Good point, except it's not at all like a dropdown menu because you can move it around just like you would a folder. It's more graphically intense because, for one thing, most icons in OS X are vector images, not raster images. That is why the pile wouldn't look like a pile of garbage--can you imagine what it would look like if you did that perspective transform to a bunch of 64x64 windows bitmaps?
Personally, I liked that demo. It would be great to open, say, the images subdir of a website I'm working on and see all the navigation images in one pile, widgets in another, etc, without the need for separate folders. It extends the desktop metaphor--piles are a natural way of interacting with documents.
I appreciate the sentiment, but while a few whiteys were actually on the moon, a hell of a lot more were living in the same kind of poverty the poem brings to mind. Maybe I should publish that poem I wrote, Darkey's Slam Dunking*
I'm amazed that you spent 300 million dollars and hundreds of hours designing an experiment that couldn't tolerate 1 second worth of error in the data.
I would love to learn more about what he has managed to accomplish. One thing that strikes me immediately is the generation of the ID numbers on the card. At my school, it is trivial to look up any student's ID number--if this is the same number as is on our Blackboard cards (or if the Bb ID is some transform of the school ID#), then that would mean that anyone can generate anyone's card without even having to copy the original. Scary.
Apparently Blackboard thinks the two students created a Blackboard-compatible hardware device of some type. They intended to speak about the device at the Interz0ne technology conference. Blackboard filed a criminal complaint, alleging that they had violated all sorts of wiretapping and corporate espionage laws. A copy of the complaint is available at Interz0ne's site.
The issue is not why Blackboard took legal action--we see corporations doing it all the time to cover their asses and try to keep information under the rug.
That would be interesting to learn more about. However, I'm still skeptical. From the writeup I read, he says the cards use standard ABA Track II. I have found numerous sites through google that tell you how to read this data using various techniques, one even had C code for using a soundcard line-in. You can also buy readers from any number of companies.
I looked through these things yesterday, and while they were interesting, there was little information of substance in them. All of the supposed vulnerabilities are theoretical, and the author himself does not claim to have tried any of them. Yes, a replay attack would work if the system works as he claims it does. Has he taken the first step of patching into one of the RS-485 drops that he claims are so very insecure? No. Does he know what kind of encryption is used on the IP converter? No. He merely speculates that it is "DES on the high end; XOR on the low end". How informative! The same could be said for any system that uses encryption.
I am following this closely because my college has installed the Blackboard system to provide all-hours card access to dorms and after-hours access to academic buildings. All of the readers are bolted into concrete or brick, or are installed on steel posts. You would have to do more physical damage to the building or the post to gain access to the supposedly insecure RS-485 drops than you would to simply force the door open. My school, however, has not extended this system to anything using real money, perhaps because they are aware of the flaws and want to limit the risks, or perhaps because the damn thing is so motherfucking expensive.
One thing that really detracts from the credibility of this "security analysis" is that in the PowerPoint presentation, someone is circled using paintbrush, identified by name, and labelled "piece of shit" or something like that. Apparently this is one of the guys that insists the system is secure. It may not be, but you can't expect anyone to take you seriously if you put crap like that into your presentation.
Here's my "Switch" story. I am the student body webmaster at my college, a thankless job which means I get to do everything from post PDFs of the newspaper online to streaming the radio station in MP3, to maintaining the FreeBSD webserver, to writing web applications to handle voting. So I asked the student senate to buy me an 800MHz iBook. Since getting it I have not even turned on my PC except to import my music into iTunes. The machine is small and light enough that I can slide it into my backpack at a moment's notice, and have a complete portable offline development environment (Apache/*SQL/Perl/PHP), though that campuswide 802.11b network means that I don't usually have to rely on this. I've even found that some things I was having to do by hand (namely, split the aforementioned PDFs into individual pages using Acrobat) can be automated using AppleScript.
I love the machine most of all because now I don't have to haul around two computers (Windows+FreeBSD) for development--even having just one full-sized machine in a dorm room takes up too much space.
Actually, that is probably the lamest thing I can think of doing at a party like that. Why even bother coming? Why not just have everyone send in their machine specs beforehand and have a perl script tally up the bogomips if that's what turns your crank?
It looks like one of those three-panel LCD deals. I'm too lazy to dig up the URL, but I'm sure someone on/. knows it. Never fails to cause in-pants ejaculation.
Well, if you won't give everyone a T1, can you at least give me one? I'll even triple your asking price!
Re:Genome Surprize
on
Genome Surprise
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Unless you prepare your food in a cleanroom, I suspect that every dish you prepare has at least one copy of a human genome in it, if not more (not to mention the genomes of other organisms). . .
Just because they say that the system is not limited by line of sight doesn't mean that, as the parent poster alluded to, it will work through 50 feet of wood and concrete. Sure, I may be able to get a signal 30 miles away if I'm behind a building, but not if I'm behind ten city blocks of buildings.
Too true! Like you said though--just because you are one of these people who isn't fat but never exercises, doesn't mean you don't have to or that you shouldn't (exercise). I would like to lose 5 or 10 lbs, but other than that I am by no means fat. Still, I eat crap and smoke cigarettes all day. Not healthy. I've found that the best times to establish new habits (and kill old ones--like smoking) is during vacations (if you're not a student this might be harder for you). It's hard for me to ditch the smokes and start working out when I'm buried with schoolwork. This summer, however, I am really looking forward to going to the gym, preparing healthy meals, and smoking other things instead of tobacco.
The Turing test is not about "cognitive reasoning". Whether or not you "pass" depends on whether or not the "interrogator" (who reads the transcript of a human's conversation with the machine) can tell which participant is the machine. BTW, you find it "ammusing" to know that some humans have failed the Turing test, and some machines have passed it. It really says more about the interrogator and the test than the participants.
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Wow, I didn't know that! Thanks.
Wow, I didn't know that. Thanks.
Personally, I liked that demo. It would be great to open, say, the images subdir of a website I'm working on and see all the navigation images in one pile, widgets in another, etc, without the need for separate folders. It extends the desktop metaphor--piles are a natural way of interacting with documents.
*I didn't actually write said poem.
What? Re-read the original story. You are wayyyyy off the mark.
I'm amazed that you spent 300 million dollars and hundreds of hours designing an experiment that couldn't tolerate 1 second worth of error in the data.
I would love to learn more about what he has managed to accomplish. One thing that strikes me immediately is the generation of the ID numbers on the card. At my school, it is trivial to look up any student's ID number--if this is the same number as is on our Blackboard cards (or if the Bb ID is some transform of the school ID#), then that would mean that anyone can generate anyone's card without even having to copy the original. Scary.
That would be interesting to learn more about. However, I'm still skeptical. From the writeup I read, he says the cards use standard ABA Track II. I have found numerous sites through google that tell you how to read this data using various techniques, one even had C code for using a soundcard line-in. You can also buy readers from any number of companies.
I am following this closely because my college has installed the Blackboard system to provide all-hours card access to dorms and after-hours access to academic buildings. All of the readers are bolted into concrete or brick, or are installed on steel posts. You would have to do more physical damage to the building or the post to gain access to the supposedly insecure RS-485 drops than you would to simply force the door open. My school, however, has not extended this system to anything using real money, perhaps because they are aware of the flaws and want to limit the risks, or perhaps because the damn thing is so motherfucking expensive.
One thing that really detracts from the credibility of this "security analysis" is that in the PowerPoint presentation, someone is circled using paintbrush, identified by name, and labelled "piece of shit" or something like that. Apparently this is one of the guys that insists the system is secure. It may not be, but you can't expect anyone to take you seriously if you put crap like that into your presentation.
I love the machine most of all because now I don't have to haul around two computers (Windows+FreeBSD) for development--even having just one full-sized machine in a dorm room takes up too much space.
Actually, that is probably the lamest thing I can think of doing at a party like that. Why even bother coming? Why not just have everyone send in their machine specs beforehand and have a perl script tally up the bogomips if that's what turns your crank?
It looks like one of those three-panel LCD deals. I'm too lazy to dig up the URL, but I'm sure someone on /. knows it. Never fails to cause in-pants ejaculation.
Well, if you won't give everyone a T1, can you at least give me one? I'll even triple your asking price!
Unless you prepare your food in a cleanroom, I suspect that every dish you prepare has at least one copy of a human genome in it, if not more (not to mention the genomes of other organisms). . .
Just because they say that the system is not limited by line of sight doesn't mean that, as the parent poster alluded to, it will work through 50 feet of wood and concrete. Sure, I may be able to get a signal 30 miles away if I'm behind a building, but not if I'm behind ten city blocks of buildings.
Who cares? They're both red and white and start with "the".
Oops, I meant .bash_profile. Sorry.
...and if you think that's clever, you'll be pleased to know that I'm selling dehydrated water for just $10 a gallon! Send payment via Paypal.
Too true! Like you said though--just because you are one of these people who isn't fat but never exercises, doesn't mean you don't have to or that you shouldn't (exercise). I would like to lose 5 or 10 lbs, but other than that I am by no means fat. Still, I eat crap and smoke cigarettes all day. Not healthy. I've found that the best times to establish new habits (and kill old ones--like smoking) is during vacations (if you're not a student this might be harder for you). It's hard for me to ditch the smokes and start working out when I'm buried with schoolwork. This summer, however, I am really looking forward to going to the gym, preparing healthy meals, and smoking other things instead of tobacco.
HISTFILESIZE=0
FAPP (FreeBSD, Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl)
I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Don't you hate being spoon-fed?
The Turing test is not about "cognitive reasoning". Whether or not you "pass" depends on whether or not the "interrogator" (who reads the transcript of a human's conversation with the machine) can tell which participant is the machine. BTW, you find it "ammusing" to know that some humans have failed the Turing test, and some machines have passed it. It really says more about the interrogator and the test than the participants.