A better option for security would be to check the actual files data header (or whatever the hell people call them these days) and run it based on what that is.
Yeah, then we can migrate back into the excellent world of ancient Mac OS versions, where you had to use ResEdit to change a file's type if something happens to corrupt the header, or simply want to change its association for whatever reason.
And this is where things get interesting because fair use permits compies of material in the library for research. But if enough students scan journals at high resolution and then organize and exchange them through the Net, there will be an enormous levelling of the academic playing field. That is a time I look forward to with eager anticipation.
I think you are misunderstanding the rights that fair use gives you. Just because someone is a student doesn't mean they can suddenly duplicate entire journals and share them with their friends.
Creativity is dead. There are no more juicy steaks of games, no more Command and Conquers or Homeworlds, the games that bring gaming into a whole new dimension, at least from the major houses.
Only if you are looking at gaming on the PC. The PC games market has been stagnant for awhile now, with most of the interesting releases happening on consoles (sometimes with a PC port later).
Look at the Legacy of Kain series, Beyond Good and Evil, Ico, Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime, F-Zero GX, Rez, Primal, KOTOR, Whiplash, Crimson Skies, Steel Battalion, the Silent Hill series, etc., and then tell me there are no good games anymore.
There are lots of people that still care about making excellent games, it's just that many of them have moved away from the PC. I can't say I blame them either, even as someone who played PC games (well, computer games, since I started on an Apple IIe) for almost two decades.
Supporting PC games is a nightmare, and (at least in my experience) PC gamers tend to be the least receptive to change (unless it's "change" in terms of making the graphics better). Imagine how frustrating it would be as a film director whose audience started whining incessantly every time you used a new camera angle or type of film stock.
That particular card reader isn't even the right shape to use for ATM card skimming.
Not a problem. I read an article (I think it was even linked from Slashdot) where a news team stuck that kind of reader on an ATM with a sign that said "ATM card cleaner" (or words to that effect), and a bunch of people used it.
Now I have little against PVCS (price tag being one thing, and some crappy network functionality that likely has been resolved by now).
If you mean how it takes something like 24 hours to upload a 2-3GB file (across a ~100MB/sec link to a remote server), then no, it hasn't been resolved.
PVCS has to be the most overrated piece of software ever. When I had to act as a liason between developers who were forced to use it and the PVCS administrators at work, I asked the PVCS admins to speak to the vendor about the insultingly slow performance. Their answer? That we should buy a cluster of Windows machines running Citrix that was local to the Unix database server which hosted PVCS and have all of the developers run the client from there instead of their desktops.
That was just the most laughable experience with their "support" team, since usually they wouldn't answer questions at all.
Buying PVCS is like buying an alarm clock that wakes you up by stabbing you in the eye with an icepick repeatedly. I'm sure it will do its job (sort of), but there are much better ways to get what you need.
This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
If there were going to be another terrorist attack, don't you think *something* would already have happened, even if it was just a Hammas-style bus bombing?
Al Qaeda already got what they wanted - they blew up some Americans, sent the US on its way to becoming a totalitarian state, isolated it from its allies (particularly in the Middle East), *and* as a bonus Iraq will soon be converted into a hardline Islamic nation. They didn't even lose their leader in the process.
What could they possibly gain by sticking their necks out again?
Just cause the guy is black doesn't mean it's going to be Men in Black nor that there will be Hip Hop. JC what a bunch of stereo-typical crap.
Uh, somehow I don't think it's because he's black, but because he's a hip-hop musician.
I'm not familiar with his work, but usually when Hollywood hires a musician for a part, it's to cash in on the image they've already built up for themselves (e.g. David Bowie in Labyrinth, Sting in Dune, Henry Rollins in every film he's ever been in).
Actually Boeing has two ideas on the drawing board to counter the A380. One is a super-cruiser that would fly just shy of the speed of sound.
No, that project was cancelled last year. There isn't a big enough market for higher-priced, moderately faster air travel anymore. It's too bad, because the concept art of the plane looked awesome, like something that really should be flying in the 21st century.
I live in Seattle, and I can see that Boeing is doomed. They seem to have been infected by too much influence from the execs of the other companies they bought up. I'm sure they will continue contracting with the military, but Airbus is going to stomp them in the civilian market.
What we need is today's equivalent of a "2001" (though we can do without the incomprehensible plot).
2001 had a totally straightforward plot, if you read the book.
Some people find a beacon on the Moon, and follow its signal to Jupiter/Saturn (depending on whether you're reading the book or watching the film). Their computer goes crazy because its instructions to keep the nature of their journey a secret conflict with its basic programming to provide truthful and complete information. It kills off four of them, and the fifth one shuts the computer down. When he gets to the destination, he finds a giant black rectangle that turns out to be an entrypoint to an intergalactic transit system. It takes him to another world, where an advanced race assimilates him.
I know the film is deliberately lacking in certain details, but I've never understood the need people have to read anything more into it.
As for modern sci-fi, I started reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space a week ago, and it's excellent. I'm really irritated that the third book in the series (Absolution Gap) won't be out in the US until June, despite it having been released in Britain last year.
Vernor Vinge and William Gibson are also excellent authors. Eric Nylund's Signal books were fun too, although he does have some of his geological and astronomical information wrong.
Dang, dude. Calm down before you give yourself a coronary.
I'm a systems engineer for a corporation with about 12,000 Windows desktops and hundreds of Windows servers (we also use Solaris and IBM mainframe, but those aren't really relevant to this discussion).
The other guy is right - SCSI has always been a niche product for PC desktops. It's useful on servers, but the last PC workstation that we bought with SCSI was a dual-PPro 200 model, which should give you some idea of its age.
I had SCSI on my home system up until a few years ago, but only because I'd had bad experiences with IDE CD burners.
SCSI is pretty cool, but the vast majority of desktop users don't need the capabilities it provides. It was handier on the Mac, since external storage was so much more common on them (at least in my experience).
For desktop PC users, IDE (or SATA now, I guess) is plenty fast enough for hard drives and CD/DVD burners, and it's a LOT cheaper. USB fills the need for external devices, except for niche users who need high speed external hard drives or AV-capture capability.
The idea that we could grow neurons on silicon is one of those big steps that looks to lead us into the Johnny Mnemonic world that Gibson was talking about just a couple stories prior to this one.
I am waiting for the Alastair Reynolds-style Conjoiner conversion myself, but Johnny Mnemonic will do in the meantime.
As long as it's the short story and not the film, that is.
The people at petsmart also forgot to mention that very soon, the hamsters will try to KILL each other.
If they are from different litters, this is normal behaviour. Have you tried sprinkling baby powder on them so they can't tell each other apart by scent?
I haven't been around rodents for a LONG time, but that usually worked pretty well.
MIDI is not the same as General MIDI (which is what the vast majority of people's soundcards support). The sound module used in this contraption probably has a different, non-lame sound set.
More like shrinking men and their submarine down to microscopic size and injecting them into someone's bloodstream, then enlarging them again once they're done.
Not everything that people say is impossible is some sort of persecuted idea that will have its day.
For the five seconds it would take for the DEA to outlaw them. They don't care whether substances are addictive or not, as evidenced by the outlawing of LSD, the tryptamines, etc.
A top UK university recently had to curtail its animal research due to the sheer cost of security that would be required to ensure the safety of its researchers.
Good. While I'm sure there are some less inhuman uses for animal testing than others, I can't see how anyone can think that the vast majority of it (e.g. sticking rabbits in restraints so that cosmetics and cleaning chemicals can be put into their eyes, sewing kittens' eyes shut to determine what the effect is on them if they never experience visual stimuli, repeatedly breaking dogs' bones in veterinary school so that students can practice setting them, then killing the dogs when the semester is over, vivisecting animals without anaesthetic because "it might skew the test results," etc.) does anything to elevate us as a species.
Anyhow, since most people seem not to have actually *played* this game (which is a shame, since it's great):
You play two animals who are escaping from a caricaturized corporation which tests on animals. Part of your objective is to free as many of the other animals as you can on your way out.
I fail to see what's so potentially horrible about that. If the British are so afraid of exposing children to what is effectively a cartoon's point of view, then their position must be pretty weak to begin with.
So report them based on whatever contact information the recording left in the message.
There is none. If you get the call live, you can press nine to talk to a human who will take your credit card number, but I don't know of any way to weasel the company name out of them.
I get more telemarketing calls now (4-6+ a day) than I did *before* the registry.
I was shocked (well, not really) to find out just how many non-profit agencies there are who want to get their hands on my money, as well as companies that have done business with me in the past 18 months.
I'm sure they're using the "do-not-call" list as a source for numbers. I feel like a sucker for ever signing up.
The most irritating one is an autodialer that repeats a recording about how I've been selected to receive a magically shitty vacation for only $99, but doesn't mention the name of the company so I can't report them. I was getting multiple messages a week from it on my voicemail for months.
Honestly, I don't see why people would be too up in arms about this.
Constantly checking for counterfeits steals processing power that I should be able to use for things I want my PC to do.
The software is never going to be perfect, either. What recourse do I have if I'm designing something that looks enough like currency to trigger it, but actually has a legitimate purpose (e.g. a prop for a film)?
Finally, it's just another symptom of the nanny-state mentality that is pervading modern society. I shouldn't have automated systems watching over my every move to make sure I'm not doing anything unfavourable.
Re:I thought I would do this...
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 1
Not helped by real world events. When most of characters qualify as "terrorists".
I know we're right in the middle of the neo-McCarthy era, where everything that's bad is linked to terrorism, but this is just not true.
Burglary, robbery, smuggling, and stealing your sister back from a government experiment are illegal, but they are *not* acts of terrorism.
If the Firefly characters were terrorists, than anyone whose ancestors lived in the old West is descended from them too.
Re:Oh, you had to do it....
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 3, Informative
canceled after 11 shows.
If you buy the DVD set (see sig), you get three that weren't even aired. The saddest part is that they're just as excellent as the rest of the series.
Slashdot Mirror
A better option for security would be to check the actual files data header (or whatever the hell people call them these days) and run it based on what that is.
Yeah, then we can migrate back into the excellent world of ancient Mac OS versions, where you had to use ResEdit to change a file's type if something happens to corrupt the header, or simply want to change its association for whatever reason.
And this is where things get interesting because fair use permits compies of material in the library for research. But if enough students scan journals at high resolution and then organize and exchange them through the Net, there will be an enormous levelling of the academic playing field. That is a time I look forward to with eager anticipation.
I think you are misunderstanding the rights that fair use gives you. Just because someone is a student doesn't mean they can suddenly duplicate entire journals and share them with their friends.
sorry - you're right. i first played it around 1991.
IGN lists the release date as 1994, which is also the copyright date on my System Shock CD.
Creativity is dead. There are no more juicy steaks of games, no more Command and Conquers or Homeworlds, the games that bring gaming into a whole new dimension, at least from the major houses.
Only if you are looking at gaming on the PC. The PC games market has been stagnant for awhile now, with most of the interesting releases happening on consoles (sometimes with a PC port later).
Look at the Legacy of Kain series, Beyond Good and Evil, Ico, Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime, F-Zero GX, Rez, Primal, KOTOR, Whiplash, Crimson Skies, Steel Battalion, the Silent Hill series, etc., and then tell me there are no good games anymore.
There are lots of people that still care about making excellent games, it's just that many of them have moved away from the PC. I can't say I blame them either, even as someone who played PC games (well, computer games, since I started on an Apple IIe) for almost two decades.
Supporting PC games is a nightmare, and (at least in my experience) PC gamers tend to be the least receptive to change (unless it's "change" in terms of making the graphics better). Imagine how frustrating it would be as a film director whose audience started whining incessantly every time you used a new camera angle or type of film stock.
That particular card reader isn't even the right shape to use for ATM card skimming.
Not a problem. I read an article (I think it was even linked from Slashdot) where a news team stuck that kind of reader on an ATM with a sign that said "ATM card cleaner" (or words to that effect), and a bunch of people used it.
You then end up paying a debit fee instead
Only if you have a debit card from a lame bank.
I've had a debit card with Washington Mutual for almost eight years and I've never paid a fee.
Now I have little against PVCS (price tag being one thing, and some crappy network functionality that likely has been resolved by now).
If you mean how it takes something like 24 hours to upload a 2-3GB file (across a ~100MB/sec link to a remote server), then no, it hasn't been resolved.
PVCS has to be the most overrated piece of software ever. When I had to act as a liason between developers who were forced to use it and the PVCS administrators at work, I asked the PVCS admins to speak to the vendor about the insultingly slow performance. Their answer? That we should buy a cluster of Windows machines running Citrix that was local to the Unix database server which hosted PVCS and have all of the developers run the client from there instead of their desktops.
That was just the most laughable experience with their "support" team, since usually they wouldn't answer questions at all.
Buying PVCS is like buying an alarm clock that wakes you up by stabbing you in the eye with an icepick repeatedly. I'm sure it will do its job (sort of), but there are much better ways to get what you need.
This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
If there were going to be another terrorist attack, don't you think *something* would already have happened, even if it was just a Hammas-style bus bombing?
When even the normally insane Pat Buchanan writes a lengthy, thoughtful, and accurate essay on why the "war on terror" is a sham - and it gets the cover of a conservative magazine, that should set off alarm bells in everyones' heads.
Al Qaeda already got what they wanted - they blew up some Americans, sent the US on its way to becoming a totalitarian state, isolated it from its allies (particularly in the Middle East), *and* as a bonus Iraq will soon be converted into a hardline Islamic nation. They didn't even lose their leader in the process.
What could they possibly gain by sticking their necks out again?
Just cause the guy is black doesn't mean it's going to be Men in Black nor that there will be Hip Hop. JC what a bunch of stereo-typical crap.
Uh, somehow I don't think it's because he's black, but because he's a hip-hop musician.
I'm not familiar with his work, but usually when Hollywood hires a musician for a part, it's to cash in on the image they've already built up for themselves (e.g. David Bowie in Labyrinth, Sting in Dune, Henry Rollins in every film he's ever been in).
Actually Boeing has two ideas on the drawing board to counter the A380. One is a super-cruiser that would fly just shy of the speed of sound.
No, that project was cancelled last year. There isn't a big enough market for higher-priced, moderately faster air travel anymore. It's too bad, because the concept art of the plane looked awesome, like something that really should be flying in the 21st century.
I live in Seattle, and I can see that Boeing is doomed. They seem to have been infected by too much influence from the execs of the other companies they bought up. I'm sure they will continue contracting with the military, but Airbus is going to stomp them in the civilian market.
What we need is today's equivalent of a "2001" (though we can do without the incomprehensible plot).
2001 had a totally straightforward plot, if you read the book.
Some people find a beacon on the Moon, and follow its signal to Jupiter/Saturn (depending on whether you're reading the book or watching the film). Their computer goes crazy because its instructions to keep the nature of their journey a secret conflict with its basic programming to provide truthful and complete information. It kills off four of them, and the fifth one shuts the computer down. When he gets to the destination, he finds a giant black rectangle that turns out to be an entrypoint to an intergalactic transit system. It takes him to another world, where an advanced race assimilates him.
I know the film is deliberately lacking in certain details, but I've never understood the need people have to read anything more into it.
As for modern sci-fi, I started reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space a week ago, and it's excellent. I'm really irritated that the third book in the series (Absolution Gap) won't be out in the US until June, despite it having been released in Britain last year.
Vernor Vinge and William Gibson are also excellent authors. Eric Nylund's Signal books were fun too, although he does have some of his geological and astronomical information wrong.
Because they're not using shaped explosive charges, it's just a lump of metal. In fact it's usually described as a "crowbar".
Exactly. As soon as I saw the article description, I thought "Holy crap, someone is finally going to build a crowbar!"
See David's Sling (out of print, sadly) for a fictional book with extensive use of them.
Dang, dude. Calm down before you give yourself a coronary.
I'm a systems engineer for a corporation with about 12,000 Windows desktops and hundreds of Windows servers (we also use Solaris and IBM mainframe, but those aren't really relevant to this discussion).
The other guy is right - SCSI has always been a niche product for PC desktops. It's useful on servers, but the last PC workstation that we bought with SCSI was a dual-PPro 200 model, which should give you some idea of its age.
I had SCSI on my home system up until a few years ago, but only because I'd had bad experiences with IDE CD burners.
SCSI is pretty cool, but the vast majority of desktop users don't need the capabilities it provides. It was handier on the Mac, since external storage was so much more common on them (at least in my experience).
For desktop PC users, IDE (or SATA now, I guess) is plenty fast enough for hard drives and CD/DVD burners, and it's a LOT cheaper. USB fills the need for external devices, except for niche users who need high speed external hard drives or AV-capture capability.
The idea that we could grow neurons on silicon is one of those big steps that looks to lead us into the Johnny Mnemonic world that Gibson was talking about just a couple stories prior to this one.
I am waiting for the Alastair Reynolds-style Conjoiner conversion myself, but Johnny Mnemonic will do in the meantime.
As long as it's the short story and not the film, that is.
The people at petsmart also forgot to mention that very soon, the hamsters will try to KILL each other.
If they are from different litters, this is normal behaviour. Have you tried sprinkling baby powder on them so they can't tell each other apart by scent?
I haven't been around rodents for a LONG time, but that usually worked pretty well.
MIDI is not the same as General MIDI (which is what the vast majority of people's soundcards support). The sound module used in this contraption probably has a different, non-lame sound set.
Kind of like putting men on the moon?!
More like shrinking men and their submarine down to microscopic size and injecting them into someone's bloodstream, then enlarging them again once they're done.
Not everything that people say is impossible is some sort of persecuted idea that will have its day.
That would be a market bonanza.
For the five seconds it would take for the DEA to outlaw them. They don't care whether substances are addictive or not, as evidenced by the outlawing of LSD, the tryptamines, etc.
$7.99 is really expensive for a DVD.
No kidding.
I can get 5-packs of JVC made in Japan DVD-Rs at Fred Meyer for less than $15. DVD+Rs are usually a few dollars cheaper.
A top UK university recently had to curtail its animal research due to the sheer cost of security that would be required to ensure the safety of its researchers.
Good. While I'm sure there are some less inhuman uses for animal testing than others, I can't see how anyone can think that the vast majority of it (e.g. sticking rabbits in restraints so that cosmetics and cleaning chemicals can be put into their eyes, sewing kittens' eyes shut to determine what the effect is on them if they never experience visual stimuli, repeatedly breaking dogs' bones in veterinary school so that students can practice setting them, then killing the dogs when the semester is over, vivisecting animals without anaesthetic because "it might skew the test results," etc.) does anything to elevate us as a species.
Anyhow, since most people seem not to have actually *played* this game (which is a shame, since it's great):
You play two animals who are escaping from a caricaturized corporation which tests on animals. Part of your objective is to free as many of the other animals as you can on your way out.
I fail to see what's so potentially horrible about that. If the British are so afraid of exposing children to what is effectively a cartoon's point of view, then their position must be pretty weak to begin with.
So report them based on whatever contact information the recording left in the message.
There is none. If you get the call live, you can press nine to talk to a human who will take your credit card number, but I don't know of any way to weasel the company name out of them.
I am sure they will come up with something
They already have.
I get more telemarketing calls now (4-6+ a day) than I did *before* the registry.
I was shocked (well, not really) to find out just how many non-profit agencies there are who want to get their hands on my money, as well as companies that have done business with me in the past 18 months.
I'm sure they're using the "do-not-call" list as a source for numbers. I feel like a sucker for ever signing up.
The most irritating one is an autodialer that repeats a recording about how I've been selected to receive a magically shitty vacation for only $99, but doesn't mention the name of the company so I can't report them. I was getting multiple messages a week from it on my voicemail for months.
Honestly, I don't see why people would be too up in arms about this.
Constantly checking for counterfeits steals processing power that I should be able to use for things I want my PC to do.
The software is never going to be perfect, either. What recourse do I have if I'm designing something that looks enough like currency to trigger it, but actually has a legitimate purpose (e.g. a prop for a film)?
Finally, it's just another symptom of the nanny-state mentality that is pervading modern society. I shouldn't have automated systems watching over my every move to make sure I'm not doing anything unfavourable.
Not helped by real world events. When most of characters qualify as "terrorists".
I know we're right in the middle of the neo-McCarthy era, where everything that's bad is linked to terrorism, but this is just not true.
Burglary, robbery, smuggling, and stealing your sister back from a government experiment are illegal, but they are *not* acts of terrorism.
If the Firefly characters were terrorists, than anyone whose ancestors lived in the old West is descended from them too.
canceled after 11 shows.
If you buy the DVD set (see sig), you get three that weren't even aired. The saddest part is that they're just as excellent as the rest of the series.