One the one hand they did do a bad thing that screwed up alot of systems, but... on the other hand they are only kids... Kids have a tendedcy to fuck up and to do things without fully thinking through the consequences. I'm sure that most people here did at least one thing that has got them in a whole heap of trouble, further more I'd bet that a fair few people here have played with cracking and/or phreaking at some point when they were kids.
IMHO it would be better to let them off lightly and make then use their talents to do something good. A form of technical community service I guess.
But what is most likely to happen is that they will get a slap on the wrist and then snapped up by the Israeli Army's tech/communications branch... belive me, I've seen it happen to friends of mine.
A fair point... but SHH doesn't seem to get BugTraq'ed every week... pity about IIS. Although I'm runing XP on my laptop and I've only had one crash in two months. I do admittidly reboot it every week or so when I'm playing around with stuff or I want some 'puter free peace. (oh and I run apache instead of IIS, IIS is evil...)
WAP may not have broad acceptance but it does have niche markets where it is used quite often. For example there was an article in the Saturday Times about six months ago which was basicly about how technology is changing british agriculture and in it it had several farmers saying that they find WAP very usefull because it allows them to check the weather and crop prices while they are in fields, instead of having to cut into their 'free time' when they are at home to check these. I for one find WAP very usefull then I am on the move as it allows me read all the news on CNN.com
Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones.
WAP is not a language. WAP (Wireless Aplication Protocol) is a protocol just like HTTP, of which it is (to an extent) a subset. It is just a way of get information to a handset with limited resources in terms of handset overhead and bandwidth. The place where java will appear in phones in on the OS level where Java's native features will be best place to work with the wide range of media that will be pushed to out phones by 3G carriers.
The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP
You're right, its not WAP, but neither is it SMS or MMS. If you look at the far east the only place where you'll find interesting new things on your mobile is Japan. In Japan their largest mobile telco (DoCoMo) offers a service called i-mode, this is actually just a slightly cut down 3G protocol and has nothing to do with SMS or MMS. In europe GPRS will help to offer similar services untill 3G networks are fully rolled out.
The 9210 does have some nice features, but since it need a bag to carry it in I'd rather sitck with my laptop and my 6210 expecially since the 6210 offer high-speed data access (when you use it with Orange in the UK, I don't know about other places)
I think we should be happy with WAP for offering a service to a neich market instead of criticising it simply because it doesn't offer you everything that you want.
Draging a hazy memory out of my brain... I'm sure that I saw an article about 'ant-modeling' in New Scientist quite a lot of years ago (at least 2/3 years ago) where they were using ant's and their scent trails (modeled of course...) to find the optimum routes across a network.
I think it worked as followed:
Put a bunch of ants on the start node, all they know how to do is travel from node to node and they know when they reach the end node.
Each ant will go down a path to a connected node, except that they will not backtrack to their previous node. Each of these ants is releasing an electronic scent and they are more likly to go down the path with the strongest scent.
Repeat with several thousand ants and you should have your optimum path across the network.
I seem to recall that the article said that BT (British Telecom) was looking into this as a way to optimise the routes that a phone call takes from switching station to switching station... but it was a very long time since I read it.
[No ants were harming in the writing of this post]
In article on salon.com it says that they use clusters of around 1000 linux boxen, which they replace for every film... it take aprx. 2/3 years to make the film, so by the next film hardware has become more powerfull, so bye-bye old clusters, hello new ones.
What I would like to know is what they do to the old computers... I hope that they do things like donate them to local schools and the such, I know that for most applications it doesn't realy matter if you don't have this year's Pentium 54 with 5gigs of ram, but I would imagine that these machines are tricked out pretty nicely. Does anyone know what does happen to them?
1000 machines x $2000 = $2,000,000 Thats still cheaper than a bigname actor... shocking:)
I'm sorry... I don't intend to put words into your mouth. I was actually agreeing with you. I just wanted to diferentiate between per-post moderation and automaticly moderating peoples comments.
Yes they are. But they are against everyone so no one person could ever claim that they are being delt with unfairly. I'm not making a judgment on a per-post basis.
OK... I guess I should qualify my statement... there is no-one makeing a value judgment about the relative merits/worth of one comment over another and then deciding that one can stay whilst the other comment get removed. There is just a set of strict rules that are inforced w/o making a value judgement about the comment; like if there is swearing, what ever the context, then it gets removed by the system.
Surely if you are implimenting an automated filter (like to remove posts with abusive words for instance) then you aren't moderating people comments since there is no thought process behind it...
This sounds remarkably like one of the things that Trevor Bailis (inventor of the windup radio) is working on. I remember reading an article or seeing an interview where he had built a pair of boots with piezo-electric strips in which he used to recharge a mobile battery.
Surely your semi-inteligent mobster is going to have some computer people as a part of his staff... well if so and if they are running a proper fire-wall on their computer they will surely notice a strange port open and sending data and will surely packet-sniff it and realise that the feds are catching their key presses... woopss.. feds fail.
I found the article very interesting in so much as you got more diversity when the team as whole was rewarded/punished but I really don't agree that the way the the robots played has anything to do with capitalism.
I would also strongly disagree with the idea that capitalism is just about individuals seaking one goal (to obtain wealth) when in practice it is groups of people working together to obtain that goal. For example in a company (of any size) nothing works if people are just blindly following their own goals, but it does work if people are all working for the greater good of the company. People do not just sit there thinking about whether a decision is going to be benfical to them based on "My Wealth" vs. "Company Good", because if that was all that they did they would obtain neither since their capitalist ideal is at that point linked with the success (or not) of that company.
Of course there are exceptions to this... But IMO the essence of capitalism is that people as a collective, not just as individuals, can strive towards those goals of accruing wealth, and it is this that the robots are doing. The team that works as a team is the one that is consolidating its wealth and is the one that I think is being more capitalist simply because if they do well as a team then they are doing well as individuals in a team (For example if there are 5 bots and they get 10 goals then each of the bots is 'worth' 2 goals)
Out of interest I looked up capitalism also. The definition that I got from Websters is as follows:
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
I don't see anything in that that says that capitalist is just about getting rich....
In Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon he talks about Van Eck phreaking against a laptop. As I remember in the book it was done not by leakage from a graphics card (such as one for you video out) but leakage from video-ram since all the different chips in any computer will leak at different frequencies depending on their speed.
Wired.com did a nice story about linux in africa about two months ago (here).
In this article they were talking to an ex-Xerox researcher. He was making the point that in a country such as kenya it would set you back about $900 for Windows and Office, but the average annual income is only about $250 which pretty much puts the MS solution out of pocket for all but the rich and big companies. In contrast the Linux solution is esentially free (baring the Hardware) although his company does offer a range of applications aimed at the small/medium company for $6.50.
So, what I hope that we'll see is that the developing world, whilst developing choses to rely on Open Source solutions and not M$. Just think... in a few decades (or less) Linux/BSD might well have a huge, huge user base and there will be parts of the world that M$ will never be able to conquer.
IMHO what would be really nice to see is pop-up menus (like the right-click ones in Windows) all looked like the ones in Office XP and if they were transparent.
I always find that it can be very annoying when you hi-light text then open a pop-up menu and it covers the text that you've just hi-lighted or when you have programs with many nested menus (like Radlight).
Slashdot Mirror
My new Toshiba laptop comes w/ firewire.... I imagine there must be a mb with it on also
I disagree somewhat.
One the one hand they did do a bad thing that screwed up alot of systems, but... on the other hand they are only kids... Kids have a tendedcy to fuck up and to do things without fully thinking through the consequences. I'm sure that most people here did at least one thing that has got them in a whole heap of trouble, further more I'd bet that a fair few people here have played with cracking and/or phreaking at some point when they were kids.
IMHO it would be better to let them off lightly and make then use their talents to do something good. A form of technical community service I guess.
But what is most likely to happen is that they will get a slap on the wrist and then snapped up by the Israeli Army's tech/communications branch... belive me, I've seen it happen to friends of mine.
A fair point... but SHH doesn't seem to get BugTraq'ed every week... pity about IIS. Although I'm runing XP on my laptop and I've only had one crash in two months. I do admittidly reboot it every week or so when I'm playing around with stuff or I want some 'puter free peace. (oh and I run apache instead of IIS, IIS is evil...)
WAP may not have broad acceptance but it does have niche markets where it is used quite often. For example there was an article in the Saturday Times about six months ago which was basicly about how technology is changing british agriculture and in it it had several farmers saying that they find WAP very usefull because it allows them to check the weather and crop prices while they are in fields, instead of having to cut into their 'free time' when they are at home to check these. I for one find WAP very usefull then I am on the move as it allows me read all the news on CNN.com
Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones.
WAP is not a language. WAP (Wireless Aplication Protocol) is a protocol just like HTTP, of which it is (to an extent) a subset. It is just a way of get information to a handset with limited resources in terms of handset overhead and bandwidth. The place where java will appear in phones in on the OS level where Java's native features will be best place to work with the wide range of media that will be pushed to out phones by 3G carriers.
The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP
You're right, its not WAP, but neither is it SMS or MMS. If you look at the far east the only place where you'll find interesting new things on your mobile is Japan. In Japan their largest mobile telco (DoCoMo) offers a service called i-mode, this is actually just a slightly cut down 3G protocol and has nothing to do with SMS or MMS. In europe GPRS will help to offer similar services untill 3G networks are fully rolled out.
The 9210 does have some nice features, but since it need a bag to carry it in I'd rather sitck with my laptop and my 6210 expecially since the 6210 offer high-speed data access (when you use it with Orange in the UK, I don't know about other places)
I think we should be happy with WAP for offering a service to a neich market instead of criticising it simply because it doesn't offer you everything that you want.
Draging a hazy memory out of my brain... I'm sure that I saw an article about 'ant-modeling' in New Scientist quite a lot of years ago (at least 2/3 years ago) where they were using ant's and their scent trails (modeled of course...) to find the optimum routes across a network.
I think it worked as followed:
Put a bunch of ants on the start node, all they know how to do is travel from node to node and they know when they reach the end node.
Each ant will go down a path to a connected node, except that they will not backtrack to their previous node. Each of these ants is releasing an electronic scent and they are more likly to go down the path with the strongest scent.
Repeat with several thousand ants and you should have your optimum path across the network.
I seem to recall that the article said that BT (British Telecom) was looking into this as a way to optimise the routes that a phone call takes from switching station to switching station... but it was a very long time since I read it.
[No ants were harming in the writing of this post]
In article on salon.com it says that they use clusters of around 1000 linux boxen, which they replace for every film... it take aprx. 2/3 years to make the film, so by the next film hardware has become more powerfull, so bye-bye old clusters, hello new ones.
:)
What I would like to know is what they do to the old computers... I hope that they do things like donate them to local schools and the such, I know that for most applications it doesn't realy matter if you don't have this year's Pentium 54 with 5gigs of ram, but I would imagine that these machines are tricked out pretty nicely. Does anyone know what does happen to them?
1000 machines x $2000 = $2,000,000
Thats still cheaper than a bigname actor... shocking
I'm sorry... I don't intend to put words into your mouth. I was actually agreeing with you. I just wanted to diferentiate between per-post moderation and automaticly moderating peoples comments.
The magazine is quite funny... they have a pdf of the second edition on their site. Its full of gems like:
Spoofing e-mail by telneting to an SMTP server
Flooding servers by leaving 'ping -t' running
and the rest of seems to be want ads where they can try and trade their DVD's and warez...
They so want to be compared to something like 2600
Yes they are. But they are against everyone so no one person could ever claim that they are being delt with unfairly. I'm not making a judgment on a per-post basis.
OK... I guess I should qualify my statement... there is no-one makeing a value judgment about the relative merits/worth of one comment over another and then deciding that one can stay whilst the other comment get removed. There is just a set of strict rules that are inforced w/o making a value judgement about the comment; like if there is swearing, what ever the context, then it gets removed by the system.
Surely if you are implimenting an automated filter (like to remove posts with abusive words for instance) then you aren't moderating people comments since there is no thought process behind it...
This sounds remarkably like one of the things that Trevor Bailis (inventor of the windup radio) is working on. I remember reading an article or seeing an interview where he had built a pair of boots with piezo-electric strips in which he used to recharge a mobile battery.
Surely your semi-inteligent mobster is going to have some computer people as a part of his staff... well if so and if they are running a proper fire-wall on their computer they will surely notice a strange port open and sending data and will surely packet-sniff it and realise that the feds are catching their key presses... woopss.. feds fail.
How would you compare your stuggle against the RIAA to the Adobe vs. Dmitry Sklyarov, do you think that there is a comarison?
I found the article very interesting in so much as you got more diversity when the team as whole was rewarded/punished but I really don't agree that the way the the robots played has anything to do with capitalism.
I would also strongly disagree with the idea that capitalism is just about individuals seaking one goal (to obtain wealth) when in practice it is groups of people working together to obtain that goal. For example in a company (of any size) nothing works if people are just blindly following their own goals, but it does work if people are all working for the greater good of the company. People do not just sit there thinking about whether a decision is going to be benfical to them based on "My Wealth" vs. "Company Good", because if that was all that they did they would obtain neither since their capitalist ideal is at that point linked with the success (or not) of that company.
Of course there are exceptions to this... But IMO the essence of capitalism is that people as a collective, not just as individuals, can strive towards those goals of accruing wealth, and it is this that the robots are doing. The team that works as a team is the one that is consolidating its wealth and is the one that I think is being more capitalist simply because if they do well as a team then they are doing well as individuals in a team (For example if there are 5 bots and they get 10 goals then each of the bots is 'worth' 2 goals)
Out of interest I looked up capitalism also. The definition that I got from Websters is as follows:
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
I don't see anything in that that says that capitalist is just about getting rich....
In Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon he talks about Van Eck phreaking against a laptop. As I remember in the book it was done not by leakage from a graphics card (such as one for you video out) but leakage from video-ram since all the different chips in any computer will leak at different frequencies depending on their speed.
Wired.com did a nice story about linux in africa about two months ago (here).
In this article they were talking to an ex-Xerox researcher. He was making the point that in a country such as kenya it would set you back about $900 for Windows and Office, but the average annual income is only about $250 which pretty much puts the MS solution out of pocket for all but the rich and big companies. In contrast the Linux solution is esentially free (baring the Hardware) although his company does offer a range of applications aimed at the small/medium company for $6.50.
So, what I hope that we'll see is that the developing world, whilst developing choses to rely on Open Source solutions and not M$. Just think... in a few decades (or less) Linux/BSD might well have a huge, huge user base and there will be parts of the world that M$ will never be able to conquer.
IMHO what would be really nice to see is pop-up menus (like the right-click ones in Windows) all looked like the ones in Office XP and if they were transparent.
I always find that it can be very annoying when you hi-light text then open a pop-up menu and it covers the text that you've just hi-lighted or when you have programs with many nested menus (like Radlight).