I really wish there were some way to make that illegal without just causing some big legal shithole.
I don't think there's any need to get the police involved. Why is the Mozilla configuration writable to the Skype installer? That's a huge security hole. Fix that first.
1. No incentive. The prize is $40. Data recovery companies charge tens of thousands to recover a drive. (Depending on how hard it is.)
The amount of gained business for a successful recovery would be worth considerably more than $40. It's stupid to even offer the $40.
2. No disassembly. Any technique that "reads residual magnetism" is going to require custom read heads and access to the platters.
It says right there that if you're a qualified data recovery company or a spook that you can disassemble the drive.
3. No longer running. The challenge ended in January 2009 and only ran for one year. That blog post is from September 2008.
Right, this should be ongoing.
4. Full disclosure. This is a show-stopper. Data recovery companies guard their secret methods very closely. Those secrets are their only competitive advantage. Telling everyone how they did it for $40 ? I don't think so.
Yes, this is the deal killer. There's no reason to require this unless they feel that their screen image file and their PGP key would be compromised. Hint: put the key in the bank and melt the flash drive it was generated on (or zero it...).
The contest is also flawed in that it could easily produce a false positive due to sector re-allocations. A better contest would require submission of the md5sum of the two large files in the root directory. They could get very un-lucky and have the sector with the root node get re-mapped on them. I don't get at all that those running the contest understand sector re-allocations.
Still it's a generally good idea. Maybe I should re-start the contest with those improvements.
Call the local government and a bureaucrat tells you effectively not to bother him because of their internal administrative divisions. This person makes an above-average salary, gets primo benefits and has a golden retirement package.
Go to the local Walmart, ask the PFY stocking the cereals where to find a lightbulb, and he puts down what he's doing, brings you to the hardware section and helps you find the lightbulb if needed. He gets a bit above minimum wage, and probably no benefits.
One of these two knows how to handle customer service. The other has a monopoly.
if we can't even talk about it because it lacks a name.
Hey, we've seen this before - no numbers, but we can have HTML Pro, HTML Extreme, HTML on Acid, HTML JC, etc.
Seriously though, if there is a written standard, no matter what they don't call it, people will label it. HTML 2012, or whatever, will be what was in effect as of January 1st 2012.
Maybe what they're trying to do here isn't to keep browser writers from having excuses for not keeping up, but for keeping the standards body from feeling like if they put out an update every 15 years they're earning their keep.
But it's still one more stone on that path to hell that American civil liberties have been slowly heading down for decades now.
It seems to me we're like societal addicts - we'll have to hit bottom before we can get better. In that light, does hastening the decline actually help?
Until I can migrate from clustered computing environment to clustered computing environment (first person to say "cloud" gets punched in the chest) with one click (with DNS, IP management, etc all handled my a hypervisor headmaster), there is still a fair amount of lock-in.
Sounds like you're looking to make Puppet better integrated with the various bits you want to manage. vCloud is Scott Ullrich's proposal to get a puppet definition of your whole environment deployed. vCloudBSD is the alpha-version implementation of that idea.
Maybe pay Puppet Labs to make Puppet do the bits you need that it doesn't already do (e.g. does it already handle Xen?), port vCloud to linux or whatever you need. Getting Amazon to implement vCloud or something like it might be hard - probably you'd have more luck with Rackspace since they seem to have a better community engagement ethic.
And then you'll need to hire somebody to build you a GUI to make the 1-button interface. Everybody else will start it from the command line.;)
So, this is good news then. The security clearance thing is merely symptomatic of how top-heavy NASA has become. I used to be bummed by this kind of stuff, the Shuttle cancellation, etc. but then I saw what Elon Musk was accomplishing.
It's sad to see NASA decline and go, but we'll come out of this stronger on the other end.
The PS3 does this too, honestly the real problem is the cable providers nonsense.
I'm not sure you can call it 'nonsense'. Certainly it's designed for Web-like applications, but it does help customers doing that kind of Internet activity.
You can work around it by pausing as soon as the film starts then getting a drink or snack or talking to a human for a minute.
Your PS3 might have a bigger buffer than my Roku. Mine has to exhaust the buffer at full quality and then fail to receive packets in order to train down. Usually this means you have to watch a minute or two of the film. If it's introductory credits for the first 3 minutes, you're all set.
Last I saw, estimates for most big players were something like $.50 to $.80 per view.
Yeah? I read that Netflix negotiated a yearly license fee for each item in their streaming catalog. I was just looking into this this morning, coincidentally, and found that there's not much reliable information on it that's an easy Google search away. I'd love to hear from folks who know more.
Supposedly OSX has a bug related to handling sites that can be accessed via both IP4 and IP6 (or at where least the dns has entries for both). Do not recall the details right now, nor if it has been fixed or not.
Not yet, next version supposedly nails it (according to a friend who knows these things). IIRC, Windows 7 is good-to-go.
But, then what happens to people running Windows Vista, Snow Leopard, etc.? I guess they'll get patches if enough people are harmed sufficiently.
In every corner it still looks like a full upgrade cycle away.
I should just re-submit the bug and see what happens.
Yes, this often works. I've been on bugs with like a hundred cc:'s that've been open for years with 129 comments and lots of rationalization that have been closed 'DUPLICATE' of a bug opened a few months ago, got the attention of some other developer who thought he owned it, and it got fixed inside two weeks.
you have bandwidth providers (mainly cable) trying to kill Netflix outright by rate shaping the traffic.
Oh, heck, my Roku can't even deal with Comcast's Powerboost. It sees the initial availability of high bandwidth to Netflix, tries to run at full quality, then once the buffer is exhausted finds it needs to re-buffer back to a lower quality.
I'd really really like to be able to tell it to just run at 3-dots quality all the time. Heck, I'd probably take 2-dots most of the time if the content wasn't visually striking for faster buffer loads. Instead, I need to plan to fill a minute doing something else while it gets its brain together when a movie starts.
I doubt it, and that's why I've shorted Apple stock. Frankly, I suggest you all do likewise.
Based on previous mis-representations, it's clear that Apple can't be trusted to be straight with Jobs' story. Do they risk a shareholder suit this way? Sure, but the damages are going to be lower than announcing, "Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO." Instead, they'll show four strong quarters under Cook before having to come clean.
Based on his previous medical history and the timing relative to the Verizon iPhone deal, he's done. He's succeeded in integrating easy-to-use computers into daily life, with the user as the penultimate beneficiary. I suspect we'll see the real fruits of this with the Verizon LTE iPhone (i.e. data-only, portable plans).
Mission accomplished. Now he'll spend his remaining time with those he loves, and where he wants to be. He deserves it. Namaste, Jobs.
Quite frankly, whatever Facebook will become in the future, the current valuations are crazy. This is protecting US investors from taking a bath, as the rule was intended to do in the first place.
Yeah, probably. Or it'll protect them from making a great profit. I'm not smart enough to predict the future valuations of Facebook.
Neither is the Federal Government, which is why this isn't an enumerated power of it.
Anyone who played the ancient cannon game would resonate with this. Two cannon, placed on opposite sides of the screen, take turns firing shots where the angle and velocity is variable. Very satisfying for such a simple game.
Heck, we played that on paper in grade school. Two of us would draw up our side of the mountain, put assets there, and then take turns by passing the paper back and forth (I think this was mostly during religion class). Any reasonable arc was acceptable. New, absurd, assets were added as needed to pass the time.
And, yes, were were impressed with the simple version of the game on the 8-bit computers.
Amen to that. It's the rambling of somebody who doesn't have the fortitude to apply CS to the real world, where things are hard.
I imagine there are some theoretical chemists who never deign to enter a lab either, but fortunately most people have more sense than that.
To be fair, the moniker 'computer science' is a bit dated. We don't call physics 'collider science', even though that's the primary tool used today to study the field. 'Computer Science' of the sort discussed is largely 'Information Science'. But then again, perhaps so is physics.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish there were some way to make that illegal without just causing some big legal shithole.
I don't think there's any need to get the police involved. Why is the Mozilla configuration writable to the Skype installer? That's a huge security hole. Fix that first.
can anyone provide any actual logic for this proposition ?
Julian Assange had unprotected sex with a woman. Q.E.D.
Well, I bothered to read the post, so:
1. No incentive. The prize is $40. Data recovery companies charge tens of thousands to recover a drive. (Depending on how hard it is.)
The amount of gained business for a successful recovery would be worth considerably more than $40. It's stupid to even offer the $40.
2. No disassembly. Any technique that "reads residual magnetism" is going to require custom read heads and access to the platters.
It says right there that if you're a qualified data recovery company or a spook that you can disassemble the drive.
3. No longer running. The challenge ended in January 2009 and only ran for one year. That blog post is from September 2008.
Right, this should be ongoing.
4. Full disclosure. This is a show-stopper. Data recovery companies guard their secret methods very closely. Those secrets are their only competitive advantage. Telling everyone how they did it for $40 ? I don't think so.
Yes, this is the deal killer. There's no reason to require this unless they feel that their screen image file and their PGP key would be compromised. Hint: put the key in the bank and melt the flash drive it was generated on (or zero it...).
The contest is also flawed in that it could easily produce a false positive due to sector re-allocations. A better contest would require submission of the md5sum of the two large files in the root directory. They could get very un-lucky and have the sector with the root node get re-mapped on them. I don't get at all that those running the contest understand sector re-allocations.
Still it's a generally good idea. Maybe I should re-start the contest with those improvements.
Call the local government and a bureaucrat tells you effectively not to bother him because of their internal administrative divisions. This person makes an above-average salary, gets primo benefits and has a golden retirement package.
Go to the local Walmart, ask the PFY stocking the cereals where to find a lightbulb, and he puts down what he's doing, brings you to the hardware section and helps you find the lightbulb if needed. He gets a bit above minimum wage, and probably no benefits.
One of these two knows how to handle customer service. The other has a monopoly.
"breaking into this bank is useless - it makes an awful aquarium."
Yeah, but they give away free toasters.
if we can't even talk about it because it lacks a name.
Hey, we've seen this before - no numbers, but we can have HTML Pro, HTML Extreme, HTML on Acid, HTML JC, etc.
Seriously though, if there is a written standard, no matter what they don't call it, people will label it. HTML 2012, or whatever, will be what was in effect as of January 1st 2012.
Maybe what they're trying to do here isn't to keep browser writers from having excuses for not keeping up, but for keeping the standards body from feeling like if they put out an update every 15 years they're earning their keep.
But it's still one more stone on that path to hell that American civil liberties have been slowly heading down for decades now.
It seems to me we're like societal addicts - we'll have to hit bottom before we can get better. In that light, does hastening the decline actually help?
Until I can migrate from clustered computing environment to clustered computing environment (first person to say "cloud" gets punched in the chest) with one click (with DNS, IP management, etc all handled my a hypervisor headmaster), there is still a fair amount of lock-in.
Sounds like you're looking to make Puppet better integrated with the various bits you want to manage. vCloud is Scott Ullrich's proposal to get a puppet definition of your whole environment deployed. vCloudBSD is the alpha-version implementation of that idea.
Maybe pay Puppet Labs to make Puppet do the bits you need that it doesn't already do (e.g. does it already handle Xen?), port vCloud to linux or whatever you need. Getting Amazon to implement vCloud or something like it might be hard - probably you'd have more luck with Rackspace since they seem to have a better community engagement ethic.
And then you'll need to hire somebody to build you a GUI to make the 1-button interface. Everybody else will start it from the command line. ;)
opting, instead, for places like Loral and SpaceX
So, this is good news then. The security clearance thing is merely symptomatic of how top-heavy NASA has become. I used to be bummed by this kind of stuff, the Shuttle cancellation, etc. but then I saw what Elon Musk was accomplishing.
It's sad to see NASA decline and go, but we'll come out of this stronger on the other end.
Hypertouch v. Valueclick
Since I'm not going to read the article, I figured I'd guess which one was the spammer and which was the ISP based on the company name alone.
Total fail.
create a 100% pure open(tm) alternative (ETA: 2015.)
oooh! The Hurd is almost done!?
The PS3 does this too, honestly the real problem is the cable providers nonsense.
I'm not sure you can call it 'nonsense'. Certainly it's designed for Web-like applications, but it does help customers doing that kind of Internet activity.
You can work around it by pausing as soon as the film starts then getting a drink or snack or talking to a human for a minute.
Your PS3 might have a bigger buffer than my Roku. Mine has to exhaust the buffer at full quality and then fail to receive packets in order to train down. Usually this means you have to watch a minute or two of the film. If it's introductory credits for the first 3 minutes, you're all set.
Last I saw, estimates for most big players were something like $.50 to $.80 per view.
Yeah? I read that Netflix negotiated a yearly license fee for each item in their streaming catalog. I was just looking into this this morning, coincidentally, and found that there's not much reliable information on it that's an easy Google search away. I'd love to hear from folks who know more.
Since when do plants store energy in a way that's efficiently useful to us?
My house is heated by energy stored in 30-40 year old plants (growing on my land).
In fact they have no completely switched to dual-stack.
Tough word to make a typo on - 'now', 'not'? Your point hinges on a letter.
No more downloading of TV shows I missed (like Judge Napolitano's Freedom Watch, Conan O'brien, Rachel Maddow, et cetera).
OK, how does Yahoo! figure in to downloading these shows? Bravo for being able to do so on dial-up, BTW.
Supposedly OSX has a bug related to handling sites that can be accessed via both IP4 and IP6 (or at where least the dns has entries for both). Do not recall the details right now, nor if it has been fixed or not.
Not yet, next version supposedly nails it (according to a friend who knows these things). IIRC, Windows 7 is good-to-go.
But, then what happens to people running Windows Vista, Snow Leopard, etc.? I guess they'll get patches if enough people are harmed sufficiently.
In every corner it still looks like a full upgrade cycle away.
But, you know, P2P is evil pirate/terrorist/pedophile thing and it can't solve traffic issues because it clobbers the tubes internet is made of...
It's Tor that's the evil pirate/terrorist/pedophile thing. Oh, wait, no, Tor is going to destroy society, P2P will destroy the Internet. Carry on.
I'll pass that along to the admin to see if he can set it up, though it may not be worth the effort for our low user count.
It's not too hard to do and it'll make your users quite happy. If you pay those users it's worth the effort.
I should just re-submit the bug and see what happens.
Yes, this often works. I've been on bugs with like a hundred cc:'s that've been open for years with 129 comments and lots of rationalization that have been closed 'DUPLICATE' of a bug opened a few months ago, got the attention of some other developer who thought he owned it, and it got fixed inside two weeks.
you have bandwidth providers (mainly cable) trying to kill Netflix outright by rate shaping the traffic.
Oh, heck, my Roku can't even deal with Comcast's Powerboost. It sees the initial availability of high bandwidth to Netflix, tries to run at full quality, then once the buffer is exhausted finds it needs to re-buffer back to a lower quality.
I'd really really like to be able to tell it to just run at 3-dots quality all the time. Heck, I'd probably take 2-dots most of the time if the content wasn't visually striking for faster buffer loads. Instead, I need to plan to fill a minute doing something else while it gets its brain together when a movie starts.
I doubt it, and that's why I've shorted Apple stock. Frankly, I suggest you all do likewise.
Based on previous mis-representations, it's clear that Apple can't be trusted to be straight with Jobs' story. Do they risk a shareholder suit this way? Sure, but the damages are going to be lower than announcing, "Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO." Instead, they'll show four strong quarters under Cook before having to come clean.
Based on his previous medical history and the timing relative to the Verizon iPhone deal, he's done. He's succeeded in integrating easy-to-use computers into daily life, with the user as the penultimate beneficiary. I suspect we'll see the real fruits of this with the Verizon LTE iPhone (i.e. data-only, portable plans).
Mission accomplished. Now he'll spend his remaining time with those he loves, and where he wants to be. He deserves it. Namaste, Jobs.
Quite frankly, whatever Facebook will become in the future, the current valuations are crazy. This is protecting US investors from taking a bath, as the rule was intended to do in the first place.
Yeah, probably. Or it'll protect them from making a great profit. I'm not smart enough to predict the future valuations of Facebook.
Neither is the Federal Government, which is why this isn't an enumerated power of it.
Anyone who played the ancient cannon game would resonate with this. Two cannon, placed on opposite sides of the screen, take turns firing shots where the angle and velocity is variable. Very satisfying for such a simple game.
Heck, we played that on paper in grade school. Two of us would draw up our side of the mountain, put assets there, and then take turns by passing the paper back and forth (I think this was mostly during religion class). Any reasonable arc was acceptable. New, absurd, assets were added as needed to pass the time.
And, yes, were were impressed with the simple version of the game on the 8-bit computers.
Amen to that. It's the rambling of somebody who doesn't have the fortitude to apply CS to the real world, where things are hard.
I imagine there are some theoretical chemists who never deign to enter a lab either, but fortunately most people have more sense than that.
To be fair, the moniker 'computer science' is a bit dated. We don't call physics 'collider science', even though that's the primary tool used today to study the field. 'Computer Science' of the sort discussed is largely 'Information Science'. But then again, perhaps so is physics.