It's just as easy to accidentally stuff crap into the wrong envelope and accidentally put the wrong address on it. Is it too much to expect that people think about what they're doing? Maybe people that stupid shouldn't be in such "critical" positions.
I would be really suprised if Google's entry into the payment market wouldn't have to do with micropayments. Why dabble with peer-to-peer aka paypal payments? That market is already cornered.
Micropayments, on the other hand are really that big a technical challenge. All previous schemes have failed because of the chicken/egg problem. If they don't have enough users signed up, not content providers will signon and vice versa.
Google already has a gigantic video service which is a great initial content provider. Apart from that, hundreds of website operators will sign on immediately because they've been successful in the past.
As for users signing up, they've only got to get a few % of the millions of gmail users to type in a credit card number, or they could let the billions of "webmasters", who've got google ads on their pages but never make it to the minimum payout, spend their click-money on micropayments.
>In any case, if a beige box (or PC laptop) ran OS X >for $1500 less than my Mac cost...
What kind of Apple hardware are you using? You can get quite alot of Mac for $1500. Say a dual 2GHZ G5 Powermac costing $2000. If you really need that type of workstation, I'd be really suprised if you could come up with any comparable beige box costing only $500. Actually, I don't see any Mac that has a $1500 premium on it.
-tim
If you're just curious, you can see the a java implementation now. Apart from all the open source versions, each Sun JDK release comes with a file called src.jar that contains the entire source of the J2SE API classes. The source to the JVM, compiler, etc. are available to look at after agreeing to a click through license here: http://tinyurl.com/e4dho
It's not like the system works by someone sending your credit card a "tell me your cardnumber, please" signal and your card happily obliges. The merchant contacts the credit card processor with details about the transaction: "customer xyz wants to pay $15". He'll get back some sort of electronic token asking to have the token encrypted by the smart card. Said card encrypts the token with a private key that's stored in the card and the merchant sends back the encrypted token --good only for that transaction-- and everyone can be sure that the physical card was actually present for the transaction.
The thing about smartcards is that they're not just stupid data stores, but are little computers that can calculate encryption routines and contain data (the cardholders private key) that can't easily be extracted from them.
I agree, and there are some other little intricacies I'd like to point out: The author of the original post obviously has some half-knowledge about how things were done a while ago:
Imagine splicing a broken fiber hanging off a helicopter platform while the line 12 feet below you is energized to 350 thousand volts. No, I haven't done it, but I watched it being done and the crew earned every penny.
They USED to do it that way, although I must amend, that the guy doing the splicing would either hang from his feet from a cable attached to the helicopter, or would actually be suspended by holding onto the rope with his mouth! Nowadays of course, management has realized that such methods are haphazard to say the least and the splice crews use jetpacks to get to fibre.
I saw my first Z-80 processor in a SCADA system shortly after the Z-80 came out.
Oh the days, back then, running nuclear powre plant control systems on the Sinclair Z-80. Nowadays of course, we use at least PlayStaton II's to take care of them there reactors.
It's impossible to get to our control system through the Internet. It could probably be done to some degree (perhaps sending a 'breaker open' command to a key substation, if you know which one), but only by hijacking an existing dedicated connection undetected, which is getting harder as we connect stations via fiber optic.
While the above is technically true, there are some aspects that you neglected. E.g. you could also send the "breaker breaker" or "breaker ultimo" command from one of the key protostations upstream or down by the river and use that to hijack any connection *directly* into SPECTRE's secret lair, located conveniently in the nose of Abraham Lincoln's portrait on Mount Rushmore.
If any utility out there has their control systems connected to computers that can be reached via the Internet (or modem for that matter), the persons responsible should be taken out and shot.
Uuups! I think you're mixing up how things are done down at the nuclear power plant and how things are done in SPECTRE's scret lair. Don't worry, happens to me all the time, too. But say, you talk to much... would you mind sitting down on the chair on top of the trap door in the conference room in ze Zeppelin?
Incomplete Implementations At the moment, these implementations are very rough, and only useful to look at if you're a developer. http://arch.fifthvision.net/bin/view
While it sounds interesting, if you're choosing a version control software, "stable" and "well tested" are at the top of your list.
I didn't say he writes his own mumbo-jumbo, but that he's responsible for it. But I guess nowadays noone is responsible for anything anymore, society's cruel 21st century capitalism is at fault, oppressing poor little Microsoft CEO Ballmer whose only got $ 16 billion to his name and robbing the poor thing of his free will.
Gimme a break already, the man could give away 90% of what he owns and still be as rich as Donald Trump, if he disagreed with anything that was being "forced" upon him by evil MS-Shareholders, Bill or society, he could just quit his job.
So Steve Ballmer is unable to speak coherently. So what? Not his fault, he's constrained by all the weird corporate mumbo-jumbo.
Actually, being the CEO of the company, one could argue that he's much less a poor helpless victim of corporate mumbo-jumbo, but that instead, he's responsible for it.
You're not going to jail, the guy selling the modchips is. That's 'cause, as the laws are now, those are illegal. You're still free to take a hammer to your X-Box.
Yep, can't believe nobody picked up on that. While Dr. Dobbs has a fair amount of weird ecclectic columns (Swaine, Campervan-jazz-musician-what's-his-name, etc.) Verity Stob is by far the best of them. One of my favourites is the lifecyle of the desktop PC: State of Decay (It's so true.)
Nicely written, informative book review, too, by the way. Hope we see more of her here!
Speaking of weird things to like about Dr. Dobbs, does anyone else look forward to the PC-Lint advert/riddles every month? -- Asking that feels strangely embarassing, similar to asking "Does anyone else ever find that they've been talking to themselves for the last hour with the office door open?":-)
Well that sounds a bit more plausible. The original post makes it sound like the attorney general is suggesting families to create their own private telecommunications network. Thanks for the ref.
Now that our illustrious Attorney General has gone as far as to suggest that families put in place an emergency communications system between themselves
That seems insane! Has anyone else heard of this? Any links to the Attorney General's site where this is mentioned? A quick search didn't turn anything up for me. Did someone make this up or have I not heard of it because I don't live in the states?
I'd be interested in some data backing the assertion that CORBA is slower than SOAP. My gut feeling is that because SOAP marshalls/unmarshalls everything to XML, which at least in Java means a lot of inefficient String processing, and in any case is much less compact than IIOP, that SOAP would be much slower. Do you have any links to concrete benchmarks?
Just to keep on bickering (sorry, bad habit): strings/dev/random wouldn't work cause my super duper filter checks for the proper distribution of letters, i.e. more e's than q's and, cause it's spam, lot's of html thingies.
You're right on the money though what filtering at the ISP is concerned, that's where the most benefit would be for the end-user. I see two problems, though.
First, the ISP has to pay bandwidth for the incoming email, spend money on filtering but then isn't rewarded with more time/bandwidth consume by their clients.Secondly, I think they'd be deathly afraid of inadvertantly filtering out some false positives and being sued.
Think what would happen if some marketing department tries to send their customer the rough draft of a mailing and it keeps getting eaten by the ISP's spam filter.
d0rk! Ignoring the fact that I was being sarcastic and artistic license would have permitted me to specify/dev/my_ass let me just say this: before you make statements trying to make people look stupid you should probably have a clue what your talking about.
While true that your measly Linux machine has no/dev/srandom, this device is the source for _s_ecure random data on OpenBSD and it's probably available some other places as well. Some random trivia (pun intented), checking around I noticed: AIX and Solaris both don't typically have/dev/random at all.
But anyway, back to your question: if you're sad you don't have/dev/srandom you could try the following:
If I were a spammer, I couldn't care less if some nerd using string entropy calculation filters out my spam, because said nerd using weird home grown filtering is also more likely to a.) not reply anyway b.) submit my open relays to blackhole lists c.) complain to my ISP etc. etc.
If I were a spammer I'd concentrate more on trying to get average users to open my mail even though they've learned that Cindy's "Haven't seen you in ages, JOE23" Emails aren't real. And how to circumvent whatever anti-spam measures come installed in JOE23's AOL software.
Anyways, some geek in his dorm room is not likely to have enough money to buy penis prosthetics anyway and can also figure out how to jerk off to free thumbnail-pics.
If spammers started padding their mail with high entropy data I would set up a filter that filters out mails based on how close the character recognition is to standard English HTML-formatted mails, and discards random junk.
But then spammers would start not just using high entropy material from/dev/srandom (really nerdy spammers themselves, who know not to trust/dev/random) but generating random characters with similar charateristics as English.
Then the antispammer would have to use fuzzy-logic spell-checking and the spammer would have to start using random words out of the dictionary and finally spammers would be left with no other option than to send me really nice personalized eCards that say "Happy Birthday!" with a little singing chicken, because I haven't found a way to filter those yet. I can only filter spam with mammals
of the story was that the guy asking didn't want to fork over "large amounts of cash". For your personal website that you want to protect from the NSA or god-knows whom cause you're a paranoid tinfoil-beanie type, $150 a year might seem like a lot of money, but a bank or an insurance is really not going to care.
Same thing as the hard-disk deleting policies mentioned yesterday: since noone truly cares about the amount of porn on your disks, you're fine just formatting them or zeroing them out a couple of times, cause the cost of having them shreddered would seem quite high.
You're also fine just tearing up your bank statements a couple of times instead of hiring someone to incinerate them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Self-righteous" would make a nice new category as well.
It's just as easy to accidentally stuff crap into the wrong envelope and accidentally put the wrong address on it. Is it too much to expect that people think about what they're doing? Maybe people that stupid shouldn't be in such "critical" positions.
I would be really suprised if Google's entry into the payment market wouldn't have to do with micropayments. Why dabble with peer-to-peer aka paypal payments? That market is already cornered.
Micropayments, on the other hand are really that big a technical challenge. All previous schemes have failed because of the chicken/egg problem. If they don't have enough users signed up, not content providers will signon and vice versa.
Google already has a gigantic video service which is a great initial content provider. Apart from that, hundreds of website operators will sign on immediately because they've been successful in the past.
As for users signing up, they've only got to get a few % of the millions of gmail users to type in a credit card number, or they could let the billions of "webmasters", who've got google ads on their pages but never make it to the minimum payout, spend their click-money on micropayments.
-tim
>In any case, if a beige box (or PC laptop) ran OS X
>for $1500 less than my Mac cost...
What kind of Apple hardware are you using? You can get quite alot of Mac for $1500. Say a dual 2GHZ G5 Powermac costing $2000. If you really need that type of workstation, I'd be really suprised if you could come up with any comparable beige box costing only $500. Actually, I don't see any Mac that has a $1500 premium on it.
-tim
If you're just curious, you can see the a java implementation now. Apart from all the open source versions, each Sun JDK release comes with a file called src.jar that contains the entire source of the J2SE API classes. The source to the JVM, compiler, etc. are available to look at after agreeing to a click through license here: http://tinyurl.com/e4dho
Even better, that means you can get 6 Smarts into one standard American parking space!
Of course it's a crime: fraud.
> It can also incrase food consumption
That really shouldn't be a priority for the United States.
It's not like the system works by someone sending your credit card a "tell me your cardnumber, please" signal and your card happily obliges. The merchant contacts the credit card processor with details about the transaction: "customer xyz wants to pay $15". He'll get back some sort of electronic token asking to have the token encrypted by the smart card. Said card encrypts the token with a private key that's stored in the card and the merchant sends back the encrypted token --good only for that transaction-- and everyone can be sure that the physical card was actually present for the transaction.
The thing about smartcards is that they're not just stupid data stores, but are little computers that can calculate encryption routines and contain data (the cardholders private key) that can't easily be extracted from them.
"unsere Truppen sind Ihr links, das Feldubungen 24 bis 48 Stunden lang tut, missachten bitte feindliche klingende Gerausche waehrend dieser Zeit"
broken grammar aside (and adjusting umlaute), that sentence makes absolutely no sense at all in German.
The author of the original post obviously has some half-knowledge about how things were done a while ago:
They USED to do it that way, although I must amend, that the guy doing the splicing would either hang from his feet from a cable attached to the helicopter, or would actually be suspended by holding onto the rope with his mouth!
Nowadays of course, management has realized that such methods are haphazard to say the least and the splice crews use jetpacks to get to fibre.
Oh the days, back then, running nuclear powre plant control systems on the Sinclair Z-80. Nowadays of course, we use at least PlayStaton II's to take care of them there reactors.
While the above is technically true, there are some aspects that you neglected. E.g. you could also send the "breaker breaker" or "breaker ultimo" command from one of the key protostations upstream or down by the river and use that to hijack any connection *directly* into SPECTRE's secret lair, located conveniently in the nose of Abraham Lincoln's portrait on Mount Rushmore.
Uuups! I think you're mixing up how things are done down at the nuclear power plant and how things are done in SPECTRE's scret lair. Don't worry, happens to me all the time, too. But say, you talk to much... would you mind sitting down on the chair on top of the trap door in the conference room in ze Zeppelin?
because of what it says on the website:
Incomplete Implementations
At the moment, these implementations are very rough, and only useful to look at if you're a developer. http://arch.fifthvision.net/bin/view
While it sounds interesting, if you're choosing a version control software, "stable" and "well tested" are at the top of your list.
I didn't say he writes his own mumbo-jumbo, but that he's responsible for it. But I guess nowadays noone is responsible for anything anymore, society's cruel 21st century capitalism is at fault, oppressing poor little Microsoft CEO Ballmer whose only got $ 16 billion to his name and robbing the poor thing of his free will.
Gimme a break already, the man could give away 90% of what he owns and still be as rich as Donald Trump, if he disagreed with anything that was being "forced" upon him by evil MS-Shareholders, Bill or society, he could just quit his job.
So Steve Ballmer is unable to speak coherently. So what? Not his fault, he's constrained by all the weird corporate mumbo-jumbo.
Actually, being the CEO of the company, one could argue that he's much less a poor helpless victim of corporate mumbo-jumbo, but that instead, he's responsible for it.
You're not going to jail, the guy selling the modchips is. That's 'cause, as the laws are now, those are illegal. You're still free to take a hammer to your X-Box.
Yep, can't believe nobody picked up on that. While Dr. Dobbs has a fair amount of weird ecclectic columns (Swaine, Campervan-jazz-musician-what's-his-name, etc.) Verity Stob is by far the best of them. One of my favourites is the lifecyle of the desktop PC: State of Decay (It's so true.)
:-)
Nicely written, informative book review, too, by the way. Hope we see more of her here!
Speaking of weird things to like about Dr. Dobbs, does anyone else look forward to the PC-Lint advert/riddles every month? -- Asking that feels strangely embarassing, similar to asking "Does anyone else ever find that they've been talking to themselves for the last hour with the office door open?"
Well that sounds a bit more plausible. The original post makes it sound like the attorney general is suggesting families to create their own private telecommunications network. Thanks for the ref.
Now that our illustrious Attorney General has gone as far as to suggest that families put in place an emergency communications system between themselves
That seems insane! Has anyone else heard of this? Any links to the Attorney General's site where this is mentioned? A quick search didn't turn anything up for me. Did someone make this up or have I not heard of it because I don't live in the states?
this
I'd be interested in some data backing the assertion that CORBA is slower than SOAP. My gut feeling is that because SOAP marshalls/unmarshalls everything to XML, which at least in Java means a lot of inefficient String processing, and in any case is much less compact than IIOP, that SOAP would be much slower. Do you have any links to concrete benchmarks?
Because if you look at regular socks, you'll notice that sometimes they're just really really really really really really really dark blue!
Nobody will get the reference, but I'm content chuckling to myself...
Just to keep on bickering (sorry, bad habit): strings /dev/random wouldn't work cause my super duper filter checks for the proper distribution of letters, i.e. more e's than q's and, cause it's spam, lot's of html thingies.
You're right on the money though what filtering at the ISP is concerned, that's where the most benefit would be for the end-user. I see two problems, though.
First, the ISP has to pay bandwidth for the incoming email, spend money on filtering but then isn't rewarded with more time/bandwidth consume by their clients.Secondly, I think they'd be deathly afraid of inadvertantly filtering out some false positives and being sued.
Think what would happen if some marketing department tries to send their customer the rough draft of a mailing and it keeps getting eaten by the ISP's spam filter.
d0rk! Ignoring the fact that I was being sarcastic and artistic license would have permitted me to specify /dev/my_ass let me just say this: before you make statements trying to make people look stupid you should probably have a clue what your talking about.
/dev/srandom, this device is the source for _s_ecure random data on OpenBSD and it's probably available some other places as well. Some random trivia (pun intented), checking around I noticed: AIX and Solaris both don't typically have /dev/random at all.
/dev/srandom you could try the following:
/dev/srandom /dev/zero
While true that your measly Linux machine has no
But anyway, back to your question: if you're sad you don't have
ln -s
If I were a spammer, I couldn't care less if some nerd using string entropy calculation filters out my spam, because said nerd using weird home grown filtering is also more likely to a.) not reply anyway b.) submit my open relays to blackhole lists c.) complain to my ISP etc. etc.
/dev/srandom (really nerdy spammers themselves, who know not to trust /dev/random) but generating random characters with similar charateristics as English.
If I were a spammer I'd concentrate more on trying to get average users to open my mail even though they've learned that Cindy's "Haven't seen you in ages, JOE23" Emails aren't real. And how to circumvent whatever anti-spam measures come installed in JOE23's AOL software.
Anyways, some geek in his dorm room is not likely to have enough money to buy penis prosthetics anyway and can also figure out how to jerk off to free thumbnail-pics.
If spammers started padding their mail with high entropy data I would set up a filter that filters out mails based on how close the character recognition is to standard English HTML-formatted mails, and discards random junk.
But then spammers would start not just using high entropy material from
Then the antispammer would have to use fuzzy-logic spell-checking and the spammer would have to start using random words out of the dictionary and finally spammers would be left with no other option than to send me really nice personalized eCards that say "Happy Birthday!" with a little singing chicken, because I haven't found a way to filter those yet. I can only filter spam with mammals
of the story was that the guy asking didn't want to fork over "large amounts of cash". For your personal website that you want to protect from the NSA or god-knows whom cause you're a paranoid tinfoil-beanie type, $150 a year might seem like a lot of money, but a bank or an insurance is really not going to care.
Same thing as the hard-disk deleting policies mentioned yesterday: since noone truly cares about the amount of porn on your disks, you're fine just formatting them or zeroing them out a couple of times, cause the cost of having them shreddered would seem quite high.
You're also fine just tearing up your bank statements a couple of times instead of hiring someone to incinerate them.