None of what I saw in the article is, in my mind, effective in fighting spam for the following reasons:
By the time one can apply the filters, you have already received the spam. This is a load on your resources. In some cases your in-box may even fill up (yes, I've received 1000's of the same piece of spam in the same hour, exceeding the capacity of my allotted storage and effectively DOSing me from real e-mail) or you may exceed limitations from forwarding services.
The spammers don't really care. Or notice. Their goal is to hit millions of victims, knowing that some of them will respond. The response is all they care about. Filter your e-mail all you want, you were not going to respond to them anyway. All they care about is reaching the mark that doesn't know any better, and this filter doesn't do anything to stop that (unless it is applied automatically by ISP's, unlikely due to the fear of fales positives).
What might help is a two fold attack on what they want: responses from marks. I suggest the following:
A massive education campaign to educate the general Internet user to never respond to (or
even read) strange messages that show up in your e-mail. Banner ads would seem a good place to start, it would be a public service if a good percentage of banners were replaced with ones that educated the Internet users who still make spam profitable. This might even have the long term effect of improving banner revenue: if banners compete with spam as a way to get out a message they have a lower value than if the public is taught to not buy from spam and even to aggressively resist doing business with a spammer. In the long run an antispam banner campaign could improve banner revenue for those who help fight spam. Ideally another great way to get the word out would be UCE, but that poses a moral dilemma....
The other thing that could effect the spammer is if the ads are not getting the desired results with the advertisers. What needs to happen here isn't filtering, it's massive negative response to the advertiser. No response don't hurt them, but making them respond themselves to unwanted responses is a more suitable way to respond to those who originate unwanted messages to use in the first place. These people need to get responses that waste their time and resources like they are wasting ours. Obviously those who supply 800 numbers are a prime target for this, while those who supply only postal addresses make it too costly to respond. I think such negative response campaigns need to be coordinated from major popular sites to be truly effective (not just from a few geeks who spend their day on an anti-spam website. Their efforts are much better applied by getting the spam sources in black holes and getting ISP's to block or filter spam). It sure would be nice to see the slashdot effect applied to spammers rather than the poor smuck who puts up a small but interesting website.
The book in question was reportedly received unsolicited in the U.S. mail. Shrink wrap or not, U.S. postal regulations make it clear that such an item can be considered a gift, and need not be returned. It certainy does not stay the property of the publisher. This would be a great test case, they have set themselves up to fail.
I'm interested in any ideas you have on how to secure against ISP-level snooping
Much like sending post cards through the mail, it's hard to keep much private from ISP/FBI snooping.
One time pads are the obvious first choice for encryption (I don't trust that the FBI and their cohorts can't read PGP). That still can give away a lot of information, like who you are in contact with. While it might be considered an abuse of resources (no worse than most use of Usenet though), I would consider posting an encrypted private message to a binary newsgroup that I knew my contact was monitoring. One should be able to disguise it so that it looks like a stray file segment to the casual user. With a interesting subject line you should even be able to entice enough people to download it that our friends in the government who protect our rights wouldn't likely be able to find who downloaded it, even if they were monitoring all ISP (he would be lost in the crowd). Very short messages might even be stored in the file header, good luck sorting through the list of all people who downloaded those! Of course, if they see you pick up a response they would have an IP address they could backtrack on, so responses, if needed, might have to consider alternate forms of subterfuge.
Clearly there are ways, which should make it clear that Carnivore is more about snooping on honest citizens than it is about spying on terrorists who are taking precautions.
I haven't installed this particular version of Linux, but have installed older Red Hat others and tried to install yet other Linux versions. I consider myself technically knowledgeable, but I often had to abort the install , reboot windows, and determine some simple setting that I would have expected the software to determine on it's own. (To be fair, the documentation made it clear that this was going to happen and the first time I installed Linux I did my homework and was ready. Later times I got cocky and had to go back to get something simple like an IRQ setting.)
Are the Linux installers (at least Red Hat, hopefully others,) getting better at this?
I noticed when I tried both Virtual Linux and Demo Linux recently that neither spotted my very typical dLink network card, and they even had trouble with my Nvidia GeForce3 based Video card.
I expect Barr knew off of this information for his Linux install, but to be fair, if the install needs the human to look this information up and feed it in, then any time spent resolving these questions for Linux should be factored into the measurement.
Can you give me any info on how you burnt this to get a bootable copy? I downloaded KNOPPIX_V3.1-06-08-2002-EN.iso and burnt it on a Win98 system with EZCD Creator 4. But when I tried to boot it, the CD wasn't recognized as bootable, and when I booted into Windows, Win98 was very upset by whatever it saw on the CD when it tried to open it for the "my computer" window. I already downloaded, burnt and booted ISO images of Virtual Linux and Demo Linux, so it's not like I'm making a novice mistake or just can't boot a CD. I looked at it with IsoBuster and IsoBuster reports that it doesn't like the ISO image at all.
Thinking I had a bad download I got another copy from a different mirror site, and found I had perfect byte by byte match to my original file. I then downloaded 2 copies of the older KNOPPIX_V3.1-04-08-2002-EN.iso with the same results. How are you burning your copies???
Carnivore is a program that they install an an ISP to grab e-mail that looks suspicious. It cannot, afaik, be used to grab info off of a computer, unless you can be talked into e-mailing that information somewhere. Pray enlighten us on
how they would use Carnivore to get information from a computer...
Carnivore is not limited to SMTP packets (if it was it would be defeated by all the web based mail readers). It can capture any and all IP traffic, so it can reconstruct anything a monitored site does on the Internet. No, it can't capture information off of a computer, but one does not go to a library to store information onto their hard drive. Anything on the hard drive of interest would have been sent over the Internet, either to or form another location: E-mail, user/passwords (even a/. login), news stories, stories about evil doers who think they are entitled to "rights" after peeking at an anti-government site, and so on.
It's been a while since I did this, but at some libraries I believe it's necessary to "unlock" a computer by somehow presenting your library card or some similar token, and so they could in fact know who was at which terminal.....
Clearly this is a needless action to take at a library. I can see the need to present your card when checking out a book, as it gives them some level of expectation that the book might be returned. But I've never had to present a library card at a library to read a book on site. I can read books in just about any public or university library in this country without a card, I just can't check them out. Why should I have to show a card to use an Internet terminal? The only reason seems to be to track people's usage. If they are doing this then we are hardly going to convince them to boot to RAM disk to protect people's privacy.
They might also look for things like what signin you used when you were checking your webmail...
And again, Carnivore will get that, a RAM disk will not provide privacy.
While one would think that a RAMdisk in such a situation would lead to privacy, don't forget that our good and trusted friends the government already have carnivore in place, and can use it to get anything that they might have expected to find on the hard drive.
That said, I still think a RAMdisk based system is a good one, the computers could be booted from a boot image on the network or even from a locked CD drive and then run completely from RAM. While it offers no protection from Carnivore, it does protect people's information from other people who come to the computer later and snoop for e-mail addresses, account information, and the like. Lets not forget to try to get libraries to close this door just because the shadow government can still get our private information.
The NPR story made claims that the government could somehow link information between a user's sessions. The reference was to someone who looked up information about atomic energy and then came back later and looked up something about the Koran. Unless they have logs of who used the terminal and when, how can they make such a link?
Do they just assume that the person doing the Koran lookup must be the same evil doer as the person who previously committed the heinous deed of reading about atomic energy?
So it was mentioned on usenet in 1985. What's the point? That it wasn't mentioned earlier? As this was well before the commercial expansion of the Internet (and usenet along with it) that's not all that surprising.
Or is the surprise that it was recognized as early as 1985? That's not even interesting, as this case only mentions the computer clock Y2K issue. I ran into a more serious Y2k issue in the early 1980's - was working on a financial mortgage program and, with the database languages of the time also supporting only a 2 digit year in the date, quickly hit problems I had to resolve when the ending date of a mortgage looked to the data base software as it it came before the starting date of the mortgage. Not all 2 digit date problems waited until the year 2000 to surface.
Apparently there is a massive problem in Europe with cell phones being stolen. I've never understood this, as it would seem pretty easy to catch someone who has such a device; the IMEI number is one way, but also just basic police work like tracking numbers called and the like would seem to make it easy to catch cell snatchers. And just wait until GPS technology is widespread in the phones. Also, if the problem is that rampant I would think the industry would make it extrenely easy to blacklist and just disable the stolen phone. If that happened then the incentive to swipe a cell phone would diminish pretty quickly.
Lots of other techniques could be used too: for example, I would consider putting together a nice automated system where, when a stolen cell phone was used, the connection was made, but after about 1 minute the call would be dropped, and a new automated call was made to the called number called suggesting that they turn in the previous caller for a reward.
Am I missing something here? It would seem that cell phones should not be such an easy target for thieft.
Of course, changing ALL of the stored information, including but not limited to the IMEI number would make my techniques harder, but are a high percentage of the stolen phones really being reprogrammed this way?
I hardly see a law that deals with changing this number to be very useful. Isn't stealing the phone already illegal? Don't they already have laws for fraud and thieft of services? Will the people who violate these laws really care about breaking another? And any suggestion that the person doing the reprogramming doesn't know exactly why the number is being changed would be negated by simply using a blacklist system of stolen phones that always connect to a recording of "this is a stolen phone. Contact the police....". This would negate that problem far better than a law on a technical matter. The cell industry already has too many special laws just for them on the books, it's time they took action themselves to become part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Piracy is OK if it's done by a school! How lame. And the first response I saw was someone saying indeed it was OK because he had done it!
What crap!
I understand that many people don't like Microsoft and are glad to screw them, but as a legal principal this makes no sense at all. What if you are a small company making educational software? How would you feel to suddenly hear governments discuss that maybe it was perfectly OK for your customers to steal your product?
Here's a more reasonable solution: Catch a big monopoly misusing their monopoly in the market with abuses that are clearly illegal, prove it in a trial, and rather than letting the monopoly choose their own punishment or threaten to break them into two monopolies, nationalize the bastards! Then you could give that software to any schools you want and still not muck with the copyright laws. The income could be used to lower taxes, and the extra layers of government mismanagement would help ensure that the smaller companies could compete!
Last friday Microsoft sent out a message to beta testers informing them that they had to start using.NET. It said, in part: This announcement affects all Microsoft BetaPlace users! We are transitioning to a mandatory.NET Passport Single Sign-in Service for BetaPlace beginning Tuesday, July 23, 2002.
Yesterday, the day after this mandatory change was to take place, they sent another announcement. It said, in part: We encountered some issues while implementing this new process and as a result this update has been postponed.
Apparently, the company who wants to push.NET down the world's throat can't even make it work correctly for their own in-house projects on their own chosen time table. Good luck to the rest of the world.
Ever since RealOne... no. I used to use it quite often, but RealOne seem to have a bad habit of taking over my system.
Amen! RealOne was enough to make me know that I'll never install another new RealMedia product. I uninstalled it and found and old RealMedial player I had downloaded a year or so ago and reinstalled that. If I come across something it will not play and other players also can't handle it I'll pass that content by.
The/. version of this says he was convicted of selling and installing mod chips, but makes no mention of the pirated video games he was also selling. Since the original story is often unavailable moments after a slashdot article goes up, this was truly a disservice to the readers. The story gives no clear indication of what the hoser was really convicted of, the mod chip or the illegal copyrighted software, but I expect there would have been a lot more trouble of getting a conviction without the illegal software. For that matter, the guy was only fined 17k and giver a year of probation after selling (at least) 30k of illegal software, doesn't sound like he made out too bad or that this will seriously curtail the piracy issue.
The only flaw in your brilliant plan is that an average TIFF file takes up about 5 MB instead of 500 KB so you can only store a few on each memory card.
Sure a lossless picture takes up more memory. In some cases that is an issue, away on vacation and you want to take a lot of shots, for example. In many other cases it is not an issue; you might be at home near the computer and want to get a good family portrait, for example. After all, if quality doesn't matter then no one would buy a more expensive 3 meg pixel camera over an inexpensive 1 meg pixel one. Your lame attempts at being insulting were not waranted.
And yes, I think it was moderated up too high too. Not a karma issue though, I maxed out long ago.
And if you _want_ a lossless format, you can use PNG.
I made my statement in reference to digital cameras. While a lossless format will take more space than highly compressed jpgs, it will also give a better image. OK, sometimes people are away from their computers and just want to be able to put hundreds of pictures on their flash memory stick and are willing to give up some quality. But other times you are close to the computer and can afford to use memory to get a few high quality shots (that's why you sprung for the 3.1 meg pixels rather than the cheap 1.3 meg pixels in the first place). But unless the camera supports, as an option, a lossless format, you're out of luck. You can't use PNG after the fact, once the loss has been introduced it's too late.
My point was that even though I agree with some points of the PNG advocates, even if the JPG standard becomes an official "non-standard", it will still be out there in a lot of equipment and media. It does matter to us if new tools loose the ability to process it, even if we prefer other formats.
Many posters seem to be missing the point. No matter what your religious view of other formats like PNG or GIF, the fact remains that there are plenty of devices out there right now, like digital cameras, (and so obviously will be for the next six months or so tas well) that produce JPG files. Personally I would like to see JPG replaced with a lossless format, or a least an option to select a format without loss and visual artifacts, but for quite a while there is going to be a need for software tools that manipulate JPG files. If this bogus claim is allowed to stand the effect will be that as software is updated it will often no longet support JPG files (remember how fast GIMP dropped GIF support?) It strikes me as pretty intolerable to have to revert to old software to use a camera or a clipart CD. This issue does matter, even if your personal belief is that there are other and better formats.
Never got to see the original page, it was slashdoted, then put up a message that it was down for a while due to the/. attention.
People have mentioned that some drives use multiple read pickups rather than high rotational speed, but I've been wondering why we have to spin the media at all. Wouldn't it be possible to read the disk by using some spinning mirrors to rotate the optical path around the CD instead? Perhaps it's a space issue, or a need to keep the pickup close to the CD, but it just strikes me that the technology is limiting itself by following designs based on older technology (like 78rpm records!)
a variable length string of up to 7 bits can be stored unambiguously in a single byte.
Very nice. Should be clean to impliment too. Far superior to the 3 bit/5 bit approach. Thanks for posting the technique.
I would rather have a POST code type system
on
Panicking In Morse Code
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This does seem somewhat bloated. The article claims it only adds a few hundred bytes, but isn't more specific. The encoding of the letters and numbers in Morse seems wasteful, but it can't be done by five bits in one byte the way Alan Cox suggested, since not all Morse characters are 5 symbols long. There would be space in a byte to store all of this information though if the remaining bits were used to store the number of encoded bits. But the real bloat comes in coding all of the potential panics anywhere they might occur. Overall I think I would prefer a system that simply passed a numeric panic number, much like the BIOS power on self test system beeps to inform a user of what failed. More limited, but reasonable for it's size. Or, if you think like Bill Gates and bloat isn't a promise but rather a blessing, then a nice text to speech system would let the computer say why it panicked.
As to the question of flashing the LED because Morse on the speaker might be too annoying, I say go for the speaker. Those who do know Morse know it by sound, not by individual dots and dashes, and seeing it on an LED is a very different thing than listening to it. If the system has panicked I'm already annoyed, beeping isn't going to be a problem. Just the opposite, if I'm nearby but not looking at the computer I want the beeping to get my attention to the problem.
And here's the really stupid question: What is this blinking system LED he's talking about???? I have a power LED on my PC, but it's not software controlled. Some PC's used to have a "turbo" LED, but that's been phased out. I sure hope he's not using the hard disk LED. Is he using a Keyboard LED or am I missing something really obvious here?
Boy this makes no sense! I find Linux to have a steep learning curve, and I've been using computers since the 60's. Yes, I finally got mom on a computer, but there is no way I could support her on Linux.
But the big issue is why in the world does this story have a megaphone icon rather than the cuddly Penguin logo?
It might kill Linux on the Desktop, but certainly not the server, where Linux has a clear advantage over MS on the 'net.
Kill it on the desktop, and you come a step closer to killing it in the server market. Less people with experience in Linux leads to more unfortunate uninformed MS server choices. It's not like this is M$'s only attack on Linux, they clearly understand the concept of death by 1000 cuts.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time one can apply the filters, you have already received the spam. This is a load on your resources. In some cases your in-box may even fill up (yes, I've received 1000's of the same piece of spam in the same hour, exceeding the capacity of my allotted storage and effectively DOSing me from real e-mail) or you may exceed limitations from forwarding services.
The spammers don't really care. Or notice. Their goal is to hit millions of victims, knowing that some of them will respond. The response is all they care about. Filter your e-mail all you want, you were not going to respond to them anyway. All they care about is reaching the mark that doesn't know any better, and this filter doesn't do anything to stop that (unless it is applied automatically by ISP's, unlikely due to the fear of fales positives).
What might help is a two fold attack on what they want: responses from marks. I suggest the following:
A massive education campaign to educate the general Internet user to never respond to (or even read) strange messages that show up in your e-mail. Banner ads would seem a good place to start, it would be a public service if a good percentage of banners were replaced with ones that educated the Internet users who still make spam profitable. This might even have the long term effect of improving banner revenue: if banners compete with spam as a way to get out a message they have a lower value than if the public is taught to not buy from spam and even to aggressively resist doing business with a spammer. In the long run an antispam banner campaign could improve banner revenue for those who help fight spam. Ideally another great way to get the word out would be UCE, but that poses a moral dilemma....
The other thing that could effect the spammer is if the ads are not getting the desired results with the advertisers. What needs to happen here isn't filtering, it's massive negative response to the advertiser. No response don't hurt them, but making them respond themselves to unwanted responses is a more suitable way to respond to those who originate unwanted messages to use in the first place. These people need to get responses that waste their time and resources like they are wasting ours. Obviously those who supply 800 numbers are a prime target for this, while those who supply only postal addresses make it too costly to respond. I think such negative response campaigns need to be coordinated from major popular sites to be truly effective (not just from a few geeks who spend their day on an anti-spam website. Their efforts are much better applied by getting the spam sources in black holes and getting ISP's to block or filter spam). It sure would be nice to see the slashdot effect applied to spammers rather than the poor smuck who puts up a small but interesting website.
Interested in other's thoughts in this area.
The book in question was reportedly received unsolicited in the U.S. mail. Shrink wrap or not, U.S. postal regulations make it clear that such an item can be considered a gift, and need not be returned. It certainy does not stay the property of the publisher. This would be a great test case, they have set themselves up to fail.
Much like sending post cards through the mail, it's hard to keep much private from ISP/FBI snooping.
One time pads are the obvious first choice for encryption (I don't trust that the FBI and their cohorts can't read PGP). That still can give away a lot of information, like who you are in contact with. While it might be considered an abuse of resources (no worse than most use of Usenet though), I would consider posting an encrypted private message to a binary newsgroup that I knew my contact was monitoring. One should be able to disguise it so that it looks like a stray file segment to the casual user. With a interesting subject line you should even be able to entice enough people to download it that our friends in the government who protect our rights wouldn't likely be able to find who downloaded it, even if they were monitoring all ISP (he would be lost in the crowd). Very short messages might even be stored in the file header, good luck sorting through the list of all people who downloaded those! Of course, if they see you pick up a response they would have an IP address they could backtrack on, so responses, if needed, might have to consider alternate forms of subterfuge.
Clearly there are ways, which should make it clear that Carnivore is more about snooping on honest citizens than it is about spying on terrorists who are taking precautions.
/. seems to have completely overlooked this, but Futurama showed up on Fox's Fall schedule a couple of months ago.
Are the Linux installers (at least Red Hat, hopefully others,) getting better at this? I noticed when I tried both Virtual Linux and Demo Linux recently that neither spotted my very typical dLink network card, and they even had trouble with my Nvidia GeForce3 based Video card. I expect Barr knew off of this information for his Linux install, but to be fair, if the install needs the human to look this information up and feed it in, then any time spent resolving these questions for Linux should be factored into the measurement.
Can you give me any info on how you burnt this to get a bootable copy? I downloaded KNOPPIX_V3.1-06-08-2002-EN.iso and burnt it on a Win98 system with EZCD Creator 4. But when I tried to boot it, the CD wasn't recognized as bootable, and when I booted into Windows, Win98 was very upset by whatever it saw on the CD when it tried to open it for the "my computer" window. I already downloaded, burnt and booted ISO images of Virtual Linux and Demo Linux, so it's not like I'm making a novice mistake or just can't boot a CD. I looked at it with IsoBuster and IsoBuster reports that it doesn't like the ISO image at all. Thinking I had a bad download I got another copy from a different mirror site, and found I had perfect byte by byte match to my original file. I then downloaded 2 copies of the older KNOPPIX_V3.1-04-08-2002-EN.iso with the same results. How are you burning your copies???
Would that be a bad thing?
Carnivore is not limited to SMTP packets (if it was it would be defeated by all the web based mail readers). It can capture any and all IP traffic, so it can reconstruct anything a monitored site does on the Internet. No, it can't capture information off of a computer, but one does not go to a library to store information onto their hard drive. Anything on the hard drive of interest would have been sent over the Internet, either to or form another location: E-mail, user/passwords (even a /. login), news stories, stories about evil doers who think they are entitled to "rights" after peeking at an anti-government site, and so on.
It's been a while since I did this, but at some libraries I believe it's necessary to "unlock" a computer by somehow presenting your library card or some similar token, and so they could in fact know who was at which terminal.....
Clearly this is a needless action to take at a library. I can see the need to present your card when checking out a book, as it gives them some level of expectation that the book might be returned. But I've never had to present a library card at a library to read a book on site. I can read books in just about any public or university library in this country without a card, I just can't check them out. Why should I have to show a card to use an Internet terminal? The only reason seems to be to track people's usage. If they are doing this then we are hardly going to convince them to boot to RAM disk to protect people's privacy.
They might also look for things like what signin you used when you were checking your webmail...
And again, Carnivore will get that, a RAM disk will not provide privacy.
That said, I still think a RAMdisk based system is a good one, the computers could be booted from a boot image on the network or even from a locked CD drive and then run completely from RAM. While it offers no protection from Carnivore, it does protect people's information from other people who come to the computer later and snoop for e-mail addresses, account information, and the like. Lets not forget to try to get libraries to close this door just because the shadow government can still get our private information.
The NPR story made claims that the government could somehow link information between a user's sessions. The reference was to someone who looked up information about atomic energy and then came back later and looked up something about the Koran. Unless they have logs of who used the terminal and when, how can they make such a link? Do they just assume that the person doing the Koran lookup must be the same evil doer as the person who previously committed the heinous deed of reading about atomic energy?
Or is the surprise that it was recognized as early as 1985? That's not even interesting, as this case only mentions the computer clock Y2K issue. I ran into a more serious Y2k issue in the early 1980's - was working on a financial mortgage program and, with the database languages of the time also supporting only a 2 digit year in the date, quickly hit problems I had to resolve when the ending date of a mortgage looked to the data base software as it it came before the starting date of the mortgage. Not all 2 digit date problems waited until the year 2000 to surface.
Lots of other techniques could be used too: for example, I would consider putting together a nice automated system where, when a stolen cell phone was used, the connection was made, but after about 1 minute the call would be dropped, and a new automated call was made to the called number called suggesting that they turn in the previous caller for a reward. Am I missing something here? It would seem that cell phones should not be such an easy target for thieft.
Of course, changing ALL of the stored information, including but not limited to the IMEI number would make my techniques harder, but are a high percentage of the stolen phones really being reprogrammed this way?
I hardly see a law that deals with changing this number to be very useful. Isn't stealing the phone already illegal? Don't they already have laws for fraud and thieft of services? Will the people who violate these laws really care about breaking another? And any suggestion that the person doing the reprogramming doesn't know exactly why the number is being changed would be negated by simply using a blacklist system of stolen phones that always connect to a recording of "this is a stolen phone. Contact the police ....". This would negate that problem far better than a law on a technical matter. The cell industry already has too many special laws just for them on the books, it's time they took action themselves to become part of the solution and not part of the problem.
What crap! I understand that many people don't like Microsoft and are glad to screw them, but as a legal principal this makes no sense at all. What if you are a small company making educational software? How would you feel to suddenly hear governments discuss that maybe it was perfectly OK for your customers to steal your product?
Here's a more reasonable solution: Catch a big monopoly misusing their monopoly in the market with abuses that are clearly illegal, prove it in a trial, and rather than letting the monopoly choose their own punishment or threaten to break them into two monopolies, nationalize the bastards! Then you could give that software to any schools you want and still not muck with the copyright laws. The income could be used to lower taxes, and the extra layers of government mismanagement would help ensure that the smaller companies could compete!
Yesterday, the day after this mandatory change was to take place, they sent another announcement. It said, in part: We encountered some issues while implementing this new process and as a result this update has been postponed.
Apparently, the company who wants to push .NET down the world's throat can't even make it work correctly for their own in-house projects on their own chosen time table. Good luck to the rest of the world.
Amen! RealOne was enough to make me know that I'll never install another new RealMedia product. I uninstalled it and found and old RealMedial player I had downloaded a year or so ago and reinstalled that. If I come across something it will not play and other players also can't handle it I'll pass that content by.
The /. version of this says he was convicted of selling and installing mod chips, but makes no mention of the pirated video games he was also selling. Since the original story is often unavailable moments after a slashdot article goes up, this was truly a disservice to the readers. The story gives no clear indication of what the hoser was really convicted of, the mod chip or the illegal copyrighted software, but I expect there would have been a lot more trouble of getting a conviction without the illegal software. For that matter, the guy was only fined 17k and giver a year of probation after selling (at least) 30k of illegal software, doesn't sound like he made out too bad or that this will seriously curtail the piracy issue.
Sure a lossless picture takes up more memory. In some cases that is an issue, away on vacation and you want to take a lot of shots, for example. In many other cases it is not an issue; you might be at home near the computer and want to get a good family portrait, for example. After all, if quality doesn't matter then no one would buy a more expensive 3 meg pixel camera over an inexpensive 1 meg pixel one. Your lame attempts at being insulting were not waranted.
And yes, I think it was moderated up too high too. Not a karma issue though, I maxed out long ago.
I made my statement in reference to digital cameras. While a lossless format will take more space than highly compressed jpgs, it will also give a better image. OK, sometimes people are away from their computers and just want to be able to put hundreds of pictures on their flash memory stick and are willing to give up some quality. But other times you are close to the computer and can afford to use memory to get a few high quality shots (that's why you sprung for the 3.1 meg pixels rather than the cheap 1.3 meg pixels in the first place). But unless the camera supports, as an option, a lossless format, you're out of luck. You can't use PNG after the fact, once the loss has been introduced it's too late.
My point was that even though I agree with some points of the PNG advocates, even if the JPG standard becomes an official "non-standard", it will still be out there in a lot of equipment and media. It does matter to us if new tools loose the ability to process it, even if we prefer other formats.
Many posters seem to be missing the point. No matter what your religious view of other formats like PNG or GIF, the fact remains that there are plenty of devices out there right now, like digital cameras, (and so obviously will be for the next six months or so tas well) that produce JPG files. Personally I would like to see JPG replaced with a lossless format, or a least an option to select a format without loss and visual artifacts, but for quite a while there is going to be a need for software tools that manipulate JPG files. If this bogus claim is allowed to stand the effect will be that as software is updated it will often no longet support JPG files (remember how fast GIMP dropped GIF support?) It strikes me as pretty intolerable to have to revert to old software to use a camera or a clipart CD. This issue does matter, even if your personal belief is that there are other and better formats.
People have mentioned that some drives use multiple read pickups rather than high rotational speed, but I've been wondering why we have to spin the media at all. Wouldn't it be possible to read the disk by using some spinning mirrors to rotate the optical path around the CD instead? Perhaps it's a space issue, or a need to keep the pickup close to the CD, but it just strikes me that the technology is limiting itself by following designs based on older technology (like 78rpm records!)
Very nice. Should be clean to impliment too. Far superior to the 3 bit/5 bit approach. Thanks for posting the technique.
As to the question of flashing the LED because Morse on the speaker might be too annoying, I say go for the speaker. Those who do know Morse know it by sound, not by individual dots and dashes, and seeing it on an LED is a very different thing than listening to it. If the system has panicked I'm already annoyed, beeping isn't going to be a problem. Just the opposite, if I'm nearby but not looking at the computer I want the beeping to get my attention to the problem.
And here's the really stupid question: What is this blinking system LED he's talking about???? I have a power LED on my PC, but it's not software controlled. Some PC's used to have a "turbo" LED, but that's been phased out. I sure hope he's not using the hard disk LED. Is he using a Keyboard LED or am I missing something really obvious here?
Boy this makes no sense! I find Linux to have a steep learning curve, and I've been using computers since the 60's. Yes, I finally got mom on a computer, but there is no way I could support her on Linux.
But the big issue is why in the world does this story have a megaphone icon rather than the cuddly Penguin logo?
Kill it on the desktop, and you come a step closer to killing it in the server market. Less people with experience in Linux leads to more unfortunate uninformed MS server choices. It's not like this is M$'s only attack on Linux, they clearly understand the concept of death by 1000 cuts.
That's weird. Salon is usually so objective and unbiased.
Kind of like reporting that the sun rose this morning, without giving opposing opinions, eh? ;-)