Admittedly, I've only been following this topic with a few cursory glances at the articles, but I'm confused about how this is becoming a freedom issue. The OpenBSD Journal article plugs the Daily Pennsylvanian as "founded by Ben Franklin (an American who strongly advocated free speech and open discovery of ideas)" Seems to me it's useless to make that parenthetical statement unless you're trying to make a point. The post to the OpenBSD list about the "capable city states" mentions that the ACLU might be getting involved.
Maybe I'm just not up to date on the Bill of Rights, but I don't see anything that says the government is requied to foot the bill for all research projects. It's not like DARPA is saying "Work on OpenBSD again, and we'll ship you off to Guantanamo Bay and hold you as an enemy combatant". Nor are they saying "Hold your Hackathon, and we'll make sure you get visisted by the FBI". All they're saying is they're not going to foot the bill. Sure, the reasons they give may be stupid, and counter-productive, but there's nothing in the Constitution that says the government has to be smart.
Don't get me wrong - I think the way it's being handled is terrible. It sucks for them to cancel hotel rooms for people with non-refundable tickets (unless the university was paying for or subsidizing those rooms - then they have every right to do that). It sucks that it was done at the last minute. It sucks that DARPA was not initially forthcoming with information about this. It sucks that it's cancelled for stupid reasons. However none of this was ever guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Even the "anti-war" statement issue isn't really a first ammendment problem. The government did not prevent Theo from making those statements. They did not throw him in jail for making those statements. They didn't censure him. If indeed his statements are the cause of the funding loss, it may be underhanded, but it's not unconstitutional. The government cannot prevent you from expressing your displeasure with its activities, however they are under no obligation to pay you while you're doing it.
Now, maybe I'm missing a critical piece of information. Maybe the government really did say to Theo "If you work on OpenBSD, with or without our money, you go to jail". If so, then you bet your ass that's a Constitutional issue. But I don't think that's the case. It's unfortunate that people cry "First Ammendment" every time the government does something that they don't like. That only serves to discredit the folks who actually have suffered due to First Ammendment violations.
Can someone explain me why there is always so much whining about Quicktime ?
Because this is/., and it's cool to bash Apple. Not quite as cool as it is to bash MS (which is more justified), but still pretty cool.
In all seriousness though, the slashbots have a hard time supporting something mainstream. If people like it and use it, it's clearly not l33t enough. MP3 gets bashed in favor of Ogg; QuickTime gets bashed in favor of DivX; etc.
Macheads with the computer world so very Windows focused why do you still buy macs?
In my case, part of it is inertia. My first computer was an Apple IIGS, and I've been with them ever since, followed by the Portable, SE/30, IIci, Quadra 700, 7100/66, 7300, G3, and iBook. But part of it is I just plain like them. The user interface is friendly (not that I can't do command line stuff, but sometimes it's nice to not have to care). Most applications I care about are available and have been for years (Photoshop, Office, Eudora, Netscape/Mozilla, ArcView, etc). I'm not a big gamer, but there were enough to keep me occupied (The Marathon Trilogy, Warcraft, Starcraft, SimCity). Then MacOS X happened, and now I can do most anything I can do on my Linux box. Command line is here, and more powerful than any windows command line (not counting Cygwin). gcc is here. emacs is here. X11 is here. And the ability to run all Legacy applications (can you say that about Windows?). I still have applications written for System 6 that run perfectly well under Classic mode in OS X.
But enough about me. What does it offer for other people?
Customer loyalty. Did you pick up an old mac at a yard sale for $2? Don't worry about the Apple Police coming to harass you about system software. You can download system software for free from Apple's website. Every System version up to and including 7.5.5 is there, which (with some enablers, also on the website) will run most Power Macs except the Desktop (gray) G3 model. And once OS X goes through a few more iterations, I think they'll release 7.6.1 and 8.x for free. Try that with Microsoft - they'll sue you for installing Windows 95 on an old Pentium. Despite the fact that it's now 8 years old. (Yes, yes I know you can install Linux on it. You can do it on older Macs too. That's not the point. The poster asked about why Mac folks stick with Apple in a Windows-focused world)
Innovation. While the rest of the PC world was still using ISA slots, Macs had NuBus. Sure, finding NuBus cards required a little more effort and money, but a 20MHz bus was quite spiffy in those days. (we're talking ~1988)
Apple also developed ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) in the mid 1980s. A bus that allowed for powered peripherals, and the daisy-chaining of numerous devices. I think it can safely be called a precursor to USB. On those days, you had a DIN connector for your keyboard, and for your mouse you had either a MousePort (some weird 8 pin connector), PS/2 (if you were lucky), or DB-9 serial. And Apple kept ADB backwards compatible, even after adding keys. My ADB keyboard from my IIGS worked fine on any mac up until they switched to USB.
Built-in networking hardware and software. In 1987! What did PCs have built-in at the time? Nothing (no, null-modem connections so don't count). The LocalTalk cables were expensive at first, but it wasn't long (1990, I believe) before PhoneNet came out, which allowed LocalTalk over plain RJ-11 phone cable). Sure, it was slow. But the ability was there. (And really, how big were your files in the early 1980s? Not more than a few KB)
Apple soon followed with Built-In Ethernet. In 1993. In the PC world, you still had to shell out a hundred bucks for a 3c503.
Standards. Yes, standards. Hard drive? SCSI. Slightly more expensive, but given that it was used on most UNIX machines and other server-class systems, it was unlikely to go away soon. It was the standard for connecting hard drives all the way from the Apple II SCSI card which debuted in 1983 to the last PowerMacs in 1997. Let's see what the PC had over those years: MFM/RLL (*shudder*), ESDI (IBM's brilliant idea), Hardcards (remember those?), ATA/IDE.
And CD-ROMs? ATAPI drives are fairly recent in CD-ROM history. My first CD-ROM drives came with a full length ISA card. However, on a Mac, they just hook right up to the SCSI bus. And of course, Apple continues with a tradition of standards (USB, FireWire, IDE, etc).
dotLRN [mit.edu] is the free and open source alternative to Blackboard and WebCT
That's nice. It's also not the point. The system being discussed is a card-based security/POS system. It's nothing related to electronic learning or collaboration.
Whowever marked this as insightful is an idiot. If you have mod points, you should read the article before moderating, or at least read other comments.
Re:A feq questions first
on
Gas Goes Solid
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The server is roasted but it seems like having the ability to buy "fuel pellets" would be a huge advance for the
automotive industry.
You can thank Slashdot for another useless article summary and title. The process is actually talking about Natural Gas, not Gasoline. The primary goal of this is not to make "fuel pellets" for cars (although that would be cool), rather it's to find an alternative method of transporting Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). LNG tankers have to maintain a very cold environment (-162 C) and high-pressure environment, as do the processing facilities. This new method only requires facilities at -10 C (or 14 F, slightly cooler than your kitchen freezer) so it would be a huge savings in costs. It would also eliminate the need for huge pipelines, since most transportation from the field to the distribution area could be done in pellet form.
Really, they are nowhere near as good as they used to be. Entry-level printers are crap nowadays. My first printer was a Citizen 200GX (ah, 9-pin printers) that did all sorts of cool things for a dot-matirx printer. It was a real workhorse, and I only retired it after 3 years because I got a new one for free when I bought a new system.
The best inkjet I had was the Canon BJC-4200. It had seperate ink tanks, so you could replace the blank tank for ~$7.00 and not have to replace the print head every time (though you could if you wanted to). It also had seperate black and color tanks, so if you didn't print color that often, and the color tank dried up, you weren't completely SOL - you could just buy a new color tank.
Linux support was great - it accepted plain ASCII input (ie: you could cat a text file to lp0), and once RedHat 4.2 came out, there were built-in ghostscript drivers to print PS. I never had a problem with it in 5 years - I only got rid of it when it physically broke (mainly because it got stepped on). The closest replacement I ever found was a BJC-2100, but it still didn't beat my 4200 for reliability. Recently, Canon's history of working with the free software community has sucked, but regardless the 4200 was the best printer ever.
However, I too gave up on inkjets and bought a LaserJet 1200, and I haven't looked back. I still have my BJC-2100 for when I need to print in color, which is rare. But HP's office/home-office printers have always been great and reliable, and if you can afford them, and don't care about color, there's no better laser printer. Just so long as you don't get the shitty "home" printers, like the 1000, which are basically big honking paperweights. But any of their entry-level printers that speaks postscript is a good deal.
No, but some of us are afraid that steps like this could allow the proverbial foot in the door and pave the way for other privacy-invasive technologies.
It's perfectly possible to make a type of RFID tag that doesn't affect privacy in any meaningful way. If the tag wasn't a unique identifier, but more like a product code (like the UPC code), then the only information it leaks it that it's a particlar inventiroy item, say, a red sweater.
Sure, but who's going to enforce that? You? The government? Yes, in today's environment, if a company tried to use unique-identifier RFID tags, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. But what about 10, 15, 20 years from now? Who's to say that by then, lots of companies won't have switched from UPC-code style RFID tags to unique-identifier ones? By then, any store that doesn't use unique-identifier RFID tags might be in the minority.
The privacy loss in unique-id RFID tags has a technological solution. I wish some slashdotter with access to capital would make a better, privacy-preserving widget instead of just hearing all of the bitching that you don't want the gov't to know you shop at LL Bean.
It's not about a technological solution. It's about setting a dangerous precedent. No one is saying that there isn't a benign way to implement RFID tags for inventory control. But lots of people are worried (and rightly so) that if such a system is implemented, it could pave the way for tracking and privacy invasion.
As mentioned in the article, RFID tags have a scan range of about 15 feet. Sure, that's not good enough to track you when you're walking, or driving, but how many of you have ever entered a store or office building? Anyone? Can you envision RFID scanners on either side of the doorway, replacing the inventory control ones we have today? I sure can, especially considering some inventory control units already used an RFID style system. Even if the RFID tag in your shirt merely identifies it as "GAP, Male, Long-Sleeve, Red", can you envision walking past, say, Eddie Bauer in the mall and a billboard presenting you with an ad that says "Hey, get rid of that GAP shirt, and buy one of ours?" Yes, it sounds like Minority Report, but is it really that implausible? Really? The technology to read RFID tags is already there and in widespread use. It's only a matter of time before someone decides to apply it in this manner.
See, this is exactly what he's talking about. Just because he doesn't code day in and day out doesn't mean he can't understand the vulnerabilities low-level languages introduce.
Basically, I see his argument as an extension of the "coders vs. scripters" discussion
that took place a few weeks ago. A lot of people seem to think that it's not programming unless it's written in C/C++ (and sometimes Java). Which is, of course, complete bullshit.
For example, I came across a program recently written by someone who had my job many years ago. All it did was read a string from STDIN, and write it to one of three files, based on the name with which the program was called. And it was written in C. And it's string handling was terrible, and had it been a net application, it would have gotten 0wnz0red very, very quickly. So why was it written in C? Granted, Perl wasn't very robust when this was written, but the same functionality could have been accomplished in less lines with a shell script. I promptly re-wrote it in Perl, with less lines of code, more functionality, and more sanity-checking.
Now, the person who wrote it may very well have been a crappy programmer - I don't know, since he's no longer around the office - but the point is that it's so much easier to shoot yourself in the foot in C than in most other languages. When you code in C/C++, you need to pay extra attention to what you're doing, and examine the code much more closely than you would in, say, Perl or Python. Sure, you'll say, all code should be audited carefully. That's definitely true, but the consequences of sloppy coding and quick or non-existent audits are far more serious if you're using C than if you're using Perl, Python, or even Java.
Is C therefore inherently bad? Of course not. Is it possible to create secure, well structured, and readable code in C? Definitely. Should the Linux kernel be re-written in PHP or Perl? Hell no. It's all about using the right tools for the job. I see a lot of posts with sarcasm such as "Oh, sure I'll write my next mail client in VB - that'll be an improvement". And they're missing the point completely. He's not saying C is bad and Perl is good. He's saying that there are a lot of cases out there where a language is used because it's cool or l33t, and not because it's the right language for the job. Programming decisions should be made based on security, ease of coding, and ease of future support. You may think it's hella cool to build everything from the ground up in C, but when another language has perfectly good implementations of what you're trying to do, and those implementations have been tested and used by a wide user base, why bother re-writing them?
Sure the people he's targeting in the article may be in a minority (though I expect it's a larger group than people think), but the points he makes are valid ones. Once everyone learns to treat programming languages as tools, and not status symbols, these problems will disappear.
And since when did a fast food restaurant want you to hang around?
Actually, when I was a kid, there was a Burger King downtown that had table service. Yes, table service - as in you order, they bring it to you. (And this wasn't that long ago - ~1985/86). It wasn't a bad idea. The food comes quickly, but you can sit and hang around if you want - they had real chairs and tables too - none of this molded plastic crap. I wonder if they tried this anywhere. That Burger King was frequented by bankers and other suit types, so I bet WiFi there would have worked. Then along came the chic diets of the '90s in which eating anything fried is worse than spending a weekend in hell, and they closed in '93 or '94 (along with the nearby McDonalds and Wendys), and an Au Bon Pain moved in.
Except for plugins, I see no reason why developers would need DLLs. Can anyone shed some light here ?
Say you're releasing a suite of programs. These programs are not necessarily bundled - some people might only need 1 program - others might need all 3 of them. All these programs need to use the $foo protocol. So you write a DLL for implementing the $foo protocol, and then all 3 of your apps use it. This is a good thing - say a security flaw is discovered - patch the DLL and send it out there. You don't have to patch each application.
The real issue is the poor use of DLLs and lack of coordination between developers and Microsoft. How many copies of the Visual Basic Runtime DLLs do you have on your system? (VBRUN*.DLL) What about the MS Visual C Runtime? (MSVCRT*.DLL). Or the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC*.DLL)? Granted there is some version skew in these DLLs, but I found three identical copies of MSVCRT.DLL - one from MGI PhotoSuite, one from WinVNC, and one from Adaptec Easy CD Creator. And there are lots more identical ones too. I think what Microsoft is doing is a good idea, although the whole problem could have been avoided with better developers and smarter installer programs...
Case in point: Evenesence CD, out today.
-11 tracks @.99ea, that's $10.89 from this service, just for the music (no case, CD, or lyrics).
-Alternately, the CD is 9.96 at my local Target.
-With tax, that's $10.65 (with CD cover, notes, lyrics, etc).
Can anyone then explain which is the better buy, especially after I pay for the DSL connection from home, and the blank CD?
Do you like every song on the CD? Every song? If so, then true, you won't benefit from this service. But if you only bought it for 1-2 songs, then you've just saved $8. And can you seriously include the cost of DSL/Cable in there? Would you not have the high-speed connection otherwise?
I'm as big of a Mac Zealot as you can get, but I think this too is doomed to failure. $.99 a song? Ripoff. This means that the average CD will still cost $10-$12 to download, and you don't get a CD, a jewel case, or liner notes.
Do you like all the songs on a store-bought CD? If you do, great. I know that with the exception of really good artists, I'm not a big fan of most songs on the album. As an example, let's say I hear "The last DJ" on the radio. I go to Target, but the CD is $14, because it's got some other tracks on there. Really, I only want "The Last DJ" and "When A Kid Goes Bad". So I go to this online service, download them, and for $2 I get the same utility out of it that I would out of the real CD in the store. So I've just saved $12, that I can use to by 12 more songs.
A lot of people don't seem to understand - this is not catering to people who want to buy the entire CD. This is designed for all those people who have said "Damn, CDs are ridiculously expensive, when all you really want is one or two songs.". Apple's service is not about making songs cheaper. It's about basically offering you the ability to make custom CDs, with guaranteed good quality downloads, and not having a guilty conscience. I don't mind paying $1 per track if I know that I can pick the tracks that go on the CD. It's all about eliminating useless bundling as a profit source for the RIAA.
Which indicates there is something in it that stops the rest of us using it. This would further indicate either a closed format with codecs only for these two. Or DRM on top of something that exists.
I think that there's a "at first" that's missing from the article. I don't think Apple is saying "This will only ever be available for Macs, so too fucking bad". Let us not forget that the iPod was a Mac-only thing for quite some time. There were rumors of a Windows version early on, but Apple didn't make it happen until much later.
So of course they're going to preview the service on their own platform. It wouldn't make much sense for them to make a huge investment in Windows software and services only to have it fail. I think, however, when/if this takes off, Apple will release a Windows version of it.
I came across another similar project on Friday. I think a have a link to it somewhere...
Ah, here it is. Using Statistics to Cause Spammers Pain. Posted on some website named slashdot.org. It also called itself TarProxy and.... oh... uh.... never mind.
Yeesh. It was a joke. Remind me to use humor tags next time for those who don't get it.
And don't bother explaining how SMTP works. I know that I don't have to run an open relay to get spam. The point is, he says while "[the] spammer is connected to your SMTP server" (emph. mine). The spammer him/her/itself would not be connected to my SMTP server unless I ran an open relay. (Almost all spammers use open relays at some point in their mail route, usually as the server they initially connect to - if they didn't, it would be a hell of a lot easier to track to them down). A mail server delivering mail on behalf of the spammer might be connected to my server, but that's different.
I just published an article that
suggests a way to use classifier output against a
spammer while they're connected to your SMTP
server,
But, but, but, why would they be connected and sending spam through your server? Unless you run an open relay. And you don't run an open relay, do you? Do you?!
Instead of worrying whether it's right or wrong that the e-mail was forwarded around the world, the real question is, Can anything be done to prevent it?
Let's compare it to a real letter, or better yet, a company memo (in dead-tree form), since real letters typically only have one recipient. Let's say a memo gets sent to all 5 members of the HR department of a company. That memo warns that there will be no holiday bonuses this year. It goes on to say that the employees will be informed of this later, but HR is getting a heads-up in advance. Now, one of the HR employees, pissed off about this, decides to scan it, and post it on the company web site. Is he wrong to do this? Most people would say he is, I'll bet.
Now, the question is, why is it so different with e-mail? If I send a printed letter to a friend, I have the expectation that it will not be plastered on bulletin boards around town. If I send an e-mail, people would argue that I can't expect it to remain private. Why? I think the answer is because it's so easy to distribute an e-mail. Clicking the forward button is trivial.
So what's the solution? Disclaimers and confidentiality statements like some companies have on their e-mail? Doubtful. Even if they would hold up in court, who's willing to fight it? How about some sort of flag that specifices whether a message can be forwarded? That smacks of DRM, and no one's going to like that, nor will every client implement it. PGP? Well, that's nice, but once the recipient decrypts it, it's plain text, which can be forwarded. As much as it sucks, we may just have to rely on personal judgement.
So was the person who forwarded her e-mail a jerk? Probably. Should he have asked permission of the author? Definitely. Is there anything that can be done about it? Nope.
You must have haxx0red the Internet in order to get that IP address. You have circumvented the U.S. Dept of Justice's webpage claiming that ISONEWS is now their property. You have allowed thousands to access the former iSONEWS site, and thus helped many hundreds of software pirates. Please stand by for prosecution under the DMCA. Have a nice day.
That was one of the nicest cease-and-desist letters I've read, since it was quite reasonable, and gave an option that wasn't "take it down" or "pay money".
If you didn't read it, basically they're asking him to either remove it OR mention that "google" is a trademark of Google Technology. Yeesh. All he has to do is add one sentence to the definition, but instead it's "Waaah, I got a cease and desist letter, I don't know what to do, panic, panic, panic". He says he doesn't want to remove it, but he doesn't know what he should do. How about doing what they said, and mentioning the trademark?
Certainly, mentioning the trademark would even improve the definition. When I tell someone, "Go Google for information on this", I mean go to www.google.com. If they come back to me and say "It wasn't on yahoo's search engine", I'll say "That's because you didn't do what I told you to do." Yeesh. It's a trademark, and all they're asking is that you acknowledge it as such. Just do it. You're not giving up any rights of your own.
If you're really concerned about stupid trademark cease-and-desist stuff, there are bigger battles to fight, like the PCI thing, or MS's trademark of the word "windows".
Why does everyone in the USA assume that everyone else in the world will somehow obey US law when it is made "illegal"?
Um, that wasn't a troll. It's a valid point. If sending spam becomes illegal in the U.S., big fucking deal. Plenty of spammers are not in this country, and those that are will move offshore (c.f. KaZaA). Good luck prosecuting a bunch of spammers in some pacific island country...
now use SpamAssassin. Basically, a set of new headers is attached to the e-mail of the form X-Spam-foo, and if X-Spam-Score is 7.5 or
greater (on a scale of 10 I believe), then X-Spam-Flag is yes. It's really useful for sorting out spam quickly, and I haven't gotten a false
positive yet...It doesn't get all of the spam, but it gets the vast majority of it...
Some more clarification:
-it's not on a scale of 10 - the SA score can go as high as necessary. I got 27 the other day. Your threshold will be configurable (sometime next week) to "high" (3.0), "normal" (7.5), or "low" (12.0), or a custom number. You'll also have custom whitelists and blacklists.
Uh, no. RMS Watts are no standard. 'RMS' just specifies the calculation method.
I think it's great that RMS has moved into the hardware sector and is hard at work calculating speaker specifications. However, you realize that by refering to them as "RMS Watts" you hurt the entire free sotware industry. Please call them "GNU/Watts" so that the whole world may rest assured they are calculated by an open method whose source code can be freely distributed and modified.
(Yes, I know what RMS means in this context. It was a joke, in case you're about to correct me.)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm just not up to date on the Bill of Rights, but I don't see anything that says the government is requied to foot the bill for all research projects. It's not like DARPA is saying "Work on OpenBSD again, and we'll ship you off to Guantanamo Bay and hold you as an enemy combatant". Nor are they saying "Hold your Hackathon, and we'll make sure you get visisted by the FBI". All they're saying is they're not going to foot the bill. Sure, the reasons they give may be stupid, and counter-productive, but there's nothing in the Constitution that says the government has to be smart.
Don't get me wrong - I think the way it's being handled is terrible. It sucks for them to cancel hotel rooms for people with non-refundable tickets (unless the university was paying for or subsidizing those rooms - then they have every right to do that). It sucks that it was done at the last minute. It sucks that DARPA was not initially forthcoming with information about this. It sucks that it's cancelled for stupid reasons. However none of this was ever guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Even the "anti-war" statement issue isn't really a first ammendment problem. The government did not prevent Theo from making those statements. They did not throw him in jail for making those statements. They didn't censure him. If indeed his statements are the cause of the funding loss, it may be underhanded, but it's not unconstitutional. The government cannot prevent you from expressing your displeasure with its activities, however they are under no obligation to pay you while you're doing it.
Now, maybe I'm missing a critical piece of information. Maybe the government really did say to Theo "If you work on OpenBSD, with or without our money, you go to jail". If so, then you bet your ass that's a Constitutional issue. But I don't think that's the case. It's unfortunate that people cry "First Ammendment" every time the government does something that they don't like. That only serves to discredit the folks who actually have suffered due to First Ammendment violations.
Because this is /., and it's cool to bash Apple. Not quite as cool as it is to bash MS (which is more justified), but still pretty cool.
In all seriousness though, the slashbots have a hard time supporting something mainstream. If people like it and use it, it's clearly not l33t enough. MP3 gets bashed in favor of Ogg; QuickTime gets bashed in favor of DivX; etc.
In my case, part of it is inertia. My first computer was an Apple IIGS, and I've been with them ever since, followed by the Portable, SE/30, IIci, Quadra 700, 7100/66, 7300, G3, and iBook. But part of it is I just plain like them. The user interface is friendly (not that I can't do command line stuff, but sometimes it's nice to not have to care). Most applications I care about are available and have been for years (Photoshop, Office, Eudora, Netscape/Mozilla, ArcView, etc). I'm not a big gamer, but there were enough to keep me occupied (The Marathon Trilogy, Warcraft, Starcraft, SimCity). Then MacOS X happened, and now I can do most anything I can do on my Linux box. Command line is here, and more powerful than any windows command line (not counting Cygwin). gcc is here. emacs is here. X11 is here. And the ability to run all Legacy applications (can you say that about Windows?). I still have applications written for System 6 that run perfectly well under Classic mode in OS X.
But enough about me. What does it offer for other people?
Apple also developed ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) in the mid 1980s. A bus that allowed for powered peripherals, and the daisy-chaining of numerous devices. I think it can safely be called a precursor to USB. On those days, you had a DIN connector for your keyboard, and for your mouse you had either a MousePort (some weird 8 pin connector), PS/2 (if you were lucky), or DB-9 serial. And Apple kept ADB backwards compatible, even after adding keys. My ADB keyboard from my IIGS worked fine on any mac up until they switched to USB.
Built-in networking hardware and software. In 1987! What did PCs have built-in at the time? Nothing (no, null-modem connections so don't count). The LocalTalk cables were expensive at first, but it wasn't long (1990, I believe) before PhoneNet came out, which allowed LocalTalk over plain RJ-11 phone cable). Sure, it was slow. But the ability was there. (And really, how big were your files in the early 1980s? Not more than a few KB)
Apple soon followed with Built-In Ethernet. In 1993. In the PC world, you still had to shell out a hundred bucks for a 3c503.
And CD-ROMs? ATAPI drives are fairly recent in CD-ROM history. My first CD-ROM drives came with a full length ISA card. However, on a Mac, they just hook right up to the SCSI bus. And of course, Apple continues with a tradition of standards (USB, FireWire, IDE, etc).
That's nice. It's also not the point. The system being discussed is a card-based security/POS system. It's nothing related to electronic learning or collaboration.
Whowever marked this as insightful is an idiot. If you have mod points, you should read the article before moderating, or at least read other comments.
You can thank Slashdot for another useless article summary and title. The process is actually talking about Natural Gas, not Gasoline. The primary goal of this is not to make "fuel pellets" for cars (although that would be cool), rather it's to find an alternative method of transporting Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). LNG tankers have to maintain a very cold environment (-162 C) and high-pressure environment, as do the processing facilities. This new method only requires facilities at -10 C (or 14 F, slightly cooler than your kitchen freezer) so it would be a huge savings in costs. It would also eliminate the need for huge pipelines, since most transportation from the field to the distribution area could be done in pellet form.
Yay ambiguous article headlines.
The best inkjet I had was the Canon BJC-4200. It had seperate ink tanks, so you could replace the blank tank for ~$7.00 and not have to replace the print head every time (though you could if you wanted to). It also had seperate black and color tanks, so if you didn't print color that often, and the color tank dried up, you weren't completely SOL - you could just buy a new color tank.
Linux support was great - it accepted plain ASCII input (ie: you could cat a text file to lp0), and once RedHat 4.2 came out, there were built-in ghostscript drivers to print PS. I never had a problem with it in 5 years - I only got rid of it when it physically broke (mainly because it got stepped on). The closest replacement I ever found was a BJC-2100, but it still didn't beat my 4200 for reliability. Recently, Canon's history of working with the free software community has sucked, but regardless the 4200 was the best printer ever.
However, I too gave up on inkjets and bought a LaserJet 1200, and I haven't looked back. I still have my BJC-2100 for when I need to print in color, which is rare. But HP's office/home-office printers have always been great and reliable, and if you can afford them, and don't care about color, there's no better laser printer. Just so long as you don't get the shitty "home" printers, like the 1000, which are basically big honking paperweights. But any of their entry-level printers that speaks postscript is a good deal.
No, but some of us are afraid that steps like this could allow the proverbial foot in the door and pave the way for other privacy-invasive technologies.
It's perfectly possible to make a type of RFID tag that doesn't affect privacy in any meaningful way. If the tag wasn't a unique identifier, but more like a product code (like the UPC code), then the only information it leaks it that it's a particlar inventiroy item, say, a red sweater.
Sure, but who's going to enforce that? You? The government? Yes, in today's environment, if a company tried to use unique-identifier RFID tags, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. But what about 10, 15, 20 years from now? Who's to say that by then, lots of companies won't have switched from UPC-code style RFID tags to unique-identifier ones? By then, any store that doesn't use unique-identifier RFID tags might be in the minority.
The privacy loss in unique-id RFID tags has a technological solution. I wish some slashdotter with access to capital would make a better, privacy-preserving widget instead of just hearing all of the bitching that you don't want the gov't to know you shop at LL Bean.
It's not about a technological solution. It's about setting a dangerous precedent. No one is saying that there isn't a benign way to implement RFID tags for inventory control. But lots of people are worried (and rightly so) that if such a system is implemented, it could pave the way for tracking and privacy invasion.
As mentioned in the article, RFID tags have a scan range of about 15 feet. Sure, that's not good enough to track you when you're walking, or driving, but how many of you have ever entered a store or office building? Anyone? Can you envision RFID scanners on either side of the doorway, replacing the inventory control ones we have today? I sure can, especially considering some inventory control units already used an RFID style system. Even if the RFID tag in your shirt merely identifies it as "GAP, Male, Long-Sleeve, Red", can you envision walking past, say, Eddie Bauer in the mall and a billboard presenting you with an ad that says "Hey, get rid of that GAP shirt, and buy one of ours?" Yes, it sounds like Minority Report, but is it really that implausible? Really? The technology to read RFID tags is already there and in widespread use. It's only a matter of time before someone decides to apply it in this manner.
See, this is exactly what he's talking about. Just because he doesn't code day in and day out doesn't mean he can't understand the vulnerabilities low-level languages introduce.
Basically, I see his argument as an extension of the "coders vs. scripters" discussion that took place a few weeks ago. A lot of people seem to think that it's not programming unless it's written in C/C++ (and sometimes Java). Which is, of course, complete bullshit.
For example, I came across a program recently written by someone who had my job many years ago. All it did was read a string from STDIN, and write it to one of three files, based on the name with which the program was called. And it was written in C. And it's string handling was terrible, and had it been a net application, it would have gotten 0wnz0red very, very quickly. So why was it written in C? Granted, Perl wasn't very robust when this was written, but the same functionality could have been accomplished in less lines with a shell script. I promptly re-wrote it in Perl, with less lines of code, more functionality, and more sanity-checking.
Now, the person who wrote it may very well have been a crappy programmer - I don't know, since he's no longer around the office - but the point is that it's so much easier to shoot yourself in the foot in C than in most other languages. When you code in C/C++, you need to pay extra attention to what you're doing, and examine the code much more closely than you would in, say, Perl or Python. Sure, you'll say, all code should be audited carefully. That's definitely true, but the consequences of sloppy coding and quick or non-existent audits are far more serious if you're using C than if you're using Perl, Python, or even Java.
Is C therefore inherently bad? Of course not. Is it possible to create secure, well structured, and readable code in C? Definitely. Should the Linux kernel be re-written in PHP or Perl? Hell no. It's all about using the right tools for the job. I see a lot of posts with sarcasm such as "Oh, sure I'll write my next mail client in VB - that'll be an improvement". And they're missing the point completely. He's not saying C is bad and Perl is good. He's saying that there are a lot of cases out there where a language is used because it's cool or l33t, and not because it's the right language for the job. Programming decisions should be made based on security, ease of coding, and ease of future support. You may think it's hella cool to build everything from the ground up in C, but when another language has perfectly good implementations of what you're trying to do, and those implementations have been tested and used by a wide user base, why bother re-writing them?
Sure the people he's targeting in the article may be in a minority (though I expect it's a larger group than people think), but the points he makes are valid ones. Once everyone learns to treat programming languages as tools, and not status symbols, these problems will disappear.
Actually, when I was a kid, there was a Burger King downtown that had table service. Yes, table service - as in you order, they bring it to you. (And this wasn't that long ago - ~1985/86). It wasn't a bad idea. The food comes quickly, but you can sit and hang around if you want - they had real chairs and tables too - none of this molded plastic crap. I wonder if they tried this anywhere. That Burger King was frequented by bankers and other suit types, so I bet WiFi there would have worked. Then along came the chic diets of the '90s in which eating anything fried is worse than spending a weekend in hell, and they closed in '93 or '94 (along with the nearby McDonalds and Wendys), and an Au Bon Pain moved in.
But I'm getting off-topic
Say you're releasing a suite of programs. These programs are not necessarily bundled - some people might only need 1 program - others might need all 3 of them. All these programs need to use the $foo protocol. So you write a DLL for implementing the $foo protocol, and then all 3 of your apps use it. This is a good thing - say a security flaw is discovered - patch the DLL and send it out there. You don't have to patch each application.
The real issue is the poor use of DLLs and lack of coordination between developers and Microsoft. How many copies of the Visual Basic Runtime DLLs do you have on your system? (VBRUN*.DLL) What about the MS Visual C Runtime? (MSVCRT*.DLL). Or the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC*.DLL)? Granted there is some version skew in these DLLs, but I found three identical copies of MSVCRT.DLL - one from MGI PhotoSuite, one from WinVNC, and one from Adaptec Easy CD Creator. And there are lots more identical ones too. I think what Microsoft is doing is a good idea, although the whole problem could have been avoided with better developers and smarter installer programs...
-11 tracks @
-Alternately, the CD is 9.96 at my local Target.
-With tax, that's $10.65 (with CD cover, notes, lyrics, etc).
Can anyone then explain which is the better buy, especially after I pay for the DSL connection from home, and the blank CD?
Do you like every song on the CD? Every song? If so, then true, you won't benefit from this service. But if you only bought it for 1-2 songs, then you've just saved $8. And can you seriously include the cost of DSL/Cable in there? Would you not have the high-speed connection otherwise?
Do you like all the songs on a store-bought CD? If you do, great. I know that with the exception of really good artists, I'm not a big fan of most songs on the album. As an example, let's say I hear "The last DJ" on the radio. I go to Target, but the CD is $14, because it's got some other tracks on there. Really, I only want "The Last DJ" and "When A Kid Goes Bad". So I go to this online service, download them, and for $2 I get the same utility out of it that I would out of the real CD in the store. So I've just saved $12, that I can use to by 12 more songs.
A lot of people don't seem to understand - this is not catering to people who want to buy the entire CD. This is designed for all those people who have said "Damn, CDs are ridiculously expensive, when all you really want is one or two songs.". Apple's service is not about making songs cheaper. It's about basically offering you the ability to make custom CDs, with guaranteed good quality downloads, and not having a guilty conscience. I don't mind paying $1 per track if I know that I can pick the tracks that go on the CD. It's all about eliminating useless bundling as a profit source for the RIAA.
I think that there's a "at first" that's missing from the article. I don't think Apple is saying "This will only ever be available for Macs, so too fucking bad". Let us not forget that the iPod was a Mac-only thing for quite some time. There were rumors of a Windows version early on, but Apple didn't make it happen until much later.
So of course they're going to preview the service on their own platform. It wouldn't make much sense for them to make a huge investment in Windows software and services only to have it fail. I think, however, when/if this takes off, Apple will release a Windows version of it.
But the spammer him/her/itself isn't connected to your machine unless you run an open relay. And you don't run an open relay, do you? Do you?
</HUMOR>
(Don't bother with a snide explanation about how SMTP works or telling me to read the article. I did that. It's a joke.)
Ah, here it is. Using Statistics to Cause Spammers Pain. Posted on some website named slashdot.org. It also called itself TarProxy and .... oh ... uh .... never mind.
And don't bother explaining how SMTP works. I know that I don't have to run an open relay to get spam. The point is, he says while "[the] spammer is connected to your SMTP server" (emph. mine). The spammer him/her/itself would not be connected to my SMTP server unless I ran an open relay. (Almost all spammers use open relays at some point in their mail route, usually as the server they initially connect to - if they didn't, it would be a hell of a lot easier to track to them down). A mail server delivering mail on behalf of the spammer might be connected to my server, but that's different.
But, but, but, why would they be connected and sending spam through your server? Unless you run an open relay. And you don't run an open relay, do you? Do you?!
Let's compare it to a real letter, or better yet, a company memo (in dead-tree form), since real letters typically only have one recipient. Let's say a memo gets sent to all 5 members of the HR department of a company. That memo warns that there will be no holiday bonuses this year. It goes on to say that the employees will be informed of this later, but HR is getting a heads-up in advance. Now, one of the HR employees, pissed off about this, decides to scan it, and post it on the company web site. Is he wrong to do this? Most people would say he is, I'll bet.
Now, the question is, why is it so different with e-mail? If I send a printed letter to a friend, I have the expectation that it will not be plastered on bulletin boards around town. If I send an e-mail, people would argue that I can't expect it to remain private. Why? I think the answer is because it's so easy to distribute an e-mail. Clicking the forward button is trivial.
So what's the solution? Disclaimers and confidentiality statements like some companies have on their e-mail? Doubtful. Even if they would hold up in court, who's willing to fight it? How about some sort of flag that specifices whether a message can be forwarded? That smacks of DRM, and no one's going to like that, nor will every client implement it. PGP? Well, that's nice, but once the recipient decrypts it, it's plain text, which can be forwarded. As much as it sucks, we may just have to rely on personal judgement.
So was the person who forwarded her e-mail a jerk? Probably. Should he have asked permission of the author? Definitely. Is there anything that can be done about it? Nope.
And Virginia.
And parts of Connecticut.
And parts of New Hampshire.
Would you like me to continue?
There's no federal law prohibiting the user of radar detectors. There are plenty of state laws - they're illegal in a good number of states.
You must have haxx0red the Internet in order to get that IP address. You have circumvented the U.S. Dept of Justice's webpage claiming that ISONEWS is now their property. You have allowed thousands to access the former iSONEWS site, and thus helped many hundreds of software pirates. Please stand by for prosecution under the DMCA. Have a nice day.
If you didn't read it, basically they're asking him to either remove it OR mention that "google" is a trademark of Google Technology. Yeesh. All he has to do is add one sentence to the definition, but instead it's "Waaah, I got a cease and desist letter, I don't know what to do, panic, panic, panic". He says he doesn't want to remove it, but he doesn't know what he should do. How about doing what they said, and mentioning the trademark?
Certainly, mentioning the trademark would even improve the definition. When I tell someone, "Go Google for information on this", I mean go to www.google.com. If they come back to me and say "It wasn't on yahoo's search engine", I'll say "That's because you didn't do what I told you to do." Yeesh. It's a trademark, and all they're asking is that you acknowledge it as such. Just do it. You're not giving up any rights of your own.
If you're really concerned about stupid trademark cease-and-desist stuff, there are bigger battles to fight, like the PCI thing, or MS's trademark of the word "windows".
Um, that wasn't a troll. It's a valid point. If sending spam becomes illegal in the U.S., big fucking deal. Plenty of spammers are not in this country, and those that are will move offshore (c.f. KaZaA). Good luck prosecuting a bunch of spammers in some pacific island country...
Some more clarification:
-it's not on a scale of 10 - the SA score can go as high as necessary. I got 27 the other day. Your threshold will be configurable (sometime next week) to "high" (3.0), "normal" (7.5), or "low" (12.0), or a custom number. You'll also have custom whitelists and blacklists.
I think it's great that RMS has moved into the hardware sector and is hard at work calculating speaker specifications. However, you realize that by refering to them as "RMS Watts" you hurt the entire free sotware industry. Please call them "GNU/Watts" so that the whole world may rest assured they are calculated by an open method whose source code can be freely distributed and modified.
(Yes, I know what RMS means in this context. It was a joke, in case you're about to correct me.)