Why not just use resEdit on your MP3 files and tell their resource or info forks that they're some other file format? You could change their file type on the iPod, copy them over, and then change them back.
Sure it isn't elegant, but someone could easily make a resource-fork screwer-around-wither that does it easily, even as a scriptable part of the OS.
Macs are great, cuz you can do deep, intuitive modifications of every part of the OS, from the layout of dialog boxes to the language of menus just by screwing around with various resource forks. Joe User never has to worry about this seedy underbelly of cheap tricks, but everyone else is welcome to cheat wherever they want.
Here's hoping Apple wins the commercial OS battle someday:)
If we don't put warning labels on these dangerous, horrible devices, some child, or even adult, might find out the hard way. Can we really afford to let people learn on their own?? We must educate them about the dangers of salt, or abandon this salt-shaker technology altogether! Think of the children!
Congress should make a LAW! We must protect the public from itself at all costs! They must never have to deal with the intense pain of throwing a dash of salt in their eyes because nobody told them not to!
My big beef with corporate media is that these corporations are still agents of government. They take 30 people working in tune with Agenda X, and ignore the 30,000 people working against it, and then promote it as the News.
Having unfiltered media over an anarchistic system is now a BAD thing? If people read everything at face value, then they're not properly exploiting the instant-access-to-everything paradigm of the Web, and really do have the rulers they deserve.
Few people are buying xbox anyway
on
Crashing Xbox Kiosks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Out of the 20 gamers I know, about 19 of them are unwilling to purchase XBox simply because of Microsoft's good name.
While the OS on other game consoles ends up crashing occasionally too (in spite of the almost complete lack of a visible OS) they'd believe anything about the Microsoft one crashing anyway, without needing a demonstration.
Its almost a shame these people don't take their expectations of one complex computer system and attach them to another, like, say, a desktop.
Even if they pick up every single packet sent over the Internet, they would have a very hard time picking up useful content.
There are roughly a billion computers on the Internet, and each one sends out a heavy stream of packets, which contain any number of encryption and steganographic schemes.
To actually stop would-be terrorists from using the internet to transmit thought crime or seditious materials, they would need a very very big computer that filters out various pieces of traffic. No matter how hard you try, this will increase network latency, and piss off the average user.
If a massive, unprovoked attack on our rights to privacy, freedom of expression and thought doesn't stir the people to action, imagine Joe Sixpack when he can't view streaming porn as quickly. He'll be calling his congressman immediately.
Ok, so if M$'s OS is the most virused on the planet, and Dubya wants to get rid of all places where terrorists can reside, and a computer virus is a form of "industrial terrorism..."
Can we please pretty please have carpet-bombing of a certain terrorist stronghold in Redmond, Washington?
Doesn't Chuck Moore's 25x already do SMP-like things, at a few billion instructions per second? Last time I checked he was using a 20-word instruction set on a stack-based computer, which IMO counts as RISC.
This is hardly new, but HP's version probably uses some fancy new lithography, and wins when it comes to clock speed.
Its the demons I tells ya! The demons! The open source community ships dozens of these little devils per Linux, Hurd and BSD distro. It was just a matter of time before the less tech savvy community noticed our little satan-worshipping plot and brought us to account for it!
We should issue a promise to the NFL that the next Linux distro they recieve will be demon-free. Then they'll stop complaining via email.
This law will not be enforcable if you ban all public offerings of free products. You know how many people will continue to give their old x86 Minix boxen to charity? Plenty.
The government wouldn't dare uniformly enforcing this law in a manner which interferes with the poor bridging yet another "social divide" like the information gap.
Meanwhile Linux and other open source products will still thrive because everyone has access to the source code, and you only need one person with the source or using a binary for the products to be a success.
Software companies' interests might as well be protected through legislation, because they're making everything else that isn't banned mandatory, right?:)
I'm just sort of glad Motorola hasn't decided to ditch their much more popular 680x0 breed of processors, which can be found in everything from your phone to your PDA to your older computers. Intel leaving the industry just means there's more money to be made if you're one of the "other", higher quality chipmakers.
You can't kill an open source project just by no longer using it. Linux is one of the more popular ones out there, and it only needs a single user on the desktop to be a successful operating system.
Even if you DID kill the official project, assasinate Linus (and risk a jihad from all the geeks out there) you'll still see active Linux development in one form or another.
As long as someone can get at the source code you can bet your fanny someone WILL get at the source code, make modifications and updates, and maybe even share them with others. Its just a law of nature. Microsoft can't beat that, and its scared shitless.
How is it a violation of the GPL being able to run arbitrary binaries from GPLed OSes? They're not stealing the GCC compiler, they've not stolen the kernel, just its personality, and they probably use different libraries... what is the problem?
... and just write pseudocode or a very detailed step-by-step description of what their code does. In the end script kiddies will have to learn to write their own leet tools, and may later on branch these skills into other areas.
If security experts took the time to make exploit code an exercise for the reader, we might someday end up with skript kiddies who can even write their own hardware drivers for Linux. They might even learn to write and discover new exploits for Windows without the help of security experts.
The space program, in its current state, is going to have to get worse before it gets better. The first thing I'd do is streamline.
First of all, the shuttle fleet is too expensive. We should return to the good old days of cheap, disposable boosters and capsules. Either integrate an ET tank or three with the space station, or stop using the wasteful beasts. There are already a whole slew of disposable, cheap Titan rockets, and Apollo or Gemini would make a decent ISS ferry.
The International Space Station is a nice idea, but it can't hold all that many people. Give them decent living quarters in TransHab or some other good inflatable, god damnit. An ET tank or other large living quarters would be good for a sustained human presence in orbit. Start practical research of sustainable life support technology.
The ISS is a bit too low for satellite repair, but given a good supply of Apollo capsules or teleoperated robots, you could do satellite construction, deployment and repair for corporate customers, and use the profits to fund the construction of heavy in-orbit spacecraft, possibly a moon shuttle.
Build that freaking moon base. You could do long-term low gravity research, actually achieve the goals set in the 50s, and supply the ISS with a cheaper supply of parts and raw materials for itself and the satellites that corporate customers will want produced. A moon base would open up the private sector to a whole lot more real-estate. It would also provide a very good trial site for a mars mission, nuclear propulsion technology, etc.
But of course, NASA is a government agency, so Goldin's successor will be just as bad as he was for establishing a human presence in space. Oh well.
While it is true Linux and other open source software will be successful as long as one person somewhere finds it useful, it is nice to finally see corporate acceptance of this software.
What does corporate acceptance mean? It means we have become cheaper to set up and maintain than the other options for the corporate world, those being Windows and MacOS.
Linux still has its original stability and low price tag, and there are now several versions of all the software that corporate customers formerly had to develop for.
Macintosh lost out to Windows in the corporate marketplace for the same reason so many companies are switching over to Linux now. Installing Windows on a pre-existing IBM DOS box is a lot cheaper, and there were more applications. We now have the same applications, possibly fewer in number, but lower in price, so companies are turning their head toward the other option.
Companies are predictable buggers. If you give them a cheaper option with the features they're looking for, they will jump on it. Every time. Linux developers only need to ask what those features are and include them in the core OS or surrounding software, and we'll enjoy even greater corporate acceptance.
Hey all you/. people with a fab, here's a fun idea to piss off intel and AMD. Make the clock/speed irrelationship totally obvious.
Imagine an x86 compatible processor that runs at a clock speed of 50ghz? That's right, fifty BILLION hertz! Now, that clock only ever hits a counter that lets the 8086-compatible processor cycle once every half to full second. You could get a whopping 1-2 IPS:)
You'd be able to make millions selling 8086's that use the first 640k of a bunch of 128 meg chips, and the first 40 megs of a 400 gig hard drive. Think of the possibilities!
Maybe Apple is trying to protect valuable marketshare as a web appliance producer. Closed or RAND-based licensing schemes would not help them maintain standards compliance, and many of the currently free but very useful Mac apps for browsing the web would have to change strategies.
Finally, a company figuring out that its restrictive practices with licensing have hurt their marketshare and the industry at large.
Powerpoint is about the only part of Microsoft Office worth keeping around. It used to be a mac app made by a third party, and for making up posters on Windows with a shoestring budget, you can't top it.
More than Word or Excel, Powerpoint is the killer app for office. Once Linux makes up something as tidy, fast and easy to use, corporate acceptance will go through the roof, just BECAUSE suits like to spend time playing with their slides.
but the way the media interpreted this case that has me worried. Already mindless script kiddies are going around saying that the "cyber world" is a magical place that exists distinct from the real world, and that anything that happens in it is beyond legality, morality, ethics or both. This has always been a common argument ever since the internet became a big deal to the media and they've used words like Cyberspace to describe it.
Now we have l33t kiddies who read some news, who will soon be telling their victims that they were vindicated by the courts, and their victims will feel even more powerless. Kiddies have never been concerned much with facts, just handy lies they can tell themselves and others.
Seriously folks, once the world gets over the whole one-key-per-letter rut that they're stuck in, alternative keyboard models like chordic will really start to pick up.
You can probably get away with chordic on a cel phone if you change the form factor a little. Imagine a phone that you carry at your side, in a fist, until you are done dialling or writing notes or whatever. It could even have a wireless connection to your various wearable devices so you never have to worry about switching keyboards. Imagine, stylus in one hand, phone in the other, and headset in ear. You'd be an unstoppable nerd machine!
Of course I can imagine geeks having a hard time learning 5-digit letter codes. After all, who would want to learn something like that? Not me. No siree. I'll just happily write bad letters with my palm and scribble on my newton and slow myself down with bulky physical keyboards.:)
The maps of the internet, while very pretty, are not very useful except to see how certain domains connect to others. What we need for a really good/nifty map would be a chart of the connections based on content or meaning.
This would be pretty tricky, however there are a few things you could do to handle the meanings of pages without having a very complex AI:
1. Run a thesaurus through a semiotic field, so words are reduced to meaning groups. Each word gets turned into a symbol during spidering. The meaning groups could then be profiled into what the subject matter is, regardless of the language or location, with reasonable accuracy.
2. Assign a color to each major page class: Search Engine, Commercial, Personal, Regional. The content could then be made into a pretty circle graph like the previous one, and you could make it browsable on the web to spot the "importance" of certain sites as information resources.
3. For even more fun things to do, make the electronic version of the web map reducible. Web portals already show categorical listings of web content, so why not make it possible to select different sub-categories from the higher levels and make the rest white?
I think that a graphical search engine like this would be a fancy toy, and might actually provide a useful interface for old people and those with a more tactile/visual/geographic view of the world.
A foreigner, trying to escape America for Russia and freedom, fighting against an unjust system, being forced to spend all his money on a legal battle that should never have happened.
I wonder how his wife and kid are doing through all this.
Isn't this exact situation the reason capitalist systems are not allowed to have monopolies in charge of an entire industry? While the w3c is technically an oligopoly, they have big swinging dick power over the ENTIRE internet, and it was only a matter of time before they started to make moves like this.
What better way to make money than to become the people responsible for ALL standards on the Internet, and then use that power to rake people in to scarey licensing deals?
Such restrictions are the kind of power tripping that EVERY monopoly so far has exercised, including AOL/TW as the content gestappo, M$ as the licensing and OEM nazis, CNN with its consent factory, etc.
North America is starting to look as communist as Russia. Vive la revolution!
Slashdot Mirror
Hey,
:)
Why not just use resEdit on your MP3 files and tell their resource or info forks that they're some other file format? You could change their file type on the iPod, copy them over, and then change them back.
Sure it isn't elegant, but someone could easily make a resource-fork screwer-around-wither that does it easily, even as a scriptable part of the OS.
Macs are great, cuz you can do deep, intuitive modifications of every part of the OS, from the layout of dialog boxes to the language of menus just by screwing around with various resource forks. Joe User never has to worry about this seedy underbelly of cheap tricks, but everyone else is welcome to cheat wherever they want.
Here's hoping Apple wins the commercial OS battle someday
In hard times people tend only to make money selling two things:
1. Banned substances.
2. Sex
I'm actually surprised more web developers HAVEN'T turned to pimping and drugs lately.
Iodized Salt may sting when placed in eyes!
If we don't put warning labels on these dangerous, horrible devices, some child, or even adult, might find out the hard way. Can we really afford to let people learn on their own?? We must educate them about the dangers of salt, or abandon this salt-shaker technology altogether! Think of the children!
Congress should make a LAW! We must protect the public from itself at all costs! They must never have to deal with the intense pain of throwing a dash of salt in their eyes because nobody told them not to!
My big beef with corporate media is that these corporations are still agents of government. They take 30 people working in tune with Agenda X, and ignore the 30,000 people working against it, and then promote it as the News.
Having unfiltered media over an anarchistic system is now a BAD thing? If people read everything at face value, then they're not properly exploiting the instant-access-to-everything paradigm of the Web, and really do have the rulers they deserve.
Out of the 20 gamers I know, about 19 of them are unwilling to purchase XBox simply because of Microsoft's good name.
While the OS on other game consoles ends up crashing occasionally too (in spite of the almost complete lack of a visible OS) they'd believe anything about the Microsoft one crashing anyway, without needing a demonstration.
Its almost a shame these people don't take their expectations of one complex computer system and attach them to another, like, say, a desktop.
Even if they pick up every single packet sent over the Internet, they would have a very hard time picking up useful content.
There are roughly a billion computers on the Internet, and each one sends out a heavy stream of packets, which contain any number of encryption and steganographic schemes.
To actually stop would-be terrorists from using the internet to transmit thought crime or seditious materials, they would need a very very big computer that filters out various pieces of traffic. No matter how hard you try, this will increase network latency, and piss off the average user.
If a massive, unprovoked attack on our rights to privacy, freedom of expression and thought doesn't stir the people to action, imagine Joe Sixpack when he can't view streaming porn as quickly. He'll be calling his congressman immediately.
Ok, so if M$'s OS is the most virused on the planet, and Dubya wants to get rid of all places where terrorists can reside, and a computer virus is a form of "industrial terrorism..."
Can we please pretty please have carpet-bombing of a certain terrorist stronghold in Redmond, Washington?
Doesn't Chuck Moore's 25x already do SMP-like things, at a few billion instructions per second? Last time I checked he was using a 20-word instruction set on a stack-based computer, which IMO counts as RISC.
This is hardly new, but HP's version probably uses some fancy new lithography, and wins when it comes to clock speed.
Its the demons I tells ya! The demons! The open source community ships dozens of these little devils per Linux, Hurd and BSD distro. It was just a matter of time before the less tech savvy community noticed our little satan-worshipping plot and brought us to account for it!
We should issue a promise to the NFL that the next Linux distro they recieve will be demon-free. Then they'll stop complaining via email.
This law will not be enforcable if you ban all public offerings of free products. You know how many people will continue to give their old x86 Minix boxen to charity? Plenty.
:)
The government wouldn't dare uniformly enforcing this law in a manner which interferes with the poor bridging yet another "social divide" like the information gap.
Meanwhile Linux and other open source products will still thrive because everyone has access to the source code, and you only need one person with the source or using a binary for the products to be a success.
Software companies' interests might as well be protected through legislation, because they're making everything else that isn't banned mandatory, right?
I'm just sort of glad Motorola hasn't decided to ditch their much more popular 680x0 breed of processors, which can be found in everything from your phone to your PDA to your older computers. Intel leaving the industry just means there's more money to be made if you're one of the "other", higher quality chipmakers.
You can't kill an open source project just by no longer using it. Linux is one of the more popular ones out there, and it only needs a single user on the desktop to be a successful operating system.
Even if you DID kill the official project, assasinate Linus (and risk a jihad from all the geeks out there) you'll still see active Linux development in one form or another.
As long as someone can get at the source code you can bet your fanny someone WILL get at the source code, make modifications and updates, and maybe even share them with others. Its just a law of nature. Microsoft can't beat that, and its scared shitless.
How is it a violation of the GPL being able to run arbitrary binaries from GPLed OSes? They're not stealing the GCC compiler, they've not stolen the kernel, just its personality, and they probably use different libraries... what is the problem?
... and just write pseudocode or a very detailed step-by-step description of what their code does. In the end script kiddies will have to learn to write their own leet tools, and may later on branch these skills into other areas.
:)
If security experts took the time to make exploit code an exercise for the reader, we might someday end up with skript kiddies who can even write their own hardware drivers for Linux. They might even learn to write and discover new exploits for Windows without the help of security experts.
Microsoft got it on the nose this time
The space program, in its current state, is going to have to get worse before it gets better. The first thing I'd do is streamline.
First of all, the shuttle fleet is too expensive. We should return to the good old days of cheap, disposable boosters and capsules. Either integrate an ET tank or three with the space station, or stop using the wasteful beasts. There are already a whole slew of disposable, cheap Titan rockets, and Apollo or Gemini would make a decent ISS ferry.
The International Space Station is a nice idea, but it can't hold all that many people. Give them decent living quarters in TransHab or some other good inflatable, god damnit. An ET tank or other large living quarters would be good for a sustained human presence in orbit. Start practical research of sustainable life support technology.
The ISS is a bit too low for satellite repair, but given a good supply of Apollo capsules or teleoperated robots, you could do satellite construction, deployment and repair for corporate customers, and use the profits to fund the construction of heavy in-orbit spacecraft, possibly a moon shuttle.
Build that freaking moon base. You could do long-term low gravity research, actually achieve the goals set in the 50s, and supply the ISS with a cheaper supply of parts and raw materials for itself and the satellites that corporate customers will want produced. A moon base would open up the private sector to a whole lot more real-estate. It would also provide a very good trial site for a mars mission, nuclear propulsion technology, etc.
But of course, NASA is a government agency, so Goldin's successor will be just as bad as he was for establishing a human presence in space. Oh well.
While it is true Linux and other open source software will be successful as long as one person somewhere finds it useful, it is nice to finally see corporate acceptance of this software.
What does corporate acceptance mean? It means we have become cheaper to set up and maintain than the other options for the corporate world, those being Windows and MacOS.
Linux still has its original stability and low price tag, and there are now several versions of all the software that corporate customers formerly had to develop for.
Macintosh lost out to Windows in the corporate marketplace for the same reason so many companies are switching over to Linux now. Installing Windows on a pre-existing IBM DOS box is a lot cheaper, and there were more applications. We now have the same applications, possibly fewer in number, but lower in price, so companies are turning their head toward the other option.
Companies are predictable buggers. If you give them a cheaper option with the features they're looking for, they will jump on it. Every time. Linux developers only need to ask what those features are and include them in the core OS or surrounding software, and we'll enjoy even greater corporate acceptance.
Hey all you /. people with a fab, here's a fun idea to piss off intel and AMD. Make the clock/speed irrelationship totally obvious.
:)
Imagine an x86 compatible processor that runs at a clock speed of 50ghz? That's right, fifty BILLION hertz! Now, that clock only ever hits a counter that lets the 8086-compatible processor cycle once every half to full second. You could get a whopping 1-2 IPS
You'd be able to make millions selling 8086's that use the first 640k of a bunch of 128 meg chips, and the first 40 megs of a 400 gig hard drive. Think of the possibilities!
Maybe Apple is trying to protect valuable marketshare as a web appliance producer. Closed or RAND-based licensing schemes would not help them maintain standards compliance, and many of the currently free but very useful Mac apps for browsing the web would have to change strategies.
Finally, a company figuring out that its restrictive practices with licensing have hurt their marketshare and the industry at large.
Just how many other open source projects have there been that are successful?
Seriously, there just aren't that many projects out there with universal recognition, let alone acceptance.
Here's a prediction for next year's winners:
1. Larry Wall
2. Guido Van Rossum
or
3. whoever invented TCL or Beowolf.
And then we're fresh out of winners for all subsequent years. It'll be worse than the Oscars.
Powerpoint is about the only part of Microsoft Office worth keeping around. It used to be a mac app made by a third party, and for making up posters on Windows with a shoestring budget, you can't top it.
More than Word or Excel, Powerpoint is the killer app for office. Once Linux makes up something as tidy, fast and easy to use, corporate acceptance will go through the roof, just BECAUSE suits like to spend time playing with their slides.
but the way the media interpreted this case that has me worried. Already mindless script kiddies are going around saying that the "cyber world" is a magical place that exists distinct from the real world, and that anything that happens in it is beyond legality, morality, ethics or both. This has always been a common argument ever since the internet became a big deal to the media and they've used words like Cyberspace to describe it.
Now we have l33t kiddies who read some news, who will soon be telling their victims that they were vindicated by the courts, and their victims will feel even more powerless. Kiddies have never been concerned much with facts, just handy lies they can tell themselves and others.
Seriously folks, once the world gets over the whole one-key-per-letter rut that they're stuck in, alternative keyboard models like chordic will really start to pick up.
:)
You can probably get away with chordic on a cel phone if you change the form factor a little. Imagine a phone that you carry at your side, in a fist, until you are done dialling or writing notes or whatever. It could even have a wireless connection to your various wearable devices so you never have to worry about switching keyboards. Imagine, stylus in one hand, phone in the other, and headset in ear. You'd be an unstoppable nerd machine!
Of course I can imagine geeks having a hard time learning 5-digit letter codes. After all, who would want to learn something like that? Not me. No siree. I'll just happily write bad letters with my palm and scribble on my newton and slow myself down with bulky physical keyboards.
The maps of the internet, while very pretty, are not very useful except to see how certain domains connect to others. What we need for a really good/nifty map would be a chart of the connections based on content or meaning.
This would be pretty tricky, however there are a few things you could do to handle the meanings of pages without having a very complex AI:
1. Run a thesaurus through a semiotic field, so words are reduced to meaning groups. Each word gets turned into a symbol during spidering. The meaning groups could then be profiled into what the subject matter is, regardless of the language or location, with reasonable accuracy.
2. Assign a color to each major page class: Search Engine, Commercial, Personal, Regional. The content could then be made into a pretty circle graph like the previous one, and you could make it browsable on the web to spot the "importance" of certain sites as information resources.
3. For even more fun things to do, make the electronic version of the web map reducible. Web portals already show categorical listings of web content, so why not make it possible to select different sub-categories from the higher levels and make the rest white?
I think that a graphical search engine like this would be a fancy toy, and might actually provide a useful interface for old people and those with a more tactile/visual/geographic view of the world.
Poor Dmitry,
A foreigner, trying to escape America for Russia and freedom, fighting against an unjust system, being forced to spend all his money on a legal battle that should never have happened.
I wonder how his wife and kid are doing through all this.
Hey,
Isn't this exact situation the reason capitalist systems are not allowed to have monopolies in charge of an entire industry? While the w3c is technically an oligopoly, they have big swinging dick power over the ENTIRE internet, and it was only a matter of time before they started to make moves like this.
What better way to make money than to become the people responsible for ALL standards on the Internet, and then use that power to rake people in to scarey licensing deals?
Such restrictions are the kind of power tripping that EVERY monopoly so far has exercised, including AOL/TW as the content gestappo, M$ as the licensing and OEM nazis, CNN with its consent factory, etc.
North America is starting to look as communist as Russia. Vive la revolution!