Already we have ATMs and vending machines that talk to mobile phones. A large bank here in Australia just bought into a mobile phone company. Unlike a credit card, a phone will cease working if stolen or forged (since you know exacly how many instance of a phone should be on the network). The absense of a physical connection means you won't spend time buffing worn out magnetic strips against your shirt trying to get it to read. Eventually you won't need to buy a train ticket, the carriage will just bill your phone as you travel from station to station. And we'll know exactly where you are at any given time, people in public places without valid phones will be investigated by the police and everyone else's movments will belogged to prove their innocence.
While AmigaOS used.info files to keep track of things like applications, I did like the way IFF was used as _the_ file format. Sounds, images, they were all was stored in IFF files that kept track of what exactly the file held. Sort of like a bundle.
Then there was Data Types. The theory was that if an App knew about data types, it didn't need to know how to write a particular format as long as Data Types did know. I liked this idea. If a new format came around, I didn't need to update all my apps (as long as they knew how to use Data Types).
While manual counting may be reliable, it would take a pretty huge chunk of resources. That's just silly. Hundreds of people labouring for days to count things. And you need to oversee every part of the process to make sure no-one cheats. One of the attractions of electronic counting is that once the method has been scrutinised and approved by participants, you can (provided the _deployment_ has a secure procedure as well) know that exactly the same method will be deployed everywhere.
Here (Canberra Australia) we are going to be testing electronic voting. The code is GPL and available to anyone for validation, the process is transparent and anonymous and the security is physical (they treat the voting servers/stations just like sealed ballot boxes).
You won't get fair voting systems without good people, the systems should lt them exert more control over how the system works.
Xix.
Keep the smoking gun for LARTing
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
A friend was berated by a student last week after a said student maxxed out his download quota and the account was locked. Apparently he was doing "vitally important research". The guy backed down when given a list and asked to identify which pR0n and MP3 downloads were so important to his course.
Then use SMB networking instead... doh... the network is down..
Seriously, if everyone is not using the Desktop to store work and are storing their work in an appropriate network drive... uh... the network is down...
Anyway, network seem to go down less often these days.
OK, how about someone writes NT profiles for Linux? I suggest a monsterous shell script to download a tarball of a user's home directory that uses sed and awk to dynamically edit the system files (.bashrc,.xinitrc) hoping to hell most of the machines on the network are kind of the same. Then grep them out when you log off and create a new tarball and send it to your server via the most congested network in the building.
More seriously, how about caching the home directory? You could do it, but I'd rather spend the effort putting in a better network.
Interesting. Now can you imagine if Dolby found out some other company was making money from ripping off open source code containing their technology? Would a company rip off open code if they knew that they would also draw the ire of some very large companies as well as an individual?
... They required that they get the code for review before I'm allowed to say that it is Dolby anything compatible, but assured me that if it's free, open source software, they wouldn't charge licensing fees.
But does that mean it could also prevent free software from co-opting the abstract of a program for free use?
I'd hate to see BigSoftwareCompany sue the pants off an author because they wrote something that worked just like their patented underlying idea. "Not only are we protecting this IP, we're protecting anything that sort of looks like it"
I am still running a 6.2 box (my only remaining Red Hat box) and will consider installing 7.2 once it comes out of beta. The box works as well as the day I installed it (about a year ago now). I want it as a nice _stable_ box that is there when I need it.
I hope people will install 7.2 beta because it offers something they need (and cannot wait for) or because they are confident enough to fix any problems that might occur.
Less clued users and frequent upgrades are a recipe for frustration.
So which suit approved the Jar Jar Binks deep throating tongue lollypop?
Just tell me there aren't pedophile concerns about a lollypop with a three foot long extendable bubblegum tongue that shoots down you child's throat. The gas station near my friend's house still had boxes of these suggestive little numbers they weren't able to shift.
Now if we'd seen that for the first Alien film OTOH.
Why in the heck do people insist on selling houses with kitchens? I mean, when I can _buy_ a ready cooked burger for a dollar, why should I bother learning how to make a nutritious meal? Besides, McDougals already has ever kind of burger there is, so what could a home kitchen possibly offer?? People don't want to learn how to cook, they want more burgers because they are too busy now to eat anything else.
Then them crazy old guys with 1950s Chevrolets, they are such l0Z3rz when I can buy a 2001 Hyundai that has a CD stacker and cup holders!
And that old dude who _walks_ to the store!!! What, doesn't he have a car or sumthin????
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure
to comply with basic economic laws,"
Economics is populated with charlatans, faith healers and witch doctors who are completely deluded as to their ability to understand a fundamentally chaotic system. These guys are right up there with snake oil salesmen in their pseudo-science. Next they will be asking the physicists to repeal the law of gravity because it offends some misguided Keynesian dogma. Small wonder that rocket scientists are in such demand in the stock market[1].
The sooner these morons are put ship and fired into deep space, the sooner we can on with making a living. (The rocket scientists could even get to build rockets)
Reminds me of man's argument with God in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The RIAA has reached an agreement amongst its members to reduce the quality of music in CDs released by RIAA members so that the net musical yield of any RIAA approved CD will be too low to copy. RIAA representative Richard Head said that it now took approximately 1.5 million KennyG albums to distil down a single work with the equivalent musical merit of Metallica's Enter Sandman, he said that "the system is already working, people just can't be bothered recording most of the stuff we release!". The RIAA plans to implement a "total chain" protection system that will impose strong legal and financial penalties on artists exceeding the RIAAs strict Ceiling Regulating Artistic Potential Music guidelines. "We need to make sure no-one goes around this protection measure if its going to work".
Suppose you want to forge some dot matrix printout from a year ago. Try finding paper from the same batch. Try finding ribbons from the same batch where they have faded down to *exactly* the same shade. Try inserting one page into a ream of regularly date stamped pages.
People try the same on written records (like minutes) and they are no harder or easier to spot once you start using numbered pages etc to structure the record to resist such attacks.
Oh yes, try h4Xor-ing a log file that gets dumped straight to paper in a secure room. No amount of system access is going to make it go away. An illicit pizza party at my university got caught that way.:o)
How about naming any of MS's much touted successes that aren't broken duplicates of other people's ideas? How about any that actually worked before version 3?
Instantly setting up a host of sites designed to obfuscate where the gambler actually lives:
1: user@.au "buys" stuff at bogus e-commerce site
2: Account credited to anongambler@domain.!au
3: Gamble it away
4: If balance is postive, credit it back to bogus e-commerce site.
5: If it gts tricky, credit it to a real e-commerce site and get it sent as "gifts".
Does this mean that they will also be stopping online share trading? How many people use e-trading as a "classy" form of gambling because they don't know as much as they think they do.
The problem is that if you whack UseNet stuff where you *expect* to see it, it starts popping up where you don't expect to see it. I agree that UseNet has become a forum for sharing pR0n. Perhaps if it was a text only forum, cull MIME, UUencode and anything else that looks like it might be a binary attachment. Cull RTF and HTML formatted posts as well. Hell, at least it'd be easier to spool and read.
Does this mean if I trademark a word, I can ban its use in any online medium?
Because the RIAA probably won't be interested in allowing anything that cannot be licenced/authenicated/taxed to have access to their bitstream. Sure, you may not care about Britney or the Backdoor Boys, but most people do, and most people still use Windows.
The question is: Will being cut out of online music streaming hurt non-proprietary alternatives? I say it can if the RIAA takes a long term view and lets people trade music for now until digital distribution becomes the norm. Then, anything that cannot talk to MyPassport, MyCreditCard and MyCelPhone will get locked out from packaged music. People want music and games more than they want freedom.
I am a member of the Australian Internet community. I am not a member of a "non-profit industry association". WTF is a non-profit industry anyway? (besides insurance and Telcos in this country). I always thought our industries wanted to make profits...
auDA was not set up by the politician that created Australia's Internet censorship laws. It was setup by the Australian Internet community. It is a non-profit industry association,...
Industries expecting to make a buck from the Internet (even if their representative organisation doesn't) shouldn't be the only players to have control over the.au namespace.
New Scientist ran an article about a retired lawyer you who developed a deep interest in listening to bad Italian pop bands after he developed a degenerative brain condition.
Once I read an article that interviewed various stars and their stereos (Robert Palmer has a soundproof bunker with the ultimate behemoth) and Rob Zombie had the same shitty Teac 3-in-1 I used to have. He pointed out something like, "most of my favorite records were recorded on budgets less than what this stereo is worth".
Interesting how some music sounds *better* if it's coming through cheap, tinny speakers. LoFi...
We have a node set up in an OGC distributed data trial and it rocks. A user at a broker site can integrate layers from a pile of contributing sites without needing to know where they are and who maintains them.
In terms of comptetioitn, we have also been looking at ESRI's ArcIMS, but IMHO Mapserver is no less clunky than ArcIMS.
All of them IMHO have really ugly, clunky user interfaces. I think people are pre-occupied with implementing a GUI GIS in a web browser without thinking about just how practical it is.
The biggest reason for this is that TiVo used Linux for their Operating System. Linux is an open source OS that is widely
available for many different platforms. The other reason is that TiVo uses standard off the shelf IDE hard drives. This
makes the hard drive upgrade easy since you can go to any computer shop and buy an IDE drive.
--
1.10. Can I hack my TiVo so I don't need a TiVo subscription?
NO NO NO. This is something that will NOT be explored. TiVo has been very gracious in not coming down on all this
hacking described in this FAQ and we will do nothing to harm that. Nothing will be looked at to get around the
subscription service so don't ask! Regardless your TiVo will function as a VCR already with manual record mode.
--
If you want the TiVo FAQ, it's not that hard to find (let's not Slashdot them with idle click-thrus).:o)
Slashdot Mirror
Already we have ATMs and vending machines that talk to mobile phones. A large bank here in Australia just bought into a mobile phone company. Unlike a credit card, a phone will cease working if stolen or forged (since you know exacly how many instance of a phone should be on the network). The absense of a physical connection means you won't spend time buffing worn out magnetic strips against your shirt trying to get it to read. Eventually you won't need to buy a train ticket, the carriage will just bill your phone as you travel from station to station. And we'll know exactly where you are at any given time, people in public places without valid phones will be investigated by the police and everyone else's movments will belogged to prove their innocence.
Xix.
While AmigaOS used .info files to keep track of things like applications, I did like the way IFF was used as _the_ file format. Sounds, images, they were all was stored in IFF files that kept track of what exactly the file held. Sort of like a bundle.
Then there was Data Types. The theory was that if an App knew about data types, it didn't need to know how to write a particular format as long as Data Types did know. I liked this idea. If a new format came around, I didn't need to update all my apps (as long as they knew how to use Data Types).
Xix.
While manual counting may be reliable, it would take a pretty huge chunk of resources. That's just silly. Hundreds of people labouring for days to count things. And you need to oversee every part of the process to make sure no-one cheats. One of the attractions of electronic counting is that once the method has been scrutinised and approved by participants, you can (provided the _deployment_ has a secure procedure as well) know that exactly the same method will be deployed everywhere.
Here (Canberra Australia) we are going to be testing electronic voting. The code is GPL and available to anyone for validation, the process is transparent and anonymous and the security is physical (they treat the voting servers/stations just like sealed ballot boxes).
You won't get fair voting systems without good people, the systems should lt them exert more control over how the system works.
Xix.
A friend was berated by a student last week after a said student maxxed out his download quota and the account was locked. Apparently he was doing "vitally important research". The guy backed down when given a list and asked to identify which pR0n and MP3 downloads were so important to his course.
Xix.
Then use SMB networking instead... doh... the network is down..
.xinitrc) hoping to hell most of the machines on the network are kind of the same. Then grep them out when you log off and create a new tarball and send it to your server via the most congested network in the building.
Seriously, if everyone is not using the Desktop to store work and are storing their work in an appropriate network drive... uh... the network is down...
Anyway, network seem to go down less often these days.
OK, how about someone writes NT profiles for Linux? I suggest a monsterous shell script to download a tarball of a user's home directory that uses sed and awk to dynamically edit the system files (.bashrc,
More seriously, how about caching the home directory? You could do it, but I'd rather spend the effort putting in a better network.
Xix.
I'd hate to see BigSoftwareCompany sue the pants off an author because they wrote something that worked just like their patented underlying idea. "Not only are we protecting this IP, we're protecting anything that sort of looks like it"
Xix.
100 million URLs on the net, 100 million URLs
Take one down, pass worms around,
99 million URLs on the net...
Xix.
I am still running a 6.2 box (my only remaining Red Hat box) and will consider installing 7.2 once it comes out of beta. The box works as well as the day I installed it (about a year ago now). I want it as a nice _stable_ box that is there when I need it.
I hope people will install 7.2 beta because it offers something they need (and cannot wait for) or because they are confident enough to fix any problems that might occur.
Less clued users and frequent upgrades are a recipe for frustration.
Xix.
So which suit approved the Jar Jar Binks deep throating tongue lollypop?
Just tell me there aren't pedophile concerns about a lollypop with a three foot long extendable bubblegum tongue that shoots down you child's throat. The gas station near my friend's house still had boxes of these suggestive little numbers they weren't able to shift.
Now if we'd seen that for the first Alien film OTOH.
Xix
Why in the heck do people insist on selling houses with kitchens? I mean, when I can _buy_ a ready cooked burger for a dollar, why should I bother learning how to make a nutritious meal? Besides, McDougals already has ever kind of burger there is, so what could a home kitchen possibly offer?? People don't want to learn how to cook, they want more burgers because they are too busy now to eat anything else.
Then them crazy old guys with 1950s Chevrolets, they are such l0Z3rz when I can buy a 2001 Hyundai that has a CD stacker and cup holders!
And that old dude who _walks_ to the store!!! What, doesn't he have a car or sumthin????
Xix.
--
Economics is populated with charlatans, faith healers and witch doctors who are completely deluded as to their ability to understand a fundamentally chaotic system. These guys are right up there with snake oil salesmen in their pseudo-science. Next they will be asking the physicists to repeal the law of gravity because it offends some misguided Keynesian dogma. Small wonder that rocket scientists are in such demand in the stock market[1].
The sooner these morons are put ship and fired into deep space, the sooner we can on with making a living. (The rocket scientists could even get to build rockets)
Reminds me of man's argument with God in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Xix. [1] An Amusingly accurate grammatical error
Xix.
Suppose you want to forge some dot matrix printout from a year ago. Try finding paper from the same batch. Try finding ribbons from the same batch where they have faded down to *exactly* the same shade. Try inserting one page into a ream of regularly date stamped pages.
:o)
People try the same on written records (like minutes) and they are no harder or easier to spot once you start using numbered pages etc to structure the record to resist such attacks.
Oh yes, try h4Xor-ing a log file that gets dumped straight to paper in a secure room. No amount of system access is going to make it go away. An illicit pizza party at my university got caught that way.
Xix.
How about naming any of MS's much touted successes that aren't broken duplicates of other people's ideas? How about any that actually worked before version 3?
Ummm.... Excel... ummm... ummm....
Xix.
Instantly setting up a host of sites designed to obfuscate where the gambler actually lives:
1: user@.au "buys" stuff at bogus e-commerce site
2: Account credited to anongambler@domain.!au
3: Gamble it away
4: If balance is postive, credit it back to bogus e-commerce site.
5: If it gts tricky, credit it to a real e-commerce site and get it sent as "gifts".
Does this mean that they will also be stopping online share trading? How many people use e-trading as a "classy" form of gambling because they don't know as much as they think they do.
Xix.
But does this count as prior art?
The way Windows is put together, you'd swear it was the same editorial committee...
Xix.
And 15 seconds later the following get newgrouped:
alt.binaries.hu5t13r
alt.binaries.p14yg1rl
alt.binaries.p3nth0use
alt.binaries.m0v13s
alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.pl4ydUUd3
alt.binaries.movies.d.i.v.x
alt.binaries.movies.pur1ty
alt.binaries.movies.sh4d0wr3alm
alt.binaries.movies.m1r4g3-mrg
alt.computers.theyll.be.suprised.to.find.it.here
The problem is that if you whack UseNet stuff where you *expect* to see it, it starts popping up where you don't expect to see it. I agree that UseNet has become a forum for sharing pR0n. Perhaps if it was a text only forum, cull MIME, UUencode and anything else that looks like it might be a binary attachment. Cull RTF and HTML formatted posts as well. Hell, at least it'd be easier to spool and read.
Does this mean if I trademark a word, I can ban its use in any online medium?
Xix.
Possibly my favorite geek kid story of all time. Defintely should be in the library of any school that wants to foster a geek appreciative culture.
Xix.
Because the RIAA probably won't be interested in allowing anything that cannot be licenced/authenicated/taxed to have access to their bitstream. Sure, you may not care about Britney or the Backdoor Boys, but most people do, and most people still use Windows.
The question is: Will being cut out of online music streaming hurt non-proprietary alternatives? I say it can if the RIAA takes a long term view and lets people trade music for now until digital distribution becomes the norm. Then, anything that cannot talk to MyPassport, MyCreditCard and MyCelPhone will get locked out from packaged music. People want music and games more than they want freedom.
Industries expecting to make a buck from the Internet (even if their representative organisation doesn't) shouldn't be the only players to have control over the .au namespace.
Xix.
Read about it here
Once I read an article that interviewed various stars and their stereos (Robert Palmer has a soundproof bunker with the ultimate behemoth) and Rob Zombie had the same shitty Teac 3-in-1 I used to have. He pointed out something like, "most of my favorite records were recorded on budgets less than what this stereo is worth".
Interesting how some music sounds *better* if it's coming through cheap, tinny speakers. LoFi...
Xix.
We have a node set up in an OGC distributed data trial and it rocks. A user at a broker site can integrate layers from a pile of contributing sites without needing to know where they are and who maintains them.
In terms of comptetioitn, we have also been looking at ESRI's ArcIMS, but IMHO Mapserver is no less clunky than ArcIMS.
All of them IMHO have really ugly, clunky user interfaces. I think people are pre-occupied with implementing a GUI GIS in a web browser without thinking about just how practical it is.
Xix.
From the TiVo hacking FAQ:
:o)
--
1.4. Why is the TiVo hackable?
The biggest reason for this is that TiVo used Linux for their Operating System. Linux is an open source OS that is widely
available for many different platforms. The other reason is that TiVo uses standard off the shelf IDE hard drives. This
makes the hard drive upgrade easy since you can go to any computer shop and buy an IDE drive.
--
1.10. Can I hack my TiVo so I don't need a TiVo subscription?
NO NO NO. This is something that will NOT be explored. TiVo has been very gracious in not coming down on all this
hacking described in this FAQ and we will do nothing to harm that. Nothing will be looked at to get around the
subscription service so don't ask! Regardless your TiVo will function as a VCR already with manual record mode.
--
If you want the TiVo FAQ, it's not that hard to find (let's not Slashdot them with idle click-thrus).
Xix.