Well, MR BIOS used to do that, but looking at their web site, it's not even clear they're still in that line of business anymore - it looks like they got bought out and they're just a handholding service now. Anyone used them lately?
BTW, does anyone else remember about 10 or 15 years ago when Apple cooked up that PR campaign to get everyone to stop pronouncing SCSI like 'scuzzy' and instead pronounce it like 'sexy'?
When drafting your headlines, please consider that some of the older residents around here have high blood pressure and a low tolerance for extreme panic.
When I read the headline "Wired's LOTR III Tech Breakdown", my first thought was "Aw, crap! ROTK has been delayed because their servers crashed! ARRRRRRRRGH!"
Now I have to go to the restroom to clean up.
A better, LESS INFLAMMATORY headline would have been something like "Wired Breaks Down the Tech Behind ROTK".
My underwears (and my cardiologist) thank you for your consideration.
If I'm wrong about this, I'll admit it, but I believe copyright violation is a federal civil offense and not a criminal offense, so cops wouldn't have jurisdiction to do anything anyway - that's an FBI gig. That's why the RIAA "sues" instead of "pressing charges".
True, but computers provide automation, which improves the criminal's efficiency. Even though the crime is the same, there is more of it, especially when the network can be manipulated to also provide some partial cover of anonymity.
I might even be willing to argue that this even invites people to consider crime as an option who otherwise would not. Look at how many ordinary people are willing to commit copyright infringement by trading songs on Kazaa, but would never even consider trying to jack a CD from Wal-Mart because that's shoplifting.
I agree with Cliff. With the possible exception of teaching programming, computers in schools are an unnecessary distraction. Here's a background piece about his book on the subject.
Why couldn't you just get one of those $50 Linksys NAT boxes for each server and use the inbound port mapping to only expose the port you really need open?
I guess if you really wanted to, you could also map a bunch of random inbound ports on the Linksys to an isolated telnet honeypot server, but then I start thinking, "really, what's the point in that? Confuse them into leaving you alone?"
Agreed, but I don't think we'll get a *complete* solution to this until MS un-activates all of their APIs and rolls new ones out to the existing 9x-XP desktops. I think they can see the handwriting on the wall about this (and that's really why Linux and DRM are so important to them right now) but they are slow to implement the changes, let's face it, their entire corporate business model is strategerized around making it easy for developers to script, code and remotely activate EVERYTHING, and this is a conflicting interest with that strategery.
If we (the general universe of software buyers, not the/. audience) are going to stick with MS Windows as our #1 choice for A desktop OS, then the problem for us is that at whatever point MS decides to do "the right thing", we're probably three to five years from the ideal solution being fully implemented.
David comes on, he's now a shareholder, he's rowing with us, and let's face it, he's added significant value to our company since February. Our stock was around a buck, now it's $14.
And what are the end-products your company makes?
DEFENDANTS
Thank you! thank you! Good night everybody! I'll be here all week!
Maybe when they get done debunkning all of the ULs you can find on Snopes, they can turn their crosshairs on huckster quackery such as cell-phone radiation shield stickers, magnet therapy bracelets and all the other crap that shows up on late-night infomercials.
This has been kind of lost in the discussion, so I'll add it here. I think it depends on what the images are for.
If you are imaging a standard workstation to accelerate workstation deployment, then yeah, there are limitations to imaging NT/2K/XP and you have to use something like Sysprep to get around them.
However, MY motivation for imaging isn't deployment, it's disaster recovery and testing. I.e., image a server to a test box on a separate network segment to test patches/updates/month-ends closing procedures before deploying them on the production hardware. In this case, the server and it's image will never go live on the same network segment, so the duplicate SIDs are a GOOD thing.
Open-sourcing the voting software is important, but in my opinion, not as important as maintaining separate systems for ballot printing and ballot tabulation.
Why is it important for this to be posted on/.? Because Time is trying to censor the truth about the Iraq war? Riiiiight... Like Time Magazine is going to pull every sring they can to get W reelected, and this isn't even new information! Everything in the TM article was a restatement of the white house's public position on the Iraq war from 1991! It's public knowledge, available from other sources and probably in history books by now.
There's absolutely no geek factor here anywhere!
...maybe if G.B. Sr. had built a scale model of the gulf war out of Legos, but otherwise it must be a slow news day.
This might be one of the 5 coolest things I've ever seen.
I was kind of disappointed when the Pentagon cancelled their futures market plans because (even though the program was presented as the macabre plans of an evil genius) it really looked like an interesting experiment for sifting through data and evaluating information. But this... this.... THIS LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF FUN. It's like fantasy football on crack, but with monopoly money and no social diseases.
Kudos to NewsFutures for putting this together. It's going to be tough to tear myself away from this when HL2 comes out, I just hope rehab isn't going to be too expensive.
Obviously, I'm leaving out a lot of important details, but let me add the following for discussion:
The only way I would support electronic voting is if the voting mechanics were split into two roles: Ballot printing machines and ballot counting machines.
The ballot printers would need to be loaded with a list of voting options before the election, then, all they would do is show the options on the screen, let you pick your choices and print you a ballot listing your votes in a HUMAN READABLE AND EASILY OCR-ABLE FONT. No non-human barcodes or hole punches allowed!
After you visually verify that the ballot printer has successfully printed the ballot you want to cast, you take it over to the ballot counter, which scans the card, OCRs the votes you've cast, shows them its screen so you can see how they were recorded, awaits your OK and stashes the ballot in a sealed metal box. At this point, your vote is counted and you are done.
Notes:
Except for the election data that needs to be loaded to prompt the voter, the ballot printers can be sealed because they would require no software code updates.
The vote counting machine only needs to count the number of times individual text strings appear on ballots, so it does NOT need to be loaded with candidate or issue data before any election. Therefore, it can be COMPLETELY SEALED WITH NO MAINTENANCE AND only a 'reset' switch to print vote totals, wipe the memory, seal the ballots in the box and eject the box for transport. Load a new box, and you're good to keep on voting.
Since the ballots themselves rely on OCRable plain text as the encoding mechanism, write-in votes can be easily included, and write-in misspellings can be handled by the election board if necessary.
Oh, and if (for whatever reason)re-scanning electronically is not an option for a recount, hand recounts are possible, too.
It's as easy for the ballot printer to print two ballots as one, so there's your paper trail voting receipt. I'm toying with the idea that you could even randomly generate a unique asymetric keypair for each voter and digitally sign each copy of the ballot with a different half of the key so that BOTH HALVES would need to be brought together to certify the votes cast on it. Not sure exactly how this would work, though.
Power failure wipes the memory in the vote counter or it fails and needs service in the middle of an election? No problem. Election officials can eject the ballots, and hand count them or re-scan them later.
The device that knows everything about the candidates knows nothing about the vote totals and vice versa. That should make it a difficult system to subvert.
No networking.
No software, really, except the OCR stuff. I'm trying to use appropriate technology to make problems go away, not use technology for its own sake where it is not warranted.
You guys are probably going to find all kinds of problems, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
You know, in the town where I grew up, there was this music store. (I used to be band in HS.) The guy that ran this place had marked everything on the shelves with a price tag inflated 20-40% higher than retail just so he could say "It's $25 but I like you, so I'll sell it to you for $15, deal?" That was his angle on the market.
Moral: It's not **my** fault **they've** chosen to artificially inflate their prices, and neither is it my fault that they've gotten away with it to this point. Just because they don't want a market correction doesn't mean one isn't in order.
They should learn to be more thankful and gracious we're still willing to include them in the process because we have all the tools we need to write, record, edit, produce, distribute and solicit music for ourselves.
This article wouldn't bother me as much if it presented a single independently verifiable fact. Since it doesn't, it's a rant and nothing more. The real queston is "Why did Syllabus choose to publish it?" This guy isn't even a professor, is he? With the title of "manager of technology strategy and outreach", it sounds like he's just a department employee. Not that that invalidates his opinion, mind you! That is discredited by his vacant non-awareness of facts.
Anyone who claims that tape is irrelvant and insufficient in the year 2003 is either ignorant of the facts or trying to sell you a hot-site server mirroring solution
Slashdot Mirror
Well, MR BIOS used to do that, but looking at their web site, it's not even clear they're still in that line of business anymore - it looks like they got bought out and they're just a handholding service now. Anyone used them lately?
BTW, does anyone else remember about 10 or 15 years ago when Apple cooked up that PR campaign to get everyone to stop pronouncing SCSI like 'scuzzy' and instead pronounce it like 'sexy'?
When drafting your headlines, please consider that some of the older residents around here have high blood pressure and a low tolerance for extreme panic.
When I read the headline "Wired's LOTR III Tech Breakdown", my first thought was "Aw, crap! ROTK has been delayed because their servers crashed! ARRRRRRRRGH!"
Now I have to go to the restroom to clean up.
A better, LESS INFLAMMATORY headline would have been something like "Wired Breaks Down the Tech Behind ROTK".
My underwears (and my cardiologist) thank you for your consideration.
If I'm wrong about this, I'll admit it, but I believe copyright violation is a federal civil offense and not a criminal offense, so cops wouldn't have jurisdiction to do anything anyway - that's an FBI gig. That's why the RIAA "sues" instead of "pressing charges".
True, but computers provide automation, which improves the criminal's efficiency. Even though the crime is the same, there is more of it, especially when the network can be manipulated to also provide some partial cover of anonymity.
I might even be willing to argue that this even invites people to consider crime as an option who otherwise would not. Look at how many ordinary people are willing to commit copyright infringement by trading songs on Kazaa, but would never even consider trying to jack a CD from Wal-Mart because that's shoplifting.
They should look at my voting system idea, which I outlined in my journal.
I agree with Cliff. With the possible exception of teaching programming, computers in schools are an unnecessary distraction. Here's a background piece about his book on the subject.
Why couldn't you just get one of those $50 Linksys NAT boxes for each server and use the inbound port mapping to only expose the port you really need open?
I guess if you really wanted to, you could also map a bunch of random inbound ports on the Linksys to an isolated telnet honeypot server, but then I start thinking, "really, what's the point in that? Confuse them into leaving you alone?"
"Scaldera". That's appropriate.
Agreed, but I don't think we'll get a *complete* solution to this until MS un-activates all of their APIs and rolls new ones out to the existing 9x-XP desktops. I think they can see the handwriting on the wall about this (and that's really why Linux and DRM are so important to them right now) but they are slow to implement the changes, let's face it, their entire corporate business model is strategerized around making it easy for developers to script, code and remotely activate EVERYTHING, and this is a conflicting interest with that strategery.
If we (the general universe of software buyers, not the
David comes on, he's now a shareholder, he's rowing with us, and let's face it, he's added significant value to our company since February. Our stock was around a buck, now it's $14.
And what are the end-products your company makes?
DEFENDANTS
Thank you! thank you! Good night everybody! I'll be here all week!
Maybe when they get done debunkning all of the ULs you can find on Snopes, they can turn their crosshairs on huckster quackery such as cell-phone radiation shield stickers, magnet therapy bracelets and all the other crap that shows up on late-night infomercials.
THAT'S what I'd do to improve humanity.
As cool as these sound, is anyone else worried that sneaky industry folks might try to distribute all new music in DRM'ed WMA files?
More likely, that's *why* they're doing this in the first place.
Is ThinkGeek going going to sell "I was served a subpoena by SCO" t-shirts?
This has been kind of lost in the discussion, so I'll add it here. I think it depends on what the images are for.
If you are imaging a standard workstation to accelerate workstation deployment, then yeah, there are limitations to imaging NT/2K/XP and you have to use something like Sysprep to get around them.
However, MY motivation for imaging isn't deployment, it's disaster recovery and testing. I.e., image a server to a test box on a separate network segment to test patches/updates/month-ends closing procedures before deploying them on the production hardware. In this case, the server and it's image will never go live on the same network segment, so the duplicate SIDs are a GOOD thing.
Ugh. What a troll.
I use Mozilla Firebird because it's better. You don't even have to leave Windows to see that.
Open-sourcing the voting software is important, but in my opinion, not as important as maintaining separate systems for ballot printing and ballot tabulation.
I wrote about it in this journal entry.
Why is it important for this to be posted on
There's absolutely no geek factor here anywhere!
This is the only IRC index that matters.
This might be one of the 5 coolest things I've ever seen.
I was kind of disappointed when the Pentagon cancelled their futures market plans because (even though the program was presented as the macabre plans of an evil genius) it really looked like an interesting experiment for sifting through data and evaluating information. But this... this.... THIS LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF FUN. It's like fantasy football on crack, but with monopoly money and no social diseases.
Kudos to NewsFutures for putting this together. It's going to be tough to tear myself away from this when HL2 comes out, I just hope rehab isn't going to be too expensive.
Obviously, I'm leaving out a lot of important details, but let me add the following for discussion:
The only way I would support electronic voting is if the voting mechanics were split into two roles: Ballot printing machines and ballot counting machines.
The ballot printers would need to be loaded with a list of voting options before the election, then, all they would do is show the options on the screen, let you pick your choices and print you a ballot listing your votes in a HUMAN READABLE AND EASILY OCR-ABLE FONT. No non-human barcodes or hole punches allowed!
After you visually verify that the ballot printer has successfully printed the ballot you want to cast, you take it over to the ballot counter, which scans the card, OCRs the votes you've cast, shows them its screen so you can see how they were recorded, awaits your OK and stashes the ballot in a sealed metal box. At this point, your vote is counted and you are done.
Notes:
You guys are probably going to find all kinds of problems, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
You know, in the town where I grew up, there was this music store. (I used to be band in HS.) The guy that ran this place had marked everything on the shelves with a price tag inflated 20-40% higher than retail just so he could say "It's $25 but I like you, so I'll sell it to you for $15, deal?" That was his angle on the market.
Moral: It's not **my** fault **they've** chosen to artificially inflate their prices, and neither is it my fault that they've gotten away with it to this point. Just because they don't want a market correction doesn't mean one isn't in order.
They should learn to be more thankful and gracious we're still willing to include them in the process because we have all the tools we need to write, record, edit, produce, distribute and solicit music for ourselves.
This article wouldn't bother me as much if it presented a single independently verifiable fact. Since it doesn't, it's a rant and nothing more. The real queston is "Why did Syllabus choose to publish it?" This guy isn't even a professor, is he? With the title of "manager of technology strategy and outreach", it sounds like he's just a department employee. Not that that invalidates his opinion, mind you! That is discredited by his vacant non-awareness of facts.
Why doesn't IBM just cut out the middle-man and get into the console business for themselves?
Amen, and seconded!
Anyone who claims that tape is irrelvant and insufficient in the year 2003 is either ignorant of the facts or trying to sell you a hot-site server mirroring solution