Several years ago, Cross (the pen people) had a thing called a CrossPad, which allowed one to write on an ordinary notepad but capture the digital image (or convert handwritten notes to text).
I must be one of the few people who found this a tremendous piece of hardware, because they discontinued it after a while and the product is no longer supported. But it used a very comfortable pen, and wrote on ordinary notepads. The hardware, I thought, was extremely well done, and I found it a breeze to use.
The problem was the software, which was written by IBM and left the distinct impression that it was little more than a demonstration-of-principle that should never have left the lab. Oddly enough, the handwriting-to-text portion was outstanding; I could write pages of notes and it would transform my handwriting to text with almost 100% accuracy. (One could always simply store the pages as images if one's handwriting wasn't neat.) BUT the software gave you no way to move things around easily, no way to file your pages nicely, in fact, no way to do much useful with your jottings at all once you had moved them on to your computer. And the software wasn't very stable, either.
I kept waiting for a software upgrade, to bring the software up to a standard that was close to the quality of the hardware, but it never happened. I wish that Cross would resurrect this technology, but with some decent software behind it. But it'll never happen:-( I'm sure that the failure last time means that they're now convinced that there's no market for this kind of product.
Turns out that it's not so simple to stop using DSOs. I am responsible for a commercial product that runs under Linux. In order to "solve" this problem, I use the -static flag to gcc when I build the application. But it turns out that, at least if you use the gcc suite, there is a small set of functions that, even with the -static flag set, are invoked dynamically on the target system. I don't have a complete list handy, but I recall that the one that always bites me is gethostbyname(). The latest version of gcc now warns you when you are calling one of these functions, which is helpful, but I have yet to find a completely general solution for the problem.
Apart from MIT, and Windows, who uses Kerberos nowadays? Doesn't SSH, and public-key based authentication pretty much make the whole thing irrelevant?
PacketCable security (VoIP over cable) is based on Kerberos. (www.packetcable.com). Interestingly, it's version of Kerberos that uses public-key authentication (PKINIT).
FWIW, the most common KDC used in PacketCable networks (www.ipfonix.com) is not vulnerable, since it uses no MIT code.
I do wish that the original headline had been more accurate, since it's not a bug in Kerberos that has been found, but a bug in a particular implementation.
How many people do you know who are running IM clients they've written themselves?
I do
Me too. I have found it a very useful ability for applications to use jabber to report their status to me. If, for example, one of my VPN connections goes down, I know about it immediately even if I am not using that connection at the time, because I get a jabber message telling me so. That's just one example of several applications for which I use jabber-based status reporting.
(And because it's presence-based, the message gets to me wherever I happen to be physically located, which is also kind of neat.)
It's been about six months since I last tried Freenet, and I wondered if maybe its performance had improved to the point where it is now usable once more (as it was a couple of years ago -- but it had other problems then).
Unfortunately, it seems that it hasn't. I really wish that Freenet worked; but I have just spent four hours with my broadband modem lights permanently lit, waiting for the homepage for The Freedom Engine to finish loading, and there's no sign that it's going to be finished anytime soon.
One day, I fully expect Freenet to be practical way to maintain anonymity. But as far as I can see, it's still not working right.
Of course, the question really is: "Is Lack of Security...?" but in any case, given that the PacketCable Security specification (which covers the security for running IP-based telephony over cable systems) runs to 377 pages, I think that one is forced to conclude that, whatever is holding VoIP back, it's not [lack of] security.
Here's a decent picture of spokes:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/image/images/saturn/8b g.jpg
On this occasion, I do know what I'm talking about. I am a co-investigator on the Voyager mission. Do not cause this you to believe that I always know what I'm talking about, though. Especially in/. posts.
(And, in case anyone cares, the most-commonly-accepted theory of the cause of spokes is that they are caused by dust particles that electrostatically elevated slightly above the plane of the rings.)
Personally, I'm waiting to discover [when Cassini gets closer] whether the Saturn Electrostatic Discharges (SED) that were so prominent in the Voyager Planetary Radio Astronomy results are still around. (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?2 003EAEJA.....1905K)
SpamBayes has worked great previously, but now even it is falling short.
Well, I use POPfile, and all I can say is that not a single one of these bizarre spams full of random words has made it into my inbox, and neither has POPfile falsely accused any real e-mail of being spam. In other words, this new tactic hasn't affected my inbox one little bit.
In fact, just yesterday I was wondering why spammers were suddenly filling their messages with random words, since it sure wasn't getting past my Bayesian filter. I guess that the answer is that it does confuse some programs, just not POPfile (yet, anyway).
What's happening with subversion? Is it useable yet?
Yep. I started using it about a month ago. Within three days I was so enamoured of it that I switched all my projects to it. Anyone who has used CVS should be able to switch almost without retraining. And the best thing of all is that the documentation (a downloadable book) is thorough, well-written, up-to-date, and full of useful examples. This project should win some sort of prize; it deserves it.
from new dehli, said every bollywood movie has the same plot
Well, he's wrong:-)
If I were to list my all-time favourite top-five films, it would include one from Bollywood: Lagaan, whose plot (apart from the singing and dancing) doesn't look anything like what you describe. And FWIW, the tunes are simply wonderful. It's the best soundtrack I have.
It is, of course, true that Bollywood makes a lot of what Westerners would think of as junk. But then, so does Hollywood.
It will be really interesting to see whether having easier access to their movies over the Internet will encourage Bollywood to create more movies of the Lagaan style rather than those simply created for home consumption.
It will also be interesting to see if Bollywood is still enthusiastic after someone finds a way around the "The file was programmed to self destruct after being viewed and could not be copied." limitation mentioned in the article.
What I've heard, anyway, is that most of the cable carriers aren't making a profit. I find this difficult to believe and would immediately jump to conclusions about bad management or something else being at fault if they can't make a profit. But, who knows.
The problem is that it cost them a fortune in capital investment to install all the new physical plant (the "HFC" -- hybrid fiber coax) that runs between their head-ends and the residences that they serve. "Fortune" here corresponds to > $70bn, according to some estimates I've seen. Most cable operators took on a lot of debt a few years ago in order to install that plant, so now they have large repayments that they have to make on that debt.
Whether they were smart or stupid I won't comment, but that's the basic reason why the broadband divisions of the cable operators aren't making money.
Of course, the plant upgrade helps them with other services as well, but usually it's treated as an expense against the broadband division.
It's always hard to know what an entity is really proposing when all you have to go on is a news story written by someone who is not technically competent. Even if one ignores the obvious technical errors in the Reuters story and replaces them with what the reporter probably meant (rather than what he did say) there seems to be one big problem with this proposal that either Yahoo! hasn't addressed, or, if they have addressed it, the reporter decided not to mention what they are doing about it.
Consider the common scenario in which a user marks his outbound mail as coming from domain X -- but X is only a forwarding service for inbound e-mail, like, say pobox.com or arrl.net. The outbound e-mail gets sent out through some other ISP. From the description in the article, it appears that somehow someone with the private key for domain X is somehow supposed to add something to the outbound e-mail; but that e-mail never goes anywhere near domain X.
One reads lost of well-meaning posts about VoIP here on/. Not all of them are very accurate, however, and many of them simplify (or even trivialise) the notion of doing telephony over IP to the point where the reader can easily come away with conclusions that are incorrect.
I would recommend that anyone who is interested in understanding the intricacies of providing a telco-equivalent level of service to a residential user in an IP environment should take a look at the specifications at www.packetcable.com/specifications/. PacketCable(TM) is the cable industry's set of standards for providing telephone service over broadband. As you will see, doing VoIP properly is not quite as simple as some people seem to believe.
There are (of course) other ways of doing telephony over IP, but this set of specifications is free and easy to download, and the documents do give the interested a reader a good idea of the kinds of issues that have to be addressed.
I suppose if they felt they were still getting useful information from the probe (ie, it was "looking" at something "interesting" with sensors that still worked), they could always launch a relay-type satellite... just like a network repeater.
Not really very practical. You'd need something that had a larger antenna aperture than one of the (large) DSN stations. It's hard to imagine what Voyager could be detecting that would support this sort of thing. If it really was detecting something vutally important, I suspect that it wuold be far less expensive to upgrade the DSN (note, I didn't say it would be cheap, just less expensive than trying to do the same thing from Earth orbit).
And, to your other point, the DSN receivers already operate at extremely low noise floors; the only practical way to enhance their ability to receive weak signals is to increase the aperture.
What's the range of communications for the probe? When will we lose our connection (if we haven't already)?
For many years I was a co-investigator on Voyager (actually, technically, I suppose that I still am; I have never been notified that the status ever changed). Anyway, the best guess when I was an active participant, throughout the 80s and half of the 90s, was more-or-less the year 2010. That was predicted to be the year at which the always-decreasing power output from the transmitter, the ever-increasing distance and the more-or-less constant sensitivity of the DSN (Deep Space Network) system combined to reduce the received signal to the point where it the bit rate at which information could be extracted was too low to be useful.
The general supposition was that funding would be eliminated before that date.
It's a bit hard to believe that GA an TX have had auroras; I live in Colorado and have made a point of checking each of the past few nights, several times a night, and there's been nothing here.
And yes, it does get pretty dark here, so it's not light pollution that's preventing me from seeing anything.
Your phrase "non-negligible" is defined as anything less than infinitely long.
Actually, it's not.
I am slightly puzzled by the fact that my post is modded funny. True, it is written in a semi-humourous vein, but actually it was quite serious. And there is a quite precise mathematical definition for what I slipped in as "non-negligible"; I just couldn't be bothered to go to the trouble of extending the post by a silly amount (and trying to do it in ASCII) just to make the posting mathematically sound, when "non-negligible" is really the gist of the point (i.e., to try to stop people from saying, "Ooh, look, here's a sequence that repeats". Oh, wait, someone did that anyway...).
It would be interesting to use this to try and find more digits in pi. Maybe we will finally find a repeat.
If by "find a repeat" you mean "find a sequence of digits that repeats itself ad infinitum", or if you mean "a non-negligible sequence of digits that repeats itself at least once", then I'm afraid you'll be out of luck no matter how many times the age of the universe you want to spend looking, since pi is irrational.
The perspicacious will have noticed the sleight of hand covered by the use of "non-negligible". I leave the selection of a more exact phrase as an exercise for the reader (who clearly has plenty of time on his hands, since he's reading slashdot...).
Yes, I know it costs money, but the first time you install something and then wish that you hadn't -- and discover that you can't get rid of the piece of junk that you just installed -- or the first time that you want to recover the version of the Word document that you overwrote half an hour ago -- or in any one of half a dozen similar circumstances, you'll be glad that you installed... GoBack (www.goback.com).
It is absoutely the first program that I install on a new Windows system.
The only downside is that the software has just been bought by Symantec (from Roxio, who bought it from the original developers, WildFile). I just hope that that doesn't mean that it's going to be ruined.
Telemarketers may still call you, if they have a pre-existing business relationship with you. So if you bank with BofA for example, BofA and all of its subsidiaries (and IIRC, business partners) can/will call you.
Or the one that really ticked me off a year or so back, when, despite the fact that I'm on Colorado's No Call List, I received a call from... Microsoft. What proportion of the general population does not have a pre-existing business relationship with Microsoft?
I dunno... maybe it's just me, but it seems like it isn't too hard to tell the difference between music and a picture. Sure, you can turn the image bits into audio bits, but it's hard to believe that a judge of even mediocre intelligence isn't going to say something to the effect of, "I don't care how you encode it or present it, it's still intended to be a picture and that's how we're going to treat it".
Is there a guarantee that the 911 call will go to the correct dispatch center, and, more obscurely, is there a guarantee that the 911 call will complete even if the network is already operating at capacity with non-911 calls?
Maybe there is (I've never looked at Vonage's offering in any detail), but knowing how hard it would be to make good on the latter requirement, I strongly doubt it.
The whole CALEA issue is pretty interesting too. In fact, almost everything to do with VoIP is interesting. But then, I do this stuff for a living, so I guess that it's good that I find it so.
I was waiting for someone to bring up the comparison with cellular "service":-) But I'm going to choose not to go there:-)
It isn't, if you don't mind calls that don't have guaranteed quality, calls that are insecure, calls that may be tapped, no guarantee that you can port your number to another service, no guarantee that a 911 call will go through, no ability for a 911 dispatcher to determine your location, no ability for the operator to break into your call when someone needs to reach urgently, etc., etc., etc.
While we slashdot-type people can make a reasonable decision as to whether we really want all this stuff (and hence can decide rationally whether to pay for it), is it really likely that the typical consumer is really going to understand that this service is different from a regular landline telephone? After all, with some of these services, he's going to be using the same telephone that he's been using for years -- so he's going to expect it to work the same.
Yes, I hate regulation too. But if this stuff is going to be marketed as a replacement for regular telephone service, then it had better provide what the typical consumer expectes from his telco. (On the other hand, if it's marketed clearly just as a kind of "don't you dare depend on this for anything; I'm just pretending to be a telephone but I'm not one really" service, then you're right: it shouldn't be regulated.)
Slashdot Mirror
I must be one of the few people who found this a tremendous piece of hardware, because they discontinued it after a while and the product is no longer supported. But it used a very comfortable pen, and wrote on ordinary notepads. The hardware, I thought, was extremely well done, and I found it a breeze to use.
The problem was the software, which was written by IBM and left the distinct impression that it was little more than a demonstration-of-principle that should never have left the lab. Oddly enough, the handwriting-to-text portion was outstanding; I could write pages of notes and it would transform my handwriting to text with almost 100% accuracy. (One could always simply store the pages as images if one's handwriting wasn't neat.) BUT the software gave you no way to move things around easily, no way to file your pages nicely, in fact, no way to do much useful with your jottings at all once you had moved them on to your computer. And the software wasn't very stable, either.
I kept waiting for a software upgrade, to bring the software up to a standard that was close to the quality of the hardware, but it never happened. I wish that Cross would resurrect this technology, but with some decent software behind it. But it'll never happen :-( I'm sure that the failure last time means that they're now convinced that there's no market for this kind of product.
Turns out that it's not so simple to stop using DSOs. I am responsible for a commercial product that runs under Linux. In order to "solve" this problem, I use the -static flag to gcc when I build the application. But it turns out that, at least if you use the gcc suite, there is a small set of functions that, even with the -static flag set, are invoked dynamically on the target system. I don't have a complete list handy, but I recall that the one that always bites me is gethostbyname(). The latest version of gcc now warns you when you are calling one of these functions, which is helpful, but I have yet to find a completely general solution for the problem.
PacketCable security (VoIP over cable) is based on Kerberos. (www.packetcable.com). Interestingly, it's version of Kerberos that uses public-key authentication (PKINIT).
FWIW, the most common KDC used in PacketCable networks (www.ipfonix.com) is not vulnerable, since it uses no MIT code.
I do wish that the original headline had been more accurate, since it's not a bug in Kerberos that has been found, but a bug in a particular implementation.
I do
Me too. I have found it a very useful ability for applications to use jabber to report their status to me. If, for example, one of my VPN connections goes down, I know about it immediately even if I am not using that connection at the time, because I get a jabber message telling me so. That's just one example of several applications for which I use jabber-based status reporting.
(And because it's presence-based, the message gets to me wherever I happen to be physically located, which is also kind of neat.)
You don't have to be British to enter. The rules clearly state that you must be a British resident. Not at all the same thing.
It's been about six months since I last tried Freenet, and I wondered if maybe its performance had improved to the point where it is now usable once more (as it was a couple of years ago -- but it had other problems then).
Unfortunately, it seems that it hasn't. I really wish that Freenet worked; but I have just spent four hours with my broadband modem lights permanently lit, waiting for the homepage for The Freedom Engine to finish loading, and there's no sign that it's going to be finished anytime soon.
One day, I fully expect Freenet to be practical way to maintain anonymity. But as far as I can see, it's still not working right.
Of course, the question really is: "Is Lack of Security...?" but in any case, given that the PacketCable Security specification (which covers the security for running IP-based telephony over cable systems) runs to 377 pages, I think that one is forced to conclude that, whatever is holding VoIP back, it's not [lack of] security.
Here's a decent picture of spokes: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/image/images/saturn/8b g.jpg
On this occasion, I do know what I'm talking about. I am a co-investigator on the Voyager mission. Do not cause this you to believe that I always know what I'm talking about, though. Especially in /. posts.
(And, in case anyone cares, the most-commonly-accepted theory of the cause of spokes is that they are caused by dust particles that electrostatically elevated slightly above the plane of the rings.)
Personally, I'm waiting to discover [when Cassini gets closer] whether the Saturn Electrostatic Discharges (SED) that were so prominent in the Voyager Planetary Radio Astronomy results are still around. (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?2 003EAEJA.....1905K)
Well, I use POPfile, and all I can say is that not a single one of these bizarre spams full of random words has made it into my inbox, and neither has POPfile falsely accused any real e-mail of being spam. In other words, this new tactic hasn't affected my inbox one little bit.
In fact, just yesterday I was wondering why spammers were suddenly filling their messages with random words, since it sure wasn't getting past my Bayesian filter. I guess that the answer is that it does confuse some programs, just not POPfile (yet, anyway).
Yep. I started using it about a month ago. Within three days I was so enamoured of it that I switched all my projects to it. Anyone who has used CVS should be able to switch almost without retraining. And the best thing of all is that the documentation (a downloadable book) is thorough, well-written, up-to-date, and full of useful examples. This project should win some sort of prize; it deserves it.
Well, he's wrong :-)
If I were to list my all-time favourite top-five films, it would include one from Bollywood: Lagaan, whose plot (apart from the singing and dancing) doesn't look anything like what you describe. And FWIW, the tunes are simply wonderful. It's the best soundtrack I have.
It is, of course, true that Bollywood makes a lot of what Westerners would think of as junk. But then, so does Hollywood.
It will be really interesting to see whether having easier access to their movies over the Internet will encourage Bollywood to create more movies of the Lagaan style rather than those simply created for home consumption.
It will also be interesting to see if Bollywood is still enthusiastic after someone finds a way around the "The file was programmed to self destruct after being viewed and could not be copied." limitation mentioned in the article.
The problem is that it cost them a fortune in capital investment to install all the new physical plant (the "HFC" -- hybrid fiber coax) that runs between their head-ends and the residences that they serve. "Fortune" here corresponds to > $70bn, according to some estimates I've seen. Most cable operators took on a lot of debt a few years ago in order to install that plant, so now they have large repayments that they have to make on that debt.
Whether they were smart or stupid I won't comment, but that's the basic reason why the broadband divisions of the cable operators aren't making money.
Of course, the plant upgrade helps them with other services as well, but usually it's treated as an expense against the broadband division.
Consider the common scenario in which a user marks his outbound mail as coming from domain X -- but X is only a forwarding service for inbound e-mail, like, say pobox.com or arrl.net. The outbound e-mail gets sent out through some other ISP. From the description in the article, it appears that somehow someone with the private key for domain X is somehow supposed to add something to the outbound e-mail; but that e-mail never goes anywhere near domain X.
I would recommend that anyone who is interested in understanding the intricacies of providing a telco-equivalent level of service to a residential user in an IP environment should take a look at the specifications at www.packetcable.com/specifications/. PacketCable(TM) is the cable industry's set of standards for providing telephone service over broadband. As you will see, doing VoIP properly is not quite as simple as some people seem to believe.
There are (of course) other ways of doing telephony over IP, but this set of specifications is free and easy to download, and the documents do give the interested a reader a good idea of the kinds of issues that have to be addressed.
Not really very practical. You'd need something that had a larger antenna aperture than one of the (large) DSN stations. It's hard to imagine what Voyager could be detecting that would support this sort of thing. If it really was detecting something vutally important, I suspect that it wuold be far less expensive to upgrade the DSN (note, I didn't say it would be cheap, just less expensive than trying to do the same thing from Earth orbit). And, to your other point, the DSN receivers already operate at extremely low noise floors; the only practical way to enhance their ability to receive weak signals is to increase the aperture.
For many years I was a co-investigator on Voyager (actually, technically, I suppose that I still am; I have never been notified that the status ever changed). Anyway, the best guess when I was an active participant, throughout the 80s and half of the 90s, was more-or-less the year 2010. That was predicted to be the year at which the always-decreasing power output from the transmitter, the ever-increasing distance and the more-or-less constant sensitivity of the DSN (Deep Space Network) system combined to reduce the received signal to the point where it the bit rate at which information could be extracted was too low to be useful.
The general supposition was that funding would be eliminated before that date.
And yes, it does get pretty dark here, so it's not light pollution that's preventing me from seeing anything.
Actually, it's not.
I am slightly puzzled by the fact that my post is modded funny. True, it is written in a semi-humourous vein, but actually it was quite serious. And there is a quite precise mathematical definition for what I slipped in as "non-negligible"; I just couldn't be bothered to go to the trouble of extending the post by a silly amount (and trying to do it in ASCII) just to make the posting mathematically sound, when "non-negligible" is really the gist of the point (i.e., to try to stop people from saying, "Ooh, look, here's a sequence that repeats". Oh, wait, someone did that anyway...).
If by "find a repeat" you mean "find a sequence of digits that repeats itself ad infinitum", or if you mean "a non-negligible sequence of digits that repeats itself at least once", then I'm afraid you'll be out of luck no matter how many times the age of the universe you want to spend looking, since pi is irrational.
The perspicacious will have noticed the sleight of hand covered by the use of "non-negligible". I leave the selection of a more exact phrase as an exercise for the reader (who clearly has plenty of time on his hands, since he's reading slashdot...).
It is absoutely the first program that I install on a new Windows system.
The only downside is that the software has just been bought by Symantec (from Roxio, who bought it from the original developers, WildFile). I just hope that that doesn't mean that it's going to be ruined.
Or the one that really ticked me off a year or so back, when, despite the fact that I'm on Colorado's No Call List, I received a call from... Microsoft. What proportion of the general population does not have a pre-existing business relationship with Microsoft?
I dunno... maybe it's just me, but it seems like it isn't too hard to tell the difference between music and a picture. Sure, you can turn the image bits into audio bits, but it's hard to believe that a judge of even mediocre intelligence isn't going to say something to the effect of, "I don't care how you encode it or present it, it's still intended to be a picture and that's how we're going to treat it".
const bool drm = (vendor_says_drm_on) || (user_says_drm_on);
Is there a guarantee that the 911 call will go to the correct dispatch center, and, more obscurely, is there a guarantee that the 911 call will complete even if the network is already operating at capacity with non-911 calls?
Maybe there is (I've never looked at Vonage's offering in any detail), but knowing how hard it would be to make good on the latter requirement, I strongly doubt it.
The whole CALEA issue is pretty interesting too. In fact, almost everything to do with VoIP is interesting. But then, I do this stuff for a living, so I guess that it's good that I find it so.
I was waiting for someone to bring up the comparison with cellular "service" :-) But I'm going to choose not to go there :-)
It isn't, if you don't mind calls that don't have guaranteed quality, calls that are insecure, calls that may be tapped, no guarantee that you can port your number to another service, no guarantee that a 911 call will go through, no ability for a 911 dispatcher to determine your location, no ability for the operator to break into your call when someone needs to reach urgently, etc., etc., etc.
While we slashdot-type people can make a reasonable decision as to whether we really want all this stuff (and hence can decide rationally whether to pay for it), is it really likely that the typical consumer is really going to understand that this service is different from a regular landline telephone? After all, with some of these services, he's going to be using the same telephone that he's been using for years -- so he's going to expect it to work the same.
Yes, I hate regulation too. But if this stuff is going to be marketed as a replacement for regular telephone service, then it had better provide what the typical consumer expectes from his telco. (On the other hand, if it's marketed clearly just as a kind of "don't you dare depend on this for anything; I'm just pretending to be a telephone but I'm not one really" service, then you're right: it shouldn't be regulated.)