I think where Tivo will make the most headway will be with smaller cable networks. The problem is, there aren't very many of them left. Why do I say this? The major networks (all of whom either own major cable channels or have major investments in cable providers) are wholly against Tivo poaching "their" ad dollars. Their attitude is that if they're going to allow Tivo to put up adverts (and they need to pass some sort of signal to provide this capability) then they want a cut of the action.
The only way around this is for Tivo to go court the little guys, and thus force the incumbents to follow their lead, or lose ad dollars. I imagine the advertisers are curious to try this feature - the only question is, will they get the chance?
Another revenue source that Tivo really ought to be persuing is movies-on-demand. They should try streaming data in much the same way Disney's Moviebeam does, only over broadband connections (for those who have it.) Thus, for the marginal cost of a "premium" subscription, users can also order the latest movies. I don't think that many people would end up keeping this movie-on-demand service, but it'd be a great lure for people to sign up for Tivo service in general, and for them to keep the basic scheduling service.
Heh, I've actually thought about sticking a computer under a kitchen/bathroom sink, and connecting a heatpipe from the processor to the cold-water line. There's plenty of unused room under there, and noise isn't an issue since it's not living space. I should have thought ahead and embedded telephone/network/cable/and power in the cabinets when they were installed. As it is, to do this means fishing more wire into the wall:P
It's a good idea to put the components in a metal enclosure - it's a nasty thing when an electrical-short inspired fire breaks out (scary too - I fried a UPS once, there was the brief foomph as the circuit vaporized, then the smoke as it consumed the available oxygen/fuel inside the metal case.)
The cost of colonizing our solar system (which for self-contained colonies probably will far exceed one trillion) can be better spent on asteroid surveillance and making the world a better place so we don't need nuclear weapons.
Um, what's the point of asteroid surveillance if you don't have nukes to take them out with anymore? You want to send a mission to divert the asteroid? Wouldn't it be easier, and cheaper just to have somebody up there already to do that?
Instead of observing asteroids, let's mine em. That way, if we get a rogue one headed for earth, we'll have plenty of mining equipment up there that can land on the bugger while it's still a ways away, and strip it of enough mass to divert it or make it a non-threat.
Can't do any of that if we're still huddled on the ground. Besides, don't think of the 1 trillion as a non-returnable cost, but as insurance (putting humanity in more than one place) with a future annunity (resource extraction, a new frontier for the adventurous, cheaper space access, and a lot more business for manufacturing both here on the ground, and in space.)
Not only the d-pads, but pretty much most of the arcade games that I cut my teeth on in the 80's were that way also. When I play mame, my timing is always off because the control pad is on my right, instead of on my left. Same thing with first person shooters - left hand controls movement, right hand operates fire buttons.
Even worse, I didn't see any buttons on the side of the archos - it's going to be awkward trying to play a game in landscape mode.
It depends. In feature work, the storyboard often times IS the story/script. As a consequence, storyboard will will come before, and may continue during the voice sessions. In TV work, the script is king. I don't know what the order is on the Simpsons, but I suspect that it wouldn't matter - the Simpsons is not traditional sight-gag driven animation, but depends mostly on writer-originated dialogue and situational humor.
At the very least, voice work will always come before timing, since the timer needs to use the approved voice tracks as a timing guide.
Wait a minute - a bit of googling turned up this bit:
According to the transcript, the script/voice sessions come before the storyboard (at least on the Simpsons it does):
Moore: After the, uh, voice tracks are done, uh, we use, uh, both the script and the track to come up with the images that we need to tell the story. What we do in storyboard is we try to get a blueprint of the show.
Since you are a student of animation, can you explain to me how they actually outsource the drawing? I mean do they say... "ok... Homer walks into Moe's and then, like, he gets hit by Grandpa... no, no, Grandpa is standing on the left. Oh yeah and draw in that Love Tester thing too. Thanks".
First is the script. They call the actors in and record the audio. Then come what are known as storyboards. For the storyboard, the script is broken down into scenes with specific backgrounds and settings. These are drawn out on notecard-sized slots, and are essentially the whole episode, in thumbnail roughs. These storyboards are then refined into what are known as layouts. Layouts are one step removed from the final background, and have all the info the background artist needs to draw/paint the background, done at full size, minus the coloring. With the layout are basic starting key poses, which are drawings at full size that show which characters start off where, and in what pose, etc.
Along with the layouts and basic key poses (and model sheets, don't forget the model sheets) are the exposure sheets. Exposure sheets for TV animation differ greatly from feature animation - TV animation has to pack a lot more info into the X-sheet because the work is being done overseas (and because the animator probably doesn't speak English, or doesn't speak it well.) The foreign animator must not only do inbetweens but key frames as well. Very often on the x-sheets for TV animation, the timer draws dozens of thumbnail sketches describing the arc of movement, poses, etc. Although these are not full-size key poses, they are used as the definitive guide as to how the overseas animator should be drawing, posing, and timing key poses and the inbetweens.
So, essentially, the entire scene is planned and laid out here in the states, the overseas animator/bg artists get layouts and model sheets that tell them how things look, and the exposure sheets and thumbnail notes dictate how the characters move. Is there any creativity left to the overseas animator? We hope not (I'm only partially joking here) - otherwise we might just be looking at a reshoot (overseas studios are actually picked based on whether they "get" a particular style of animation or not. For example, Disney TV animation tends to be a bit more "cushioned", and picking a studio that's used to doing animation that way would make the Simpsons look like they're moving way too much.)
I'm putting a big emphasis on timing because for US TV animation, timing is the road to being a director, and it's usually the closest thing to actually animating that you're going to get working in TV animation in the US.
As a student of animation, I can tell you that this is nothing new. Almost ALL animation viewed in the US has been produced overseas since mid-eighties, corresponding closely to the ill-fated animators strike (they were striking against overseas production...) It's not all bad, however - although the scenes are animated overseas, you're right - there are certain actions and idioms that must be carried through precisely as indicated, or else jokes won't work.
Whose job is it to set up all the timing, thumbnails, and notes so the overseas animator doesn't screw up? Layout artists and timers, working here in the US. Although they succeeded in exporting the actual animation jobs, they made the remaining jobs here much more valuable. There's not too much room for screwing up when getting a reshoot of a bad scene takes weeks - hence, timing* is a very important position.
*timing is literally someone timing out actions with a stopwatch, notating them on an exposure sheet to dictate precisely how, when, and where keyframes and inbetweens fall. The timer has the most control over how a show looks in terms of the actual animation.
Zelenshchikov said Energiya engineers were also working on a huge spaceship for a flight to Mars, set to weigh 660 tons, the Interfax news agency reporte
660 tons? Wow. That's a lot of hard currency at work there. You think maybe the Chinese have put a back-order in for a ship to beat the US to the red planet?
Heh. You can always find some submerged atoll, build an artificial island on top of it, declare yourself a sovereign nation (not under UN treaty) and avoid all that legal mumbo-jumbo. Of course, you'll need some sort of military defense, in case REAL pirates (with guns and attack boats), or their legal bretheren from the United States (ie, trial lawyers) show up...
Definite confusion - if you had asked me, just from looking at the website, I would have thought project gutenberg 2 was a spinoff of project gutenberg. At the very least, the use of the name seems to imply some sort of legitimacy (real or not.) If that isn't trading on the goodwill and reputation of somebody else's mark, I don't know what is.
Sure you can. You just have to price to the market (ie, target rich guys who want to show off how they can "navigate by the stars" when cruising to Tahiti in their 200 ft yacht.)
Can EVERYBODY make a living building sextants? No - because there aren't that many rich guys who have the money and the time to go galavanting off at sea.
The death of an industry does not mean the death of the trade or craft, but it does mean that the market economics have changed - the available number of consumers can't support the same number of jobs in that field as they used to, nor should you expect them to.
The trailer has a nice style to it - sort of a Dick Tracey meets Laputa: Castle in the Sky feel. However, I wonder if the acting in the movie will pan out - we've already experienced the unfocused performances of actors who are acting without any environmental references in movies like Attack of the Clones. Although they're avoiding the problems with all-CG actors (ie, Final Fantasy), I'm wondering if they're going to run into problems marrying real actors with very stylized background plates that are more animation than special effects - to me, the style that I'm seeing is begging for animated characters, not live action...
It's a common Hollywood practice to cut trailers to "hot" tracks from any source, including other movies. I've heard parts of the score from Backdraft in trailers for all sorts of films, and I wouldn't be surprised if they lifted a section directly from the score from Matrix Revolutions. Yes, when they air it, it's licensed. However, when the editors are looking for music, anything is game (I imagine that the old Napster was a great tool for them, while it lasted.)
Personally, I think cutting in recognizable sequences from other movies is an extremely risky thing to do, as anyone who can recognize the music cannot help but make a connection (either good or bad) between the film that the music was originally scored from, and the new film...
So... who wants to fork a clone of Bolo, add real-world physics, design a vehicle avatar driven by a set of standard interfaces (ie, steering wheel, accelerator, brakes), set up a suite of virtual sensors, and then enable a serial-based link to a "driver" box where the AI code lives?
If nothing else, you can sell the resulting code/hardware platform to DARPA...
Well, to prove identity you could cryptographically sign mails. When the recipient gets the signed mail, they do a key lookup and verify that the signed mail was signed with the correct private key.
Now, how do you handle the situation where spammers are generating thousands of keys? Well, the spammers are forced to waste some cpu time, but that's trival for them. They're also polluting key registries with their garbage - that's a big negative.
However, in terms of trustworthiness, the spammer probably hasn't gotten all his keys signed by somebody else who is of a "trusted" ranking. Even more likely, much of the signed mail you do get will either be known to you (ie, you've signed their keys) or will be known to people you know (ie, someone you know has signed somebody else's key.)
Mind you, this is no replacement for other types of filtering (ie, SpamAssassin with Bayes, etc.) but it would make whitelisting useable against spammers who forge e-mails, UNLESS the spammers know the private key of the poor slob that they're impersonating.
If a log of the failed challenge attempts is kept, the source of repeated failed challenges can be ruled out from getting any more challege attempts, or even just one failed challenge with hundreds of successful ones coming from the same IP space... then the hacker source cna be flagged and ruled out.
Unfortunately, this is one area in which the spam gangs already have a leg up on the rest of us. Trojaned machines provide them with a distributed set of machines (and hence, distributed set of IPs) from which to launch their attacks. While you may be able to block some zombies machines, there are many more from which the spammers can continue launching attacks, many of which overlap with IP space of actual (non-spam) users.
Unless you're being extremely unforgiving (in which case, you WILL get false positives), all the spammers will have to do is continue rotating machines to prevent exposing an IP long enough to get it blacklisted.
Open Office is awesome. I'm reviewing Powerpoint presentations from a class I'm taking, and it works great. Another nice feature is export to PDF - I can read in a Word file for a paper submission, dump it out as a PDF, all for free. Best of all, I don't have to waste my time hunting down and killing Clippy - one of the most obnoxious "features" of Microsoft Office...
I only wish that someone could backport Open Office to my old classic Macs.:(
Send robots with film equipment and bluescreens in. Shoot live action plates (as they did with Disney's Dinosaur) and composite the actors on top of the plates, with additional shots in the studio and in nearby (but less-radioactive) locales. The question is, will the radioactivity fog your film? You might have to use lead-lined canisters, and slower film to compensate.
Ok, I just erased the page long rant about how those something something Canadians and New Zealanders are stealing jobs from such great people as, oh MYSELF, my FRIENDS, and the rest of us who are dedicated to the film industry here in lovely Hollywood.
How can the Canadians and New Zealanders be *stealing* jobs, when it's Hollywood itself that's paying the star actors and actresses upwards of 20 percent of the budget of the film?
Besides, shipping entertainment jobs overseas isn't new - we lost pretty much all the local TV animator jobs back in the 80's. You think you were the first ones to have to train your replacements?
Rant aside, I think it's a good thing for the WHOLE INDUSTRY when movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy are made. Success means more money for similar films, and more money in this category mean more work for everybody, both overseas and locally. Besides, there were Americans working on that production as well - you going to piss all over their efforts just because they went to NZ to work?
I say, congrats to Peter Jackson, and may he and his crew make bigger successes!
The electrons hitting the phosphors on the back of your screen cause the image to appear. They also tend to generate a large static imbalance (ie, anode/cathode, +/-). While the screen is charged with these excess electrons, lighter objects are attracted, just as you'd get with the rubbing your hair with balloon trick. Someone who understands more physics than I do can probably do a better job of explaining exactly what is happening.
Get the PrefButtons extension. Then, right-click on the status bars to re-arrange the items, and to add/subtract new ones. I've added icons for new tab and bookmark, next to the URL address/search fields. Right above those, next to the rotating icon, and on the same line as the menu items is where I've added the three checkboxes for Cookies, Images, and JavaScript. Takes up no more space than a normal layout, but is a heck of a lot more convenient.
Firefox is great. I've got half a dozen extensions loaded, and the search bar is more than enough justification to install it (I've got everything from Google, eBay, to Wikipedia, all in one click.) Not only that, but it's way faster than Mozilla, or even IE, for that matter. Being able to customize the interface is another cool feature - I've got three checkboxes at the top of the window that allow me to toggle JS, Cookies, and Images, on and off, without having to go through a labyrinth of menus. Oh, and did I mention tabbed browsing?
Now, if someone would please backport it MacOS classic, so I can run it on my ancient PowerPC machines (running MacOS 7.6.1, 8.5.1, 8.6, and various flavors of 9)...
Some of us like designing and making GUIs (ie, interface design is the itch), but like anything else, it's something that takes time, practice, and patience to do well. If you're already devoting most of your coding time for functionality, it's not much of a stretch to see that a GUI will get short thrift.
Part of the problem is that the GUI code for a short program tends to be more work than the program itself, and the GUI code for a large program tends to be complex and hard to work cleanly because the underlying program is complex and unoptimized (design-wise.)
Anyone know how to make GUI programming more interesting?
I don't know how to make it more interesting for you, but if you code your program cleanly and in a modular fashion, it shouldn't take too much more work for a GUI-oriented person to put a GUI front-end to your code.
Very often, when anyone tries to access a now non-existant web page, the ISP owning the relevant server will forward you to one of their home pages.
They still return a 404 error, or at least, they're supposed to. Get Mozilla Firefox, download the Live HTTP headers extension, and you can verify this for yourself. Also, this is typically within a domain that does exist - it's just the page doesn't.
Or maybe a web domain speculator will buy up a domain name, and use that to forward you to their search engine. Verisign could argue they're doing something similar.
Ahh, but SiteFinder works even for domains that have NEVER existed. This means that Verisign is squatting on an almost-infinite number of domain combinations, which they haven't paid a cent for. As scummy and dispicable as webspammers are, this is scum and villany on a grand scale. Worse, it's scum and villany at a very low level - it doesn't just break HTTP, it breaks FTP, SMTP, and a host of other DNS-dependent protocols, AND it affects everyone running a DNS server by loading their cache tables with garbage.
Or better yet, demonstrate how DNS MUST operate on mutual trust, by sending anybody trying to query www.verisign.com (and other associated names) to their competitors (on a random basis.) If Verisign wants to break DNS, they'll have to deal with the fact that anybody else down the chain between the root server and the user can break it equally as well.
Remember folks, we use DNS because it's useful. If it stops being useful, we can stop using it just as quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
I think where Tivo will make the most headway will be with smaller cable networks. The problem is, there aren't very many of them left. Why do I say this? The major networks (all of whom either own major cable channels or have major investments in cable providers) are wholly against Tivo poaching "their" ad dollars. Their attitude is that if they're going to allow Tivo to put up adverts (and they need to pass some sort of signal to provide this capability) then they want a cut of the action.
The only way around this is for Tivo to go court the little guys, and thus force the incumbents to follow their lead, or lose ad dollars. I imagine the advertisers are curious to try this feature - the only question is, will they get the chance?
Another revenue source that Tivo really ought to be persuing is movies-on-demand. They should try streaming data in much the same way Disney's Moviebeam does, only over broadband connections (for those who have it.) Thus, for the marginal cost of a "premium" subscription, users can also order the latest movies. I don't think that many people would end up keeping this movie-on-demand service, but it'd be a great lure for people to sign up for Tivo service in general, and for them to keep the basic scheduling service.
Heh, I've actually thought about sticking a computer under a kitchen/bathroom sink, and connecting a heatpipe from the processor to the cold-water line. There's plenty of unused room under there, and noise isn't an issue since it's not living space. I should have thought ahead and embedded telephone/network/cable/and power in the cabinets when they were installed. As it is, to do this means fishing more wire into the wall :P
It's a good idea to put the components in a metal enclosure - it's a nasty thing when an electrical-short inspired fire breaks out (scary too - I fried a UPS once, there was the brief foomph as the circuit vaporized, then the smoke as it consumed the available oxygen/fuel inside the metal case.)
The cost of colonizing our solar system (which for self-contained colonies probably will far exceed one trillion) can be better spent on asteroid surveillance and making the world a better place so we don't need nuclear weapons.
Um, what's the point of asteroid surveillance if you don't have nukes to take them out with anymore? You want to send a mission to divert the asteroid? Wouldn't it be easier, and cheaper just to have somebody up there already to do that?
Instead of observing asteroids, let's mine em. That way, if we get a rogue one headed for earth, we'll have plenty of mining equipment up there that can land on the bugger while it's still a ways away, and strip it of enough mass to divert it or make it a non-threat.
Can't do any of that if we're still huddled on the ground. Besides, don't think of the 1 trillion as a non-returnable cost, but as insurance (putting humanity in more than one place) with a future annunity (resource extraction, a new frontier for the adventurous, cheaper space access, and a lot more business for manufacturing both here on the ground, and in space.)
Not only the d-pads, but pretty much most of the arcade games that I cut my teeth on in the 80's were that way also. When I play mame, my timing is always off because the control pad is on my right, instead of on my left. Same thing with first person shooters - left hand controls movement, right hand operates fire buttons.
Even worse, I didn't see any buttons on the side of the archos - it's going to be awkward trying to play a game in landscape mode.
It depends. In feature work, the storyboard often times IS the story/script. As a consequence, storyboard will will come before, and may continue during the voice sessions. In TV work, the script is king. I don't know what the order is on the Simpsons, but I suspect that it wouldn't matter - the Simpsons is not traditional sight-gag driven animation, but depends mostly on writer-originated dialogue and situational humor.
At the very least, voice work will always come before timing, since the timer needs to use the approved voice tracks as a timing guide.
Wait a minute - a bit of googling turned up this bit:
Making of The Simpsons
According to the transcript, the script/voice sessions come before the storyboard (at least on the Simpsons it does):
Moore: After the, uh, voice tracks are done, uh, we use, uh, both
the script and the track to come up with the images that we
need to tell the story. What we do in storyboard is we try
to get a blueprint of the show.
Since you are a student of animation, can you explain to me how they actually outsource the drawing? I mean do they say... "ok... Homer walks into Moe's and then, like, he gets hit by Grandpa... no, no, Grandpa is standing on the left. Oh yeah and draw in that Love Tester thing too. Thanks".
First is the script. They call the actors in and record the audio. Then come what are known as storyboards. For the storyboard, the script is broken down into scenes with specific backgrounds and settings. These are drawn out on notecard-sized slots, and are essentially the whole episode, in thumbnail roughs. These storyboards are then refined into what are known as layouts. Layouts are one step removed from the final background, and have all the info the background artist needs to draw/paint the background, done at full size, minus the coloring. With the layout are basic starting key poses, which are drawings at full size that show which characters start off where, and in what pose, etc.
Along with the layouts and basic key poses (and model sheets, don't forget the model sheets) are the exposure sheets. Exposure sheets for TV animation differ greatly from feature animation - TV animation has to pack a lot more info into the X-sheet because the work is being done overseas (and because the animator probably doesn't speak English, or doesn't speak it well.) The foreign animator must not only do inbetweens but key frames as well. Very often on the x-sheets for TV animation, the timer draws dozens of thumbnail sketches describing the arc of movement, poses, etc. Although these are not full-size key poses, they are used as the definitive guide as to how the overseas animator should be drawing, posing, and timing key poses and the inbetweens.
So, essentially, the entire scene is planned and laid out here in the states, the overseas animator/bg artists get layouts and model sheets that tell them how things look, and the exposure sheets and thumbnail notes dictate how the characters move. Is there any creativity left to the overseas animator? We hope not (I'm only partially joking here) - otherwise we might just be looking at a reshoot (overseas studios are actually picked based on whether they "get" a particular style of animation or not. For example, Disney TV animation tends to be a bit more "cushioned", and picking a studio that's used to doing animation that way would make the Simpsons look like they're moving way too much.)
I'm putting a big emphasis on timing because for US TV animation, timing is the road to being a director, and it's usually the closest thing to actually animating that you're going to get working in TV animation in the US.
As a student of animation, I can tell you that this is nothing new. Almost ALL animation viewed in the US has been produced overseas since mid-eighties, corresponding closely to the ill-fated animators strike (they were striking against overseas production...) It's not all bad, however - although the scenes are animated overseas, you're right - there are certain actions and idioms that must be carried through precisely as indicated, or else jokes won't work.
Whose job is it to set up all the timing, thumbnails, and notes so the overseas animator doesn't screw up? Layout artists and timers, working here in the US. Although they succeeded in exporting the actual animation jobs, they made the remaining jobs here much more valuable. There's not too much room for screwing up when getting a reshoot of a bad scene takes weeks - hence, timing* is a very important position.
*timing is literally someone timing out actions with a stopwatch, notating them on an exposure sheet to dictate precisely how, when, and where keyframes and inbetweens fall. The timer has the most control over how a show looks in terms of the actual animation.
Zelenshchikov said Energiya engineers were also working on a huge spaceship for a flight to Mars, set to weigh 660 tons, the Interfax news agency reporte
660 tons? Wow. That's a lot of hard currency at work there. You think maybe the Chinese have put a back-order in for a ship to beat the US to the red planet?
Heh. You can always find some submerged atoll, build an artificial island on top of it, declare yourself a sovereign nation (not under UN treaty) and avoid all that legal mumbo-jumbo. Of course, you'll need some sort of military defense, in case REAL pirates (with guns and attack boats), or their legal bretheren from the United States (ie, trial lawyers) show up...
Definite confusion - if you had asked me, just from looking at the website, I would have thought project gutenberg 2 was a spinoff of project gutenberg. At the very least, the use of the name seems to imply some sort of legitimacy (real or not.) If that isn't trading on the goodwill and reputation of somebody else's mark, I don't know what is.
Can I make a living building sextants?
Sure you can. You just have to price to the market (ie, target rich guys who want to show off how they can "navigate by the stars" when cruising to Tahiti in their 200 ft yacht.)
Can EVERYBODY make a living building sextants? No - because there aren't that many rich guys who have the money and the time to go galavanting off at sea.
The death of an industry does not mean the death of the trade or craft, but it does mean that the market economics have changed - the available number of consumers can't support the same number of jobs in that field as they used to, nor should you expect them to.
The trailer has a nice style to it - sort of a Dick Tracey meets Laputa: Castle in the Sky feel. However, I wonder if the acting in the movie will pan out - we've already experienced the unfocused performances of actors who are acting without any environmental references in movies like Attack of the Clones. Although they're avoiding the problems with all-CG actors (ie, Final Fantasy), I'm wondering if they're going to run into problems marrying real actors with very stylized background plates that are more animation than special effects - to me, the style that I'm seeing is begging for animated characters, not live action...
It's a common Hollywood practice to cut trailers to "hot" tracks from any source, including other movies. I've heard parts of the score from Backdraft in trailers for all sorts of films, and I wouldn't be surprised if they lifted a section directly from the score from Matrix Revolutions. Yes, when they air it, it's licensed. However, when the editors are looking for music, anything is game (I imagine that the old Napster was a great tool for them, while it lasted.)
Personally, I think cutting in recognizable sequences from other movies is an extremely risky thing to do, as anyone who can recognize the music cannot help but make a connection (either good or bad) between the film that the music was originally scored from, and the new film...
So... who wants to fork a clone of Bolo, add real-world physics, design a vehicle avatar driven by a set of standard interfaces (ie, steering wheel, accelerator, brakes), set up a suite of virtual sensors, and then enable a serial-based link to a "driver" box where the AI code lives?
If nothing else, you can sell the resulting code/hardware platform to DARPA...
Well, to prove identity you could cryptographically sign mails. When the recipient gets the signed mail, they do a key lookup and verify that the signed mail was signed with the correct private key.
Now, how do you handle the situation where spammers are generating thousands of keys? Well, the spammers are forced to waste some cpu time, but that's trival for them. They're also polluting key registries with their garbage - that's a big negative.
However, in terms of trustworthiness, the spammer probably hasn't gotten all his keys signed by somebody else who is of a "trusted" ranking. Even more likely, much of the signed mail you do get will either be known to you (ie, you've signed their keys) or will be known to people you know (ie, someone you know has signed somebody else's key.)
Mind you, this is no replacement for other types of filtering (ie, SpamAssassin with Bayes, etc.) but it would make whitelisting useable against spammers who forge e-mails, UNLESS the spammers know the private key of the poor slob that they're impersonating.
If a log of the failed challenge attempts is kept, the source of repeated failed challenges can be ruled out from getting any more challege attempts, or even just one failed challenge with hundreds of successful ones coming from the same IP space... then the hacker source cna be flagged and ruled out.
Unfortunately, this is one area in which the spam gangs already have a leg up on the rest of us. Trojaned machines provide them with a distributed set of machines (and hence, distributed set of IPs) from which to launch their attacks. While you may be able to block some zombies machines, there are many more from which the spammers can continue launching attacks, many of which overlap with IP space of actual (non-spam) users.
Unless you're being extremely unforgiving (in which case, you WILL get false positives), all the spammers will have to do is continue rotating machines to prevent exposing an IP long enough to get it blacklisted.
Open Office is awesome. I'm reviewing Powerpoint presentations from a class I'm taking, and it works great. Another nice feature is export to PDF - I can read in a Word file for a paper submission, dump it out as a PDF, all for free. Best of all, I don't have to waste my time hunting down and killing Clippy - one of the most obnoxious "features" of Microsoft Office...
:(
I only wish that someone could backport Open Office to my old classic Macs.
Send robots with film equipment and bluescreens in. Shoot live action plates (as they did with Disney's Dinosaur) and composite the actors on top of the plates, with additional shots in the studio and in nearby (but less-radioactive) locales. The question is, will the radioactivity fog your film? You might have to use lead-lined canisters, and slower film to compensate.
Ok, I just erased the page long rant about how those something something Canadians and New Zealanders are stealing jobs from such great people as, oh MYSELF, my FRIENDS, and the rest of us who are dedicated to the film industry here in lovely Hollywood.
How can the Canadians and New Zealanders be *stealing* jobs, when it's Hollywood itself that's paying the star actors and actresses upwards of 20 percent of the budget of the film?
Besides, shipping entertainment jobs overseas isn't new - we lost pretty much all the local TV animator jobs back in the 80's. You think you were the first ones to have to train your replacements?
Rant aside, I think it's a good thing for the WHOLE INDUSTRY when movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy are made. Success means more money for similar films, and more money in this category mean more work for everybody, both overseas and locally. Besides, there were Americans working on that production as well - you going to piss all over their efforts just because they went to NZ to work?
I say, congrats to Peter Jackson, and may he and his crew make bigger successes!
The electrons hitting the phosphors on the back of your screen cause the image to appear. They also tend to generate a large static imbalance (ie, anode/cathode, +/-). While the screen is charged with these excess electrons, lighter objects are attracted, just as you'd get with the rubbing your hair with balloon trick. Someone who understands more physics than I do can probably do a better job of explaining exactly what is happening.
Get the PrefButtons extension. Then, right-click on the status bars to re-arrange the items, and to add/subtract new ones. I've added icons for new tab and bookmark, next to the URL address/search fields. Right above those, next to the rotating icon, and on the same line as the menu items is where I've added the three checkboxes for Cookies, Images, and JavaScript. Takes up no more space than a normal layout, but is a heck of a lot more convenient.
Firefox is great. I've got half a dozen extensions loaded, and the search bar is more than enough justification to install it (I've got everything from Google, eBay, to Wikipedia, all in one click.) Not only that, but it's way faster than Mozilla, or even IE, for that matter. Being able to customize the interface is another cool feature - I've got three checkboxes at the top of the window that allow me to toggle JS, Cookies, and Images, on and off, without having to go through a labyrinth of menus. Oh, and did I mention tabbed browsing?
Now, if someone would please backport it MacOS classic, so I can run it on my ancient PowerPC machines (running MacOS 7.6.1, 8.5.1, 8.6, and various flavors of 9)...
Some of us like designing and making GUIs (ie, interface design is the itch), but like anything else, it's something that takes time, practice, and patience to do well. If you're already devoting most of your coding time for functionality, it's not much of a stretch to see that a GUI will get short thrift.
Part of the problem is that the GUI code for a short program tends to be more work than the program itself, and the GUI code for a large program tends to be complex and hard to work cleanly because the underlying program is complex and unoptimized (design-wise.)
Anyone know how to make GUI programming more interesting?
I don't know how to make it more interesting for you, but if you code your program cleanly and in a modular fashion, it shouldn't take too much more work for a GUI-oriented person to put a GUI front-end to your code.
Very often, when anyone tries to access a now non-existant web page, the ISP owning the relevant server will forward you to one of their home pages.
They still return a 404 error, or at least, they're supposed to. Get Mozilla Firefox, download the Live HTTP headers extension, and you can verify this for yourself. Also, this is typically within a domain that does exist - it's just the page doesn't.
Or maybe a web domain speculator will buy up a domain name, and use that to forward you to their search engine. Verisign could argue they're doing something similar.
Ahh, but SiteFinder works even for domains that have NEVER existed. This means that Verisign is squatting on an almost-infinite number of domain combinations, which they haven't paid a cent for. As scummy and dispicable as webspammers are, this is scum and villany on a grand scale. Worse, it's scum and villany at a very low level - it doesn't just break HTTP, it breaks FTP, SMTP, and a host of other DNS-dependent protocols, AND it affects everyone running a DNS server by loading their cache tables with garbage.
Or better yet, demonstrate how DNS MUST operate on mutual trust, by sending anybody trying to query www.verisign.com (and other associated names) to their competitors (on a random basis.) If Verisign wants to break DNS, they'll have to deal with the fact that anybody else down the chain between the root server and the user can break it equally as well.
Remember folks, we use DNS because it's useful. If it stops being useful, we can stop using it just as quickly.