I love it when Hi-Tech mechinisms meet low tech solutions. A post it note defeating copy protected CD's is great, I mean less than 1 cents worth of paper defeating what is probally thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of R&D into copy protection schemes. Its along those same Hi/Low tech meetings as using a pencil to overclock the Duron, or even the old exploit in the Scantron tests where you could just fill in all the bubbles. It just goes to show you, theres always a use for the junk around your desk...
OK, so these guys really expect me to believe that these cheesy $350+ hack jobs are going to have a better picture than a DLP projector, or a Barco? Please, don't waste my time. I can go on to E-bay and buy a Sony 1272 projector for about 700 bucks, which has RGB inputs and can handle at least the refresh rate of a 1024x768 SVGA resolution output if not more (I never tested a higher resolution on one). I used these things faithfully for 6 years on Corporate presentations when the power of a Barco or a DLP wasnt necessary. This ridiculous hack job reminds me of those $10 lenses you buy for your TV that is supposed to turn them into a projection set. Oh well, wasnt it PT Barnum who said "A sucker is born every minute" ?
In the words on Al Pacino in Heat, "Don't Waste my MOTHER FU&#ING TIME!!" Youve got to be kidding me, they don't want to "drag it out" any further. Well lets see, its only taken them...... something like 4 years+ to get this far, without stop, to try and nail Microsoft on these issues, and their going to stop now? Especially when they hold the nail that would crucify them? Ive got a better picture of whats going on... Lets see, a bunch of lawyers... One of the biggest, richest companys in the world.. so my question is how much do DA's cost these days??
Im glad to see that the LED market is growing more and more out of the "blinking light on the front panel" industry. With brighter and brighter LEDs being developed, the use for them is growing. I was working with an associate of mine on some industrial lighting application using ultrabright white LED's configured in an array which were going to be used as a walkway light. These things were pretty bright an had pretty low power consumption, at least compared to other lights. The heating issue came up on the power supply designed for them, but off hand I dont remember how high we were running them. There was another projects were still working on using LED arrays that are pretty cool, but I wont get into those. Youd actually be suprised how bright these things can get, we had a LED array based flashlight we made for grins that blinded us, and it was about 3 times as bright as a Mag-Light. I think its fascinating where this stuff is going...
Thats pretty unusual for a school district NOT to take more of a stance on legitimate use of its networks. The schools here (in San Antonio) are VERY strict on legitimate uses, with the exception of the colleges. I remember the high school I was in we couldnt use those systems unless were were under total supervision. But, if your a system administrator an use of P2P clients and virii plague the performance of your network, your going to have to be administive. If your stuck in a web of red tape, first thing you do is gather statistics and evidence to the fact about the possible legal and performance issues that the use of these networks entail, especially in a education enviroment. Theres been a few cases of the IT worlds legal battles with the education world of late, an if you bring proof of legal repercussions to the school boards attention, with words like "LAWSUIT" an "AUDIT" that will get their attention. Next, set up some sort of monitoring to get the actual amount of this traffic, Id recommend a SNORT setup with some sort of custom rule set to set off alerts for the type of stuff your looking for, since it is packet based. Boards like numbers, and if you show something like 5 hours of continuous P2P activity in an 8 hour school day, the school board will have no choice but to wonder whos wasting this much time, if its a teacher are they doing their job? And if its a student, why are they wasting so much time in class. With enough evidence to back you an to support your claim of protection against legal repercussions, and the performance loss on a limited bandwidth network, not to mention the amount of MONEY ----- (big key word there, very very important to education institutions) that is wasted on repairs of virii infected systems, time wasted waiting for legitimate sites to pop up, an d the cost of misappropriated hardware. I'm sure you can get the authoritive backing you need. A preventive measure would be to set up a firewall/router an shut down the ports that are in use for these activities. It kind of sucks to have to go through these measures, but some times being an administrator means being administrative, even if it means you are the "asshole". Look at it this way, when shit hits the fan and noone can work because of virii, who gets blammed? CYA!!!
Once again, Ill have to say, the reason is big money. Slim Jims are legal because car manufacturers don't stuff our law makers pockets with fat cash. This is same old story just like Rockefeller, Carnagie, Morgan and the other Robber Barons lining law makers pockets to take away the civil rights of the lower class Americans. If you look back, they only exploited children by forcing them to labor in harsh conditions and all that. Same difference, only now people arent losing their fingers or their lives to copy CD's, just their right to protect their property with what was legal with Tapes... Its only our civil rights, I mean, whos going to speak up for them?
Unfortunatly, getting Joe Public involved doesnt really do much. Just take a look back to the sixties. How many "Joe Publics" did it take before the Govt. did ANYTHING such as civils rights bills, leave 'Namm, or anything else that took protests of millions to get results. The problem with DMCA is its support from Big Money, if you could get even bigger lobbyists to back its repeal or amendment, then youd have more money backing it too.... Strange game that politics is...
I believe Ive seen the scematics for what your looking for in one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits. Most of the parts you can get at Radio Shack. If i remember there was even a scematic for a parallel port/serial port interface that could be used with the alarm box. I know they sell pre-made alarms, but the only ones Ive had any experience with that had PC interfaces of any sort were commercial grade. Id check out those books at the library though and do a search for HelpPC on the web (a very useful reference program I use sometimes) for information about the correct voltages/currents to interface with the ports. Other than the interface, simpler alarm schematics can be found in the basic electronics books at Radio Shack (the title of the one Im thinking escapes me right now...). Although there are already existing products for this, if your really interested in doing this yourself, Id recommend those books and wish you luck..
Well, although the warning seems right along the lines of "Don't touch the positive and negative leads a car battery", the results are somewhat less cool. You just get a a run time error (depends on your platform as to what you get, a Segmentation Fault from *nix, a GPF from windows, ect) that crashes a program, no fireworks, no fires, not even a puff of smoke. As far as how you do this//everything that would be before, such as main, skipped for brevity
int *a;
a = NULL;
*a = 5;//The star denotes a dereference, this will crash right here..
Along the same lines, youd encounter a dereference situation more common in something like this...
int *a = new int [5];//dynamic array of ints..//some code to work with array here...
delete [] a;//OK were done with out dynamic array, clear it
a = NULL;//assigned to NULL for ease//some more code so you forget that you cleared a and assigned it NULL for housekeeping purposes
*a = 4;//whoops.....
things like that happen more often than youd think, the warning was there so it sticks out in your mind so you can remember little things like that, a very basic mistake, just be weary of it.
Its also common in function calls that use pointers as paramters.
Whoops, forgot to add... you might be tempted do some sort of flashy web based or online collaboration to do the training, which would be fine if it were like 5 or 6 people in a controlled enviroment, but 300+ around 80 sites leaves a very large margin of error. Just go with the tried and true methods of much more experienced companys and force them to sit through the boring training locally by a designated training officer....
In a case like this, make a standardized training tape, templates for handouts and manuals, and designate 1 experience person per site as a trainer. No travel, and the handouts and tapes will be standardized for new employees and such. And every site will be responsible for new hire training... At least thats how it works for almost every company Ive ever worked for...
Neat stuff. I really like the concept of self-serve grocery checkouts myself. Typical paranoia though:
Well, this ranks right up there with E-Commerce on the useful to everyday average people meter, which is pretty damned LOW. When you take customer service out of the store going experience, IE the person at the checkout that you complain to when the store didn't have this or that price was wrong, people get pretty bitchy. Try telling the a series of electronicly linked checkouts that you HATE this brand of Widget X and the price is too high and see what happens.... Im just picturing the scene in Zoolander where the two guys are hoping around like cavmen trying to get the files out of a computer.... But then again, I may be giving too much credit to Mr Murphey and not to the everyday average Joe Schmoe...
Well first we get to read the story about WHY cell phones alone should be annoying, with excessive RF and all that. So why not encorporate that into EVERYTHING, so that EVERYTHING can emit even more excessive RF just for the purpose of my watch being able to communicate with stop lights... Although a cool concept, is this REALLY necessary.
Thats great, I get to spend even more nights forgetting my biological duties to find a partner of the opposite sex and fornicate to instead DM to endless hours of the night and stunt my social development even further!! I remember the screen shots, the corridors look great, but the monsters look like Muppets...
Interesting concept, I wonder if that is how we can "feel" the presence of another person in a room without actually seeing that person first. I dont know how many of you have had that experience. That could be one way of describing it...
Ive come across a few issues using STL. Although the benifits more than outweigh the disadvantages. Biggest one is compatibility with vendors, mostly with VC6. Cygwin and G++ seems to work alright, with one exception using the size() function and the capacity() function with vectors, although I cant remember what exactly it was off the top of my head.
Some performance loss has been experienced, but only slightly in my case, and code seems to compile a little large for simple programs. And probally the biggest annoyance Ive come across with containers is declaring them. Multiple declarations of container variables across functions will get annoying, I dont think Ive ever used the typedef statement so much until I started working with STL.
Other than really simple annoyances, the STL is a great time saver with the containers it provides, and the iterators make working with pointers a breeze. I havnt so much been very impressed with its Algorithms, but then again I havnt really come across much of a need for them either, although there are some good ones.
Other than vendor specific issues and minor annoyances, I dont really have anything real bad to say about the STl.
"When did trees go out of fashion?
Why invest so much money trying to replicate what just about all plants do naturally? I mean, geez, perhaps we will surpass plants' abilities to process Carbon Dioxide, but do you think it will run on water, Carbon Dioxide & dirt?"
Well, considering the rate in which we are killing off all the trees, we have to cover our a$$ somehow...
"Advice to Americans: your weight and measurement "system" doesn't make sense with modern physics. You don't know the different between a quantity and a volume, a force and a mass and whatnot. Cost you a martian probe already. When will you finally get this straight ? "
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
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I love it when Hi-Tech mechinisms meet low tech solutions. A post it note defeating copy protected CD's is great, I mean less than 1 cents worth of paper defeating what is probally thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of R&D into copy protection schemes. Its along those same Hi/Low tech meetings as using a pencil to overclock the Duron, or even the old exploit in the Scantron tests where you could just fill in all the bubbles. It just goes to show you, theres always a use for the junk around your desk...
OK, so these guys really expect me to believe that these cheesy $350+ hack jobs are going to have a better picture than a DLP projector, or a Barco? Please, don't waste my time. I can go on to E-bay and buy a Sony 1272 projector for about 700 bucks, which has RGB inputs and can handle at least the refresh rate of a 1024x768 SVGA resolution output if not more (I never tested a higher resolution on one). I used these things faithfully for 6 years on Corporate presentations when the power of a Barco or a DLP wasnt necessary. This ridiculous hack job reminds me of those $10 lenses you buy for your TV that is supposed to turn them into a projection set. Oh well, wasnt it PT Barnum who said "A sucker is born every minute" ?
In the words on Al Pacino in Heat, "Don't Waste my MOTHER FU&#ING TIME!!" Youve got to be kidding me, they don't want to "drag it out" any further. Well lets see, its only taken them...... something like 4 years+ to get this far, without stop, to try and nail Microsoft on these issues, and their going to stop now? Especially when they hold the nail that would crucify them? Ive got a better picture of whats going on... Lets see, a bunch of lawyers... One of the biggest, richest companys in the world.. so my question is how much do DA's cost these days??
Im glad to see that the LED market is growing more and more out of the "blinking light on the front panel" industry. With brighter and brighter LEDs being developed, the use for them is growing. I was working with an associate of mine on some industrial lighting application using ultrabright white LED's configured in an array which were going to be used as a walkway light. These things were pretty bright an had pretty low power consumption, at least compared to other lights. The heating issue came up on the power supply designed for them, but off hand I dont remember how high we were running them. There was another projects were still working on using LED arrays that are pretty cool, but I wont get into those. Youd actually be suprised how bright these things can get, we had a LED array based flashlight we made for grins that blinded us, and it was about 3 times as bright as a Mag-Light. I think its fascinating where this stuff is going...
Thats pretty unusual for a school district NOT to take more of a stance on legitimate use of its networks. The schools here (in San Antonio) are VERY strict on legitimate uses, with the exception of the colleges. I remember the high school I was in we couldnt use those systems unless were were under total supervision. But, if your a system administrator an use of P2P clients and virii plague the performance of your network, your going to have to be administive. If your stuck in a web of red tape, first thing you do is gather statistics and evidence to the fact about the possible legal and performance issues that the use of these networks entail, especially in a education enviroment. Theres been a few cases of the IT worlds legal battles with the education world of late, an if you bring proof of legal repercussions to the school boards attention, with words like "LAWSUIT" an "AUDIT" that will get their attention. Next, set up some sort of monitoring to get the actual amount of this traffic, Id recommend a SNORT setup with some sort of custom rule set to set off alerts for the type of stuff your looking for, since it is packet based. Boards like numbers, and if you show something like 5 hours of continuous P2P activity in an 8 hour school day, the school board will have no choice but to wonder whos wasting this much time, if its a teacher are they doing their job? And if its a student, why are they wasting so much time in class. With enough evidence to back you an to support your claim of protection against legal repercussions, and the performance loss on a limited bandwidth network, not to mention the amount of MONEY ----- (big key word there, very very important to education institutions) that is wasted on repairs of virii infected systems, time wasted waiting for legitimate sites to pop up, an d the cost of misappropriated hardware. I'm sure you can get the authoritive backing you need. A preventive measure would be to set up a firewall/router an shut down the ports that are in use for these activities. It kind of sucks to have to go through these measures, but some times being an administrator means being administrative, even if it means you are the "asshole". Look at it this way, when shit hits the fan and noone can work because of virii, who gets blammed? CYA!!!
Once again, Ill have to say, the reason is big money. Slim Jims are legal because car manufacturers don't stuff our law makers pockets with fat cash. This is same old story just like Rockefeller, Carnagie, Morgan and the other Robber Barons lining law makers pockets to take away the civil rights of the lower class Americans. If you look back, they only exploited children by forcing them to labor in harsh conditions and all that. Same difference, only now people arent losing their fingers or their lives to copy CD's, just their right to protect their property with what was legal with Tapes... Its only our civil rights, I mean, whos going to speak up for them?
Unfortunatly, getting Joe Public involved doesnt really do much. Just take a look back to the sixties. How many "Joe Publics" did it take before the Govt. did ANYTHING such as civils rights bills, leave 'Namm, or anything else that took protests of millions to get results. The problem with DMCA is its support from Big Money, if you could get even bigger lobbyists to back its repeal or amendment, then youd have more money backing it too.... Strange game that politics is...
The nanosystem??? Ive always been taught it was called the metric system. Why bother learning it if they keep changing the name of it....
I believe Ive seen the scematics for what your looking for in one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits. Most of the parts you can get at Radio Shack. If i remember there was even a scematic for a parallel port/serial port interface that could be used with the alarm box. I know they sell pre-made alarms, but the only ones Ive had any experience with that had PC interfaces of any sort were commercial grade. Id check out those books at the library though and do a search for HelpPC on the web (a very useful reference program I use sometimes) for information about the correct voltages/currents to interface with the ports.
Other than the interface, simpler alarm schematics can be found in the basic electronics books at Radio Shack (the title of the one Im thinking escapes me right now...). Although there are already existing products for this, if your really interested in doing this yourself, Id recommend those books and wish you luck..
Well, although the warning seems right along the lines of "Don't touch the positive and negative leads a car battery", the results are somewhat less cool. You just get a a run time error (depends on your platform as to what you get, a Segmentation Fault from *nix, a GPF from windows, ect) that crashes a program, no fireworks, no fires, not even a puff of smoke. As far as how you do this //everything that would be before, such as main, skipped for brevity
int *a;
a = NULL;
*a = 5; //The star denotes a dereference, this will crash right here..
Along the same lines, youd encounter a dereference situation more common in something like this...
int *a = new int [5]; //dynamic array of ints.. //some code to work with array here ...
delete [] a; //OK were done with out dynamic array, clear it
a = NULL; //assigned to NULL for ease //some more code so you forget that you cleared a and assigned it NULL for housekeeping purposes
*a = 4; //whoops.....
things like that happen more often than youd think, the warning was there so it sticks out in your mind so you can remember little things like that, a very basic mistake, just be weary of it.
Its also common in function calls that use pointers as paramters.
Whoops, forgot to add... you might be tempted do some sort of flashy web based or online collaboration to do the training, which would be fine if it were like 5 or 6 people in a controlled enviroment, but 300+ around 80 sites leaves a very large margin of error. Just go with the tried and true methods of much more experienced companys and force them to sit through the boring training locally by a designated training officer....
In a case like this, make a standardized training tape, templates for handouts and manuals, and designate 1 experience person per site as a trainer. No travel, and the handouts and tapes will be standardized for new employees and such. And every site will be responsible for new hire training... At least thats how it works for almost every company Ive ever worked for...
Neat stuff. I really like the concept of self-serve grocery checkouts myself. Typical paranoia though: Well, this ranks right up there with E-Commerce on the useful to everyday average people meter, which is pretty damned LOW. When you take customer service out of the store going experience, IE the person at the checkout that you complain to when the store didn't have this or that price was wrong, people get pretty bitchy. Try telling the a series of electronicly linked checkouts that you HATE this brand of Widget X and the price is too high and see what happens.... Im just picturing the scene in Zoolander where the two guys are hoping around like cavmen trying to get the files out of a computer.... But then again, I may be giving too much credit to Mr Murphey and not to the everyday average Joe Schmoe...
Well first we get to read the story about WHY cell phones alone should be annoying, with excessive RF and all that. So why not encorporate that into EVERYTHING, so that EVERYTHING can emit even more excessive RF just for the purpose of my watch being able to communicate with stop lights... Although a cool concept, is this REALLY necessary.
Thats great, I get to spend even more nights forgetting my biological duties to find a partner of the opposite sex and fornicate to instead DM to endless hours of the night and stunt my social development even further!! I remember the screen shots, the corridors look great, but the monsters look like Muppets...
For some odd reason, Im just picturing a guy throwing a ball at the fire and a big Pokemon coming out and squirting water at it.....
Interesting concept, I wonder if that is how we can "feel" the presence of another person in a room without actually seeing that person first. I dont know how many of you have had that experience. That could be one way of describing it...
Ive come across a few issues using STL. Although the benifits more than outweigh the disadvantages. Biggest one is compatibility with vendors, mostly with VC6. Cygwin and G++ seems to work alright, with one exception using the size() function and the capacity() function with vectors, although I cant remember what exactly it was off the top of my head. Some performance loss has been experienced, but only slightly in my case, and code seems to compile a little large for simple programs. And probally the biggest annoyance Ive come across with containers is declaring them. Multiple declarations of container variables across functions will get annoying, I dont think Ive ever used the typedef statement so much until I started working with STL. Other than really simple annoyances, the STL is a great time saver with the containers it provides, and the iterators make working with pointers a breeze. I havnt so much been very impressed with its Algorithms, but then again I havnt really come across much of a need for them either, although there are some good ones. Other than vendor specific issues and minor annoyances, I dont really have anything real bad to say about the STl.
"When did trees go out of fashion? Why invest so much money trying to replicate what just about all plants do naturally? I mean, geez, perhaps we will surpass plants' abilities to process Carbon Dioxide, but do you think it will run on water, Carbon Dioxide & dirt?" Well, considering the rate in which we are killing off all the trees, we have to cover our a$$ somehow...
"Advice to Americans: your weight and measurement "system" doesn't make sense with modern physics. You don't know the different between a quantity and a volume, a force and a mass and whatnot. Cost you a martian probe already. When will you finally get this straight ? "
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
What can we say but "Yesterdays technology tommorrow"... But theres always the time machine :)