I really don't want a big player to come in and start causing trouble for all us small-time developers.
This had better be sarcasm. I'm sorry but my sarcasm processor is ofline at the moment so I have to answer as if you were serious.
What? What are you babbling about? A big player is just what the hand-held software industry needs. All consumer benefit, that's for sure, with better games and more games. And for the developers we get higher expectations, more community support for this excellent OS, libraries we can all develop to, expansion of the industry, recognition of Palm OS as a gaming environment...
What is the downside you are worried about? Some big player will gazump your little development? Who knows, you may surprise yourself and bring out something better than the big boys. Remember that not everyone will have the half-meg of space the big commercial games will (probably) require.
My favourite game on PalmOS is Lines. 9K! Pure gameplay. Anyone can write it, takes almost no space, pure addiction in every byte and not Sega's style.
Sorry about the rant, but I can't see anything but good in this announcement, for players and developers.
Out here in SoCal we had thousands and thousands of posters with Danielle Van Damme's picture on it until she was found, dead...
An excellent rule of thumb for determining how likely something is to happen to you, is the media coverage.
If there's wall-to-wall coverage of a tragic event happening to a single person, and everyone in the state knows the person's name and the names of their five nearest relatives, there is little or no risk of it happening to you or anyone you know. For example, Danielle's tragic case. (one in tens of millions).
If a tragic event happens which gets a regular slot on the news, and the victims are not named, then there is a slight risk of it happening. Examples include car accidents, tornadoes, drug overdose and terrorism in Israel. (one in a few hundred thousand)
If something tragic happens so often that to announce it on the news would be completely redundant, and we are left with overwhelming numbers that cannot be comprehended, or if everyone knows it is happening but is uncomfortable talking about it, then it is something to be deeply worried about. Examples include heart disease, tobacco, cancer, alcohol abuse. (one in ten).
In short, I hope I have presented a good argument in favour of being worried about personal consequences of a tragic event in inverse proportion to the amount of media coverage.
"Patents promote a developing market. It encourages you to get your ideas out in the open."
I hate to be the first to call "Bovine Excreta!" but you are so full of it it's a wonder it doesn't come out your nose.
How about the obscure legalese in which patents are written? The lawyers who draft these things are desperate to minimise the amount of useable information contained in a patent, with a great deal of success. Slashdot runs many stories claiming "XYZ Patented!" followed by hundreds of comments by qualified engineers who have scrutinised the patent and come out completely confused as to the scope of the patent claim.
"IF YOU DO NOT OR CANNOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS..."
Minors cannot agree to legal contracts. Tell me if my logic fails me, but does that mean that minors can't listen to copyprotected CD's?
I think you're right, I think that's exactly what they are saying. This gets around the loophole where you send your little brother in to buy your CDs or games so that you don't enter into any legal agreements.
Let's say I have read that phrase. Let's say I do not agree to the terms and conditions, or I'm under 16 and cannot agree. What are the consequences?
"...YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO USE THE PLAYER OR CONTENT..."
Who do they think they are? I don't need their permission to do anything. I've bought the CD, it's mine. I didn't agree to anything before I bought it. I own it. I no longer have any relationship to the previous owner. There are many things I am not permitted to do with the CD, but DAMMIT I expect to listen to it.
"IF YOU DO NOT OR CANNOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, YOU MAY RETURN THE COMPACT DISC ON WHICH YOU RECEIVED THE PLAYER AND CONTENT FOR A REFUND."
Well thank you very much Jack, but I also MAY just go off and decrypt the content or reverse-engineer the player, or I MAY express my disgust with an upraised single digit and join a sourceforge project developing a P2P filesharing system.
IF YOU ARE A RECORDING INDUSTRY EXECUTIVE, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORISED TO CONTINUE BREATHING. IF YOU WISH TO CONTINUE BREATHING YOU MAY GIVE ME ONE BILLION ($1,000,000) DOLLARS.
Re:INT, not DEX
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think the other advantage of Nethack is that things can happen that are completely unscripted. I'll never forget the time I stole from the shopkeeper only to have the Keystone Kops come after me... and run into a pack of orcs while I had on my Ring of Conflict:
Kop throws a pie. Orc is hit by a cream pie. Orc wipes face. Orc throws dagger. Kop is destroyed!
How about a nice large cheque sent a few days before the vote. Senatorcritter will remember the donation, and make the vote... just before the cheque bounces!
I get a total energy output of 3.9x10^20 joules. One kilo of high explosive is 4x10^6 joules, so we get a yield of 9.8x10^13 kilos, or 98,371 Megatons. Not quite enough to bust a planet apart, but quite a light show!
What would happen if an asteroid of a given size hit the moon?
The best possible outcome would be that the moon would shatter into a billion pieces and Earth would get a ring system like Saturn! Saturn's rings are apparently only about a hundred million years old, and probably created out of a collision between two moons.
Also we would get pretty much constant meteor showers for the next few hundred years... I really can't see a down-side! [fx: whispers from offstage] Oh yeah, millions of people will probably be killed by falling pieces of moon, with tsunamis, fireballs, massive explosions etc. but that's okay, we regenerate millions of people every few months. It'd be worth it for the light show.
...but I like to pretend to know how to defend myself":)
But seriously folks, can't you see your favourite Ub3r L33t H4X0r D00D here? This guys is a prime representative of all the script kiddies, crackers and sundry lowlifes that populate the web. I'm so glad one of them's gone to jail, hopefully to get the l337 kicked out of him.
Self-compiling is an easily-verifyable milestone in a compiler's development. It was first achieved in 1973 when N. Wirth wrote a Pascal compiler in Pascal and hand-compiled it, then ran the hand-compiled compiler on itself.
..good luck doing the packet reconstruction, parse the IP tunnelling, determine what protocol I'm using, and separating signals from my browser, FTP client, weather ticker, httpd, apt-get and realplayer...
Read the friggin article numbnuts!
The modem light indicates all transmitted bits on the RS232 output stream including the start and stop bits.
Feed that signal to a standard UART and you'll get a byte stream, probably in PPP protocol. Feed that byte stream into pppd, and I get a copy of every packet you send or receive. I can now read the TCP byte stream and UDP packets to and from every protocol on your machine, so yes, I can "separate the signals" as you call it.
Wait a minute! The DMCA shouldn't apply at all in this case!
Welcome to the Noughties! You're guilty until proven capable of affording a lawyer. The equation goes something like this:
Elected officials: "You cannot X unless Y"
Cabal of Lawyers: "You! Stop X!"
Victim: "But Y! "
CoL:"Pay money and we'll prove you did Y and leave you alone."
End result: If you have money, you cannot X unless Y. If you have no money, you cannot X.
My idea was to reduce the number of applicants for a position.
Firstly, I have a staff of employment consultants in the office. When an application for a job comes in over the web, one email is sent to the person who entered the job, and one to the account manager of the company that offers the job. The candidate (if new) is allocated to a "primary contact" who then becomes a sort of case manager for that candidate. My idea was that the primary contact would immediately call the candidate on the phone (whoah, radical) and asses their chance of getting the positions they asked for.
(On a side note, have you ever worked at a company where a position has opened up? Have you seen the giant pile of CVs that magically appears? So many of them a pure junk or pure fiction.)
Disclaimer: I wrote myjob.ie for a commercial company, but I get just as much money for sitting on my hands doing nothing as I would get if myjob.ie got ten thousand applicants a day. In fact, this comment will probably mean more work for me [D'oh! ] so take this comment as biased advice, not commercial advertising. Or something.
From the website (for the lazy or bandwidth impaired):
Rubberhose transparently and deniably encrypts disk data, minimising the effectiveness of warrants, coersive interrogations and other compulsive mechanims, such as U.K RIP legislation. Rubberhose differs from conventional disk encryption systems in that it has an advanced modular architecture, self-test suite, is more secure, portable, utilises information hiding (steganography / deniable cryptography), works with any file system and has source freely available. Currently supported ciphers are DES, 3DES, IDEA, RC5, RC6, Blowfish, Twofish and CAST.
Currently alpha, but has a cool graphic, cool idea and cool name:)
Because there is no kinetic energy involved, you could mount your defensive material some distance away from your position, like a meter or so. If what you say is true, as soon as the material is vapourised, it produces an opaque vapour which would block the laser?
I suspect the best SAM site would be cheap, disposable and remote-operated. Iraq surely has no problem with hiring young idiots off the street to man it's SAMs, but I bet they have very few veterans.
To summarise your argument... "Corruption is becoming more common, everyone knows about it, so it's time to ignore it."
You and your joe sixpack mates are not only part of the problem, you're a major part of the problem. The corrupt media and the corrupt politicians are relying on your attitude to keep their trough full and the swill tasting sweet.
The "Free" in Free Software has nothing to do with price.
The English language mapping of words to concepts fails us so many times. In an ideal language, there would be a one-to-one mapping between words and concepts, though since concepts are sometimes very complex, this is unlikely to ever happen.
We say over and over again: "Free as in speech, not free as in beer," but some people don't get it.
You can charge for Free Software.
"Buy this CD of free software"
"What? Why? I can download it and burn my own CD"
"Yes, but you can have this one for $5, for less hassle, and I provide installation support."
"Oh, alright then."
For the last year I have worked as a programmer for a new web site (blatant plug for myjob.ie) inside an employment agency here in Ireland.
Firstly, employment consultants. Employment consultants are very polite, knowledgable about their speciality (e.g. IT) and they have a LOT of knowledge about the job market. I recommend talking to an employment agency if only for the valuable free job advice.
Employment consultants have a single motivation - commission. They get a percentage of your salary (!) if they find you a job. So they want (1) employable candidates and (2) potentially highly paid candidates.
Their time is limited, so they concentrate most of their energy on candidates who are both employable and highly sought after. If you can convince them of this, they will work as your slave. If not, your CV goes down to the bottom of the pile.
Secondly, qualifications. MSCE is a joke around here. The initial telephone contact between a candidate and a consultant will often go like this:
Candidate: "Can you get me a job?"
Consultant: "What level of experience do you have?"
Can: "I just got an MSCE."
Con: "Hahahahahahaha! Get to the end of the queue with all the others, you pathetic sheep" - or polite, knowledgable words to the equivalent effect.
Good qualifications can get your foot in the door, but what most good employers want is someone with the right experience and the right attitude.
Conclusions: If you have the qualifications, great, that's a bonus, but what good employers want is experience. If you have the experience, but not the qualifications, call one or more employment agencies and explain your wealth of experience. They have the power to put in the good word for you with a company, often talking to insider contacts. "Jim, you remember that position you told us about? Well, I have just found the perfect candidate, lots of experience. Interested? I'm sending the CV in an email now. Bye bye! See you at the golf game!"
One parameter you haven't given us is: How much activity does the area experience? This is critical to determine the degree of video compression possible.
If you are securing a room that people rarely enter, MPEG compression will see one frame as very similar to the previous frame, and record very little information for the frame.
Also, a feature you may not have thought of, if an alarm is triggered, the recording should go into overdrive, and record high resolution colour at 30fps. There's no excuse for the grainy out-of-focus stop-start security camera images we see on the news!
I've asked sourceforge.net to provide a CVS repository for this document. If they do, I'll be pettitioning the editors to add the story:) Cross fingers!
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't want a big player to come in and start causing trouble for all us small-time developers.
This had better be sarcasm. I'm sorry but my sarcasm processor is ofline at the moment so I have to answer as if you were serious.
What? What are you babbling about? A big player is just what the hand-held software industry needs. All consumer benefit, that's for sure, with better games and more games. And for the developers we get higher expectations, more community support for this excellent OS, libraries we can all develop to, expansion of the industry, recognition of Palm OS as a gaming environment...
What is the downside you are worried about? Some big player will gazump your little development? Who knows, you may surprise yourself and bring out something better than the big boys. Remember that not everyone will have the half-meg of space the big commercial games will (probably) require.
My favourite game on PalmOS is Lines. 9K! Pure gameplay. Anyone can write it, takes almost no space, pure addiction in every byte and not Sega's style.
Sorry about the rant, but I can't see anything but good in this announcement, for players and developers.
An excellent rule of thumb for determining how likely something is to happen to you, is the media coverage.
If there's wall-to-wall coverage of a tragic event happening to a single person, and everyone in the state knows the person's name and the names of their five nearest relatives, there is little or no risk of it happening to you or anyone you know. For example, Danielle's tragic case. (one in tens of millions).
If a tragic event happens which gets a regular slot on the news, and the victims are not named, then there is a slight risk of it happening. Examples include car accidents, tornadoes, drug overdose and terrorism in Israel. (one in a few hundred thousand)
If something tragic happens so often that to announce it on the news would be completely redundant, and we are left with overwhelming numbers that cannot be comprehended, or if everyone knows it is happening but is uncomfortable talking about it, then it is something to be deeply worried about. Examples include heart disease, tobacco, cancer, alcohol abuse. (one in ten).
In short, I hope I have presented a good argument in favour of being worried about personal consequences of a tragic event in inverse proportion to the amount of media coverage.
I hate to be the first to call "Bovine Excreta!" but you are so full of it it's a wonder it doesn't come out your nose.
How about the obscure legalese in which patents are written? The lawyers who draft these things are desperate to minimise the amount of useable information contained in a patent, with a great deal of success. Slashdot runs many stories claiming "XYZ Patented!" followed by hundreds of comments by qualified engineers who have scrutinised the patent and come out completely confused as to the scope of the patent claim.
Of course, yet again, all this is covered in the main article. Why don't you read the main article? Read the article, you pathetic apologist.
Minors cannot agree to legal contracts. Tell me if my logic fails me, but does that mean that minors can't listen to copyprotected CD's?
I think you're right, I think that's exactly what they are saying. This gets around the loophole where you send your little brother in to buy your CDs or games so that you don't enter into any legal agreements.
Let's say I have read that phrase. Let's say I do not agree to the terms and conditions, or I'm under 16 and cannot agree. What are the consequences?
"...YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO USE THE PLAYER OR CONTENT..."
Who do they think they are? I don't need their permission to do anything. I've bought the CD, it's mine. I didn't agree to anything before I bought it. I own it. I no longer have any relationship to the previous owner. There are many things I am not permitted to do with the CD, but DAMMIT I expect to listen to it.
"IF YOU DO NOT OR CANNOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, YOU MAY RETURN THE COMPACT DISC ON WHICH YOU RECEIVED THE PLAYER AND CONTENT FOR A REFUND."
Well thank you very much Jack, but I also MAY just go off and decrypt the content or reverse-engineer the player, or I MAY express my disgust with an upraised single digit and join a sourceforge project developing a P2P filesharing system.
IF YOU ARE A RECORDING INDUSTRY EXECUTIVE, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORISED TO CONTINUE BREATHING. IF YOU WISH TO CONTINUE BREATHING YOU MAY GIVE ME ONE BILLION ($1,000,000) DOLLARS.
Kop throws a pie. Orc is hit by a cream pie. Orc wipes face. Orc throws dagger. Kop is destroyed!
How about a nice large cheque sent a few days before the vote. Senatorcritter will remember the donation, and make the vote... just before the cheque bounces!
radius=1000; //metres // kg/m^3 // m/s
density=3340;
volume=radius*radius*radius*M_PI*(3.0/4.0); m^3
mass=density * volume;//
velocity=10000;
kinetic_energy=mass*vel*vel/2;
I get a total energy output of 3.9x10^20 joules. One kilo of high explosive is 4x10^6 joules, so we get a yield of 9.8x10^13 kilos, or 98,371 Megatons. Not quite enough to bust a planet apart, but quite a light show!
The best possible outcome would be that the moon would shatter into a billion pieces and Earth would get a ring system like Saturn! Saturn's rings are apparently only about a hundred million years old, and probably created out of a collision between two moons.
Also we would get pretty much constant meteor showers for the next few hundred years... I really can't see a down-side! [fx: whispers from offstage] Oh yeah, millions of people will probably be killed by falling pieces of moon, with tsunamis, fireballs, massive explosions etc. but that's okay, we regenerate millions of people every few months. It'd be worth it for the light show.
But seriously folks, can't you see your favourite Ub3r L33t H4X0r D00D here? This guys is a prime representative of all the script kiddies, crackers and sundry lowlifes that populate the web. I'm so glad one of them's gone to jail, hopefully to get the l337 kicked out of him.
It's news for nerds. News for newbies is here.
I'll answer your specific question anyway:
Read the friggin article numbnuts!
The modem light indicates all transmitted bits on the RS232 output stream including the start and stop bits. Feed that signal to a standard UART and you'll get a byte stream, probably in PPP protocol. Feed that byte stream into pppd, and I get a copy of every packet you send or receive. I can now read the TCP byte stream and UDP packets to and from every protocol on your machine, so yes, I can "separate the signals" as you call it.
Does that sounds secure to you?
One word - cleats!
1 - remove floppy drive.
2 - remove cdrom drive.
3 - seal the case. Use glue.
Welcome to the Noughties! You're guilty until proven capable of affording a lawyer. The equation goes something like this:
Elected officials: "You cannot X unless Y"
Cabal of Lawyers: "You! Stop X!"
Victim: "But Y! "
CoL:"Pay money and we'll prove you did Y and leave you alone."
End result: If you have money, you cannot X unless Y. If you have no money, you cannot X.
Now there's an excellent mental image.
Bill: "You dare defy me? Guards! Throw him to the lawyers!"
My idea was to reduce the number of applicants for a position.
Firstly, I have a staff of employment consultants in the office. When an application for a job comes in over the web, one email is sent to the person who entered the job, and one to the account manager of the company that offers the job. The candidate (if new) is allocated to a "primary contact" who then becomes a sort of case manager for that candidate. My idea was that the primary contact would immediately call the candidate on the phone (whoah, radical) and asses their chance of getting the positions they asked for.
(On a side note, have you ever worked at a company where a position has opened up? Have you seen the giant pile of CVs that magically appears? So many of them a pure junk or pure fiction.)
Disclaimer: I wrote myjob.ie for a commercial company, but I get just as much money for sitting on my hands doing nothing as I would get if myjob.ie got ten thousand applicants a day. In fact, this comment will probably mean more work for me [D'oh! ] so take this comment as biased advice, not commercial advertising. Or something.
From the website (for the lazy or bandwidth impaired):
Rubberhose transparently and deniably encrypts disk data, minimising the effectiveness of warrants, coersive interrogations and other compulsive mechanims, such as U.K RIP legislation. Rubberhose differs from conventional disk encryption systems in that it has an advanced modular architecture, self-test suite, is more secure, portable, utilises information hiding (steganography / deniable cryptography), works with any file system and has source freely available. Currently supported ciphers are DES, 3DES, IDEA, RC5, RC6, Blowfish, Twofish and CAST.
Currently alpha, but has a cool graphic, cool idea and cool name :)
Because there is no kinetic energy involved, you could mount your defensive material some distance away from your position, like a meter or so. If what you say is true, as soon as the material is vapourised, it produces an opaque vapour which would block the laser?
I suspect the best SAM site would be cheap, disposable and remote-operated. Iraq surely has no problem with hiring young idiots off the street to man it's SAMs, but I bet they have very few veterans.
If the weapon is made, a defence will be made. And cheaper, I would hazard a guess.
The eternal race between Attack and Defence technology continues...
You and your joe sixpack mates are not only part of the problem, you're a major part of the problem. The corrupt media and the corrupt politicians are relying on your attitude to keep their trough full and the swill tasting sweet.
Don't chew glass
HA! I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me.
The English language mapping of words to concepts fails us so many times. In an ideal language, there would be a one-to-one mapping between words and concepts, though since concepts are sometimes very complex, this is unlikely to ever happen.
We say over and over again: "Free as in speech, not free as in beer," but some people don't get it.
You can charge for Free Software.
"Buy this CD of free software"
"What? Why? I can download it and burn my own CD"
"Yes, but you can have this one for $5, for less hassle, and I provide installation support."
"Oh, alright then."
Firstly, employment consultants. Employment consultants are very polite, knowledgable about their speciality (e.g. IT) and they have a LOT of knowledge about the job market. I recommend talking to an employment agency if only for the valuable free job advice.
Employment consultants have a single motivation - commission. They get a percentage of your salary (!) if they find you a job. So they want (1) employable candidates and (2) potentially highly paid candidates.
Their time is limited, so they concentrate most of their energy on candidates who are both employable and highly sought after. If you can convince them of this, they will work as your slave. If not, your CV goes down to the bottom of the pile.
Secondly, qualifications. MSCE is a joke around here. The initial telephone contact between a candidate and a consultant will often go like this:
Candidate: "Can you get me a job?"
Consultant: "What level of experience do you have?"
Can: "I just got an MSCE."
Con: "Hahahahahahaha! Get to the end of the queue with all the others, you pathetic sheep" - or polite, knowledgable words to the equivalent effect.
Good qualifications can get your foot in the door, but what most good employers want is someone with the right experience and the right attitude.
Conclusions: If you have the qualifications, great, that's a bonus, but what good employers want is experience. If you have the experience, but not the qualifications, call one or more employment agencies and explain your wealth of experience. They have the power to put in the good word for you with a company, often talking to insider contacts. "Jim, you remember that position you told us about? Well, I have just found the perfect candidate, lots of experience. Interested? I'm sending the CV in an email now. Bye bye! See you at the golf game!"
Oh, and if you're not getting a bite on your CV, try some of these tricks.
If you are securing a room that people rarely enter, MPEG compression will see one frame as very similar to the previous frame, and record very little information for the frame.
Also, a feature you may not have thought of, if an alarm is triggered, the recording should go into overdrive, and record high resolution colour at 30fps. There's no excuse for the grainy out-of-focus stop-start security camera images we see on the news!
I've asked sourceforge.net to provide a CVS repository for this document. If they do, I'll be pettitioning the editors to add the story :) Cross fingers!