Anyone who is even casually acquainted with recent papers in semantic extraction, clustering, relevance, ambiguity resolution, et al knows that a claim of 95% accuracy is utter bullshit.
The gcc is not a linux compiler. The g stands for Gnu. The linux kernel and the systems built around it are most often compiled with the gcc. The gcc existed long before Linus's first kernel release. -- ken_i_m Founder, Bozeman Linux User Group
I live in an area that the telecom folks in Denver consider to be unworthy of their time. Dial-up is my the only option at present. Opening up spectrum will make it easier to set up wireless networking so that maybe I can get on the 'net at something faster then ~46 to 48kbs.
Frankly, I am surprised that Powell has the balls. Though I note that he has been sitting on this until IBM/AT&T/Intel announced their nationwide wireless network.
in "the 70's", which I remember very clearly; I was a record collector in those days!
um... that would be because anyone who listened to music was a record collector. It was the only option we had. (8-track was not a viable option. They died, a lot. Everyone I knew with an 8-track player had lot of dead tapes.)
This is my gripe. I bought it on vinyl, I bought it again on cassette tape, and once more on compact disc. That is three times that I have bought what comprises the core of my music collection. OK, I own those. They are mine. They are a part of my culture. The oldest album in my collection (that I bought when it was new) is over 30 years old. Copyright was originally set for 14 years. That was it an era when it took many months for a message to travel from New York to London. Ideas moved much, much slower then. Today, with Internet Time.... and the corporations have bought themselves copyright enforcement 50 years after the death of the author, have bought themselves the DMCA, and have bought themselves the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002.
OK, look at it this way. The RIAA, MPAA, Disney, et al have used their enormous profit margins to buy politicians to pass laws that enforce their business model and protect their profit margins. The judical system and the rest of the power elite has been crushing the idea of jury nullification for several generations now. Jury nullification has been a part of English Common Law going back many, many centuries. It is a way for the people to effectively question bad and corrupt laws.
The RIAA (and anyone else who wants to lock up ideas in the shackles of property ownership to the end of time) can piss off.
This is not about insecure company networks so much as it is about free neighborhood networks. All those free wireless neighborhood networks sprouting up in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, et al. If they continue to catch on and as they begin to overlap there will emerge a wireless Internet. People will be able to wirelessly send email, visit websites, trade files, and all the things they did on the original Internet but without the creeping centralization and control that is starting to pervert the Internet into just another Mass Media distribution system.
The real fly in the soup from the Feds point of view is that there would be no choke points such as ISPs to get ahold of it. Such a wireless mesh would truly route around any obstacles.
Just when the FBI has essentailly been given a green light to monitor the 'net, email, chatrooms, etc along comes a tech that has the potential to break their control. If you think they are going to sit back and let that happen I have a bridge to sell you.
In light of the FBI's claim that wireless networks are terrorist tools.
This type of mesh networking is the the ultimate in P2P networking. The FBI can't install their Carnivore network sniffer in a prevasively meaningful way in such a system.
M$ started a campain to stop the release of proof of concept code. Want to take a wild guess as to why they might want to do that? Remember, everything M$ does costs lots of money.
When researchers have worked with M$ in good faith, fixes have taken six months and more
to be released.
Exploit code gives me finer granularity on protecting my systems. Rather the hearing that
there is a hole in `foo' (which may not really be a hole) and completely turning off `foo'. (Such a non-hole announcement amounts to a DoS against `foo'.) The release of the code proves the existence of the hole, the nature of the hole, and gives me some leverage on closing the hole (pending a patch) that may be less crippling then turning `foo' off altogether.
`bar' may not have been mentioned in the announcement regarding the hole in `foo' but is
susceptable to the same sort of exploit. The more knowledge I have on the nature of a security hole the better I am able to assess the risk to my systems as a whole. Not just the first application that the hole was found in.
I would probably have to admit that the trend had already begun before Symantec bought SecurityFocus this past summer. But as someone who has been reading bugtraq and other similar lists daily for years I feel the vigor in the bugtraq community isn't quite there any more. Heh, time will tell.
There is a contingent of Blackhats that would agree that revealing exploit code is irresponsible. They are quite vocal against doing so. The reason is simple. They don't want the holes they exploit closed. The more noise they make the more assured I am that releasing proof of concept/exploit code is the right thing to do.
When the buffer overflow technique became common knowledge and discussion of it became mundane the communities of programmers where this had happened greatly reduced the number of such bugs. The programmer communities where these bugs are still produced have little feedback/discussion or where young programmers have an arrongance that precludes them from learning from history/older programmers. (The latter observation explains why so many of the same errors keep getting made in software on a generational timespan.)
MD5 checksums are only good for checking that the download process did not corrupt the file. More and more developers are using gpg or pgp to sign the checksums. So, this one should be labelled ignorance not fear.
The bullet labelled ignorance does not parse to a logical argument.
Sloth should be relabelled - if you can't do this sort of stuff with ease you have no business being a sys-admin.
Hardware is cheap. Having a development box for testing and compiling should be a given in this day and age.
There are many tools that provide much better control than Windows Update (loser) for example Red Hat Up2date Agent, Red Carpet, RPM, Ports, and on and on. Again if you are not competent enough to use this tools you have no business being a sys-admin (they are very easy to use).
If a company wants a person to do both sys-admin and some other task then they need to make sure that said individual is qualified to do both tasks. Now we are starting to get to some of the real underlying problem. Most companies (that fall into this category) don't have a job description for a sys-admin and thus don't have a clue what a qualified one looks like. This is where certs such as those from LPI or Red Hat come into play. They do not replace ignorance on the employers part but may act as a general guide for the clueless in hiring someone who may be qualified to actually do the work as it should be done. Of course, the best guide is demonstrated hands-on experience. (We have all met the comp-sci prof we would not let touch our server.)
I agree. This 1% is the most superficial bugs. Once M$ fixes these there will be another deeper crop waiting to cause crashes. And another after that and so on.
There is no way they will clean up everything in a year. Besides that it will not be many crops of bugs before they start hitting fundamental design mistakes. Design decisions that were made for marketing reasons rather than be based on sound computer science engineering principles.
I was at a security conference a couple of weeks ago and this subject came up. One of the attendees there is the CIO for a backbone provider who has been looking at these two edicts from Congress.
The problem? They conflict. And not just a little.
I have not had time to read these acts in full. Thus I am unable to offer specific details. The 40k feet view is that the Patriot Act requires user identification and burdensome record keeping that in detail is intended to make it extremely easy to determine who, what, when, where.
HIPAA on the other hand is almost the exact opposite.
A lot of time and effort went into the crafting of HIPPA. On the other hand, the Patriot Act was a kneejerk approval of a very focused special interest group's agenda. An agenda that they have been forcing before Congress every year for many years and were soundly shot down every year.
What the hell is it with the naming of the nasty ones that get passed by Congress? The "Patriot Act" guts all the ideals that the United States was founded on.
Macs != decent prices regardless of who you buy them from
Re:If it's not free it must be.... EVIL MUHAHAHAHA
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"Wi-fi is an largly unregulated spectrum. It's one of the few ones the common man has. And so it's pretty dang hard to swallow companies making a buck off something like this..."
But is is easy to swallow companies making a lot more than a buck off of radio spectrum because the govenment has given them a monopoly to use it? Or the vast tracts of spectrum set aside for the military that go unused?
I would ask him to come out here but at 1500 feet he would not even make it out to the highway let alone to the nearest backbone. Note: I rent a small place on a cattle ranch that is a mile down a gravel road from a rural route highway.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
Re:If it's not free it must be.... EVIL MUHAHAHAHA
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"Why are you so unwilling to actually PAY for a service that you use?"
This is a symptom of the onset of adult reality. It's a "reality bites"-thing when Mommy and Daddy start to cut the purse strings. Some folks have such a strong reaction to this that they are willing to give up all sorts of things if the government will just assume the role of Mommy and Daddy.
Folks who look to the government in this manner are sometimes called socialists. At other times they are called not so nice names. One of the basic assumptions of democracy is personal responsiblity.
This is an example of "having only one tool". The adage is about a hammer but in this case it is Free Software but defined as "free as in beer".
I love Open/Free Software, so much so I founded the local LUG. But nowhere (except by such clueless as Mr. Oh) in all of Open/Free Software philosophy does it say you can not make money. At no time has RMS ever said a person can not make money. He merely advocates limits to the models which might be used to make money. Providing a service is a viable model.
Let's look at it from another direction. Microsoft was guilty of using illegal business methods by providing IE free with its operating system. It was a loss leader for the purpose of breaking Netscape's business model.
Mr. Oh is giving away Internet access that costs his company money to break Starbuck's added-service model. Bandwidth costs money. Perhaps in some future utopia bandwidth will be free but today it costs money. It costs significant amounts of money to create/obtain more bandwidth. There is no "copy" command for creating more bandwidth. CD burners can not make more for the price of a blank.
He is a luser when it comes to wireless. 1500 feet is only 500 yards, barely over a quarter mile. While the car is a mobile point, the link between it and his office is still a point-to-point link. The APs mounted on the car are point-to-multipoint and have a range of only 300 feet!?! Off-the-shelf equipment does better than this. I am currently playing with some gear at 1 1/2 miles without modifications.
It is my sincere hope that wireless will massively drive down the cost of bandwidth. Out where I live APs have to have a minimum of two miles range or they would not be cost effective. Point-to-point links for backhaul need to run 10 miles or more at a shot. Out past me from town those distances rise rapidly. This is doable tech. Wireless ISPs in rural settings are the fastest growing sector of the ISP market. There are now 3000+ wISPs in the US. In rural areas wireless is the only option possible for boardband access. I and millions of other rural residents will never have the option of cable or xDSL.
Thankfully this infrastructure is being built today by commercial, co-op, and community organizations.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m Chief Gadgeteer, Elegant Innovations
As one poster commented, "pay me $5000 per year and I will vouch for ya". 5k $ is a lot of money for an individual or small business. All that money so that someone (JBOSS) can put up a website and print up some dead tree product that basically asserts that they are an authority. Hum... I think I will advertise elsewhere.
Support your local user group. Do things for the community and put it on the lug website. This establishes that you are civic minded and advertises your skills. It can be something as simple as giving a presentation. Which if you are a consultant, you should be jumping at every chance to get out there and talk about what you do in any venue you can find. Clients will not cause your phone to ring if they do not know it's there.
For example, if you are going to be anywhere near Bozeman, Montana the last Thursday of the month contact me about talking to a room full of people. Additionally, you and your company name will end up in the monthly newsletter which is published via mailing list and on the web.
Human networking at the grassroots level.
ken_i_m BozemanLUG dot org "Doing my part to spread the Free and Open Software memes"
Your use of the verb "netstumbling" attempts to provide validity to a scriptkiddie tool in the way that intellectual property asserts validity to ownership claims beyond those provided by law. Specifically, by attempting to redefine the terms used in public debate by introducing a term which if accepted grants said validity and moves the debate onto other issues. As practiced, the use of Netstumbler does not contribute to the improved security of wireless networks. In practice, through the use of "warchalking" and on-line database mapping it contributes to the breaching of said systems.
As my reference to "draconian laws" indicates the last thing I am suggesting is a legal bandaid. I am questioning what appears to be a lack of thinking through the implications of what is being done.
As for the fallacious argument of using such a tool for a site survey, it is very weak. Wireless networks are not even the majority of usage in the spectrums in question. Ask anyone who actually does site surveying (for a WISP, for example) and they will tell you that the proper tool is a spectrum analyzer.
There are some wireless equipment vendors that promote the use of propietary protocols as a defense against wardriving. If the use of Netstumbler continues to grow as a "kewl" thing to do these vendors may well succeed. Then there will be a fine mess of incompatible equipment and protocols holding back the adoption of wireless.
Yes, the security of the 802.11x protocols needs to be improved. "Warchalking" and "netstumbling" does not contribute in a positive manner to that improvement.
I would no more welcome making the use of such programs illegal then I do laws against smoking (Disclaimer: I am and always have been a non-smoker). Yet, like smoking I would gently discourage its use. Which is what I am doing by questioning the rising tide of the acceptance of such practice.
(BTW, I define "hacking" in the manner of the old schoolers, which is why I used the term "scriptkiddie". "Cracker" could also be used.)
It seems that it has become hip to download scriptkiddie tools *cough*netstumbler*cough* to hack networks. What part of "scriptkiddie" is a low-level, lifeform similar to scum that these hipsters don't get? The 'l33+ $ki77z d0odz behind the above unmentioned tool have been in the irc scene for a number of years. A scene not known for legal use of other folk's servers.
Leaving the MPAA and the RIAA and their arguments out of this. This type of activity is often cited as justification for enacting the draconian laws that we all hate.
It is primarily this activity that is being used by the Media and others (not friends of wireless) to spread FUD about how wireless is not to be trusted and is a giant security hole. Wireless is our only hope of getting out from under the thumb of the telecos. (Telecos == that ever increasing bill you have been paying every month, all of your life.)
Want to have to submit DNA sample to your "trusted computing platform" so that you can log on? Then support this type of scriptkiddie activity. -- I think, therefore, ken_i_m
Pawn shops are like a bizaar where you haggle with the shop owner. View it as an exercise in social engineering. The first thing to know is that pawn shops only pay for the metal the rock is set in. Ignore what the setting looks like, look at the rock(s). Haggle like crazy. Any money you pay beyond the value of the metal is like buying bluesky. Once you have your rocks have them set in a custom ring by a small independent jeweler. She will have a one of a kind ring to wear and you will not have supported the extraction of yet another rock from the ground.
meetup.com's website said not enough people had signed up for a/. meetup here. um... whatever. There were 5 of us at the BozemanLUG meeting. The LUG meets the last Thursday of each month so we will have a conflict anyway. Nonetheless, I am surprised because Bozeman is a very high-tech oriented area. Linux Meetup Day is August 6th and there will be one of those here.
-- I think, therefore, ken_i_m "Doing my part to spread the open and free software memes."
I have a very good friend who is a professional 3D artist. Among his various qualifications he is an instructor at the college level. I sent him a link to this article and asked for his comment. I thought the rest of/. would be interested in what he has to say:
Hmm... while I can't begin to explain hardware considerations (you know I'm no engineer!), I can say this:
This is a perfect example of the different trains of thought between artists and engineers. It seems to me, this fellow is looking at the situation backwards.
" a modeling package more geared to hardware capabilities,...... adapting an existing modeler to make it more hardware friendly "
??? That's like cursing the horse's design because he can't pull a cart.
It's only been VERY recently that game engines and real-time texture rendering engines/ hardware have evolved to being slightly worth a shit. And, that is due to the fact that 3D imaging tools haven't sat around waiting for game hardware or anyone else to catch up. They've striven to provide the artists with the tools and capabilities they need to produce true-to-life images. That's the Grail they seek.
And, haven't the amazing advances in 3D imaging been the major player in what has pushed the game industy's technological advancement? I seriously doubt gaming would have become a $9 billion annual industry if we were still playing Frogger and Pac Man.
Ironically, it's the game industry's lack of standardization that's the leading problem. There are literally thousands of game engines out there. And, of course, cutting edge hardware today is under-strength tomorrow. Game Developers would love to be able create games they knew everyone could play. Those could be marketed to X-box, PS2, Cube, PC, and online users all at the same time, instead, each has it's own special considerations that have to be designed for.
As a 3D artist I can tailor my project's creation to suit my output needs, whether that's real-time or pre-rendered. The modelling program you discribe sounds to me like going to an auto mechanic, chaulking a circle on the ground, dumping over his toolbox, throwing away all the tools that didn't land inside the circle, and then asking him to repair your car.
Why haven't 3D developers designed software specifically for game development? You should ask; How could they? Why should they?
The bit about "polygon strips/fans"... I don't know what that means, clearly I could learn something from this gentleman. He goes on to say how it's very hard to "avoid generating polygons that will never be seen (the inside surface of a pipe for example)." To this an artist would ask; "Why didn't you just model a cylinder instead of a pipe?" Unless I can actually see the inside of this pipe it is only past experience that tells me it's hollow. Further more, if this isn't a prominant prop in my scene, I could even use a 2-dimensional plane with a gradiated texture that would give the illusion it's a rounded piece of geometry. Thus, this "pipe' has been reduced to just one polygon. maybe he might be able to learn something from me too.
Ah...the smell of vaporware in the morning. It smells like profit at any cost from someone with 40 billion dollars in the bank.
Corporations and governments are interested in only power and money/money and power. Infringing on your privacy, stifling innovation, or otherwise degrading quality of life not directly related to more money and power for corporations and governments is but a small price to pay.
Joe Mega-corp contacts IPSTAG holder. "Hey, make the www.joe-mega-corp-sucks.com website go away."
IPSTAG holder: "No problem."
IPSTAG holder kills DNS service for www.joe-mega-corp-sucks.com. Does not bother to make contact with webmaster for two reasons. 1) Does not know why Joe Mega-corp wants the site killed. 2) Too much effort to go to all that trouble of actually contacting them. It is easier to simply stop the DNS service and eventually the webmaster will figure out that no one can see them anymore.
Think this does not happen? Sure it does. Interactive Digital Software Association brags of 3000 "takedowns". This is one organization. There are quite a few self-appointed-types doing "takedowns" for many different reasons. Got a political view? There is someone who disagrees with it. Maybe enough to get your website on a "takedown" list.
MAP was scheduled to launch last fall. The astronomy club I belong to does a winter lecture series. March of 2000 Dr. Niels Cornish (Physics Dept. at MSU) gave a talk about the physics involved and what they are looking for. It promises to provide considerable data about the early universe via a technique different from the bulk of the work done to date. Way cool stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who is even casually acquainted with recent papers in semantic extraction, clustering, relevance, ambiguity resolution, et al knows that a claim of 95% accuracy is utter bullshit.
The gcc is not a linux compiler. The g stands for Gnu. The linux kernel and the systems built around it are most often compiled with the gcc. The gcc existed long before Linus's first kernel release.
--
ken_i_m
Founder, Bozeman Linux User Group
I live in an area that the telecom folks in Denver consider to be unworthy of their time. Dial-up is my the only option at present. Opening up spectrum will make it easier to set up wireless networking so that maybe I can get on the 'net at something faster then ~46 to 48kbs.
Frankly, I am surprised that Powell has the balls. Though I note that he has been sitting on this until IBM/AT&T/Intel announced their nationwide wireless network.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
um... that would be because anyone who listened to music was a record collector. It was the only option we had. (8-track was not a viable option. They died, a lot. Everyone I knew with an 8-track player had lot of dead tapes.)
This is my gripe. I bought it on vinyl, I bought it again on cassette tape, and once more on compact disc. That is three times that I have bought what comprises the core of my music collection. OK, I own those. They are mine. They are a part of my culture. The oldest album in my collection (that I bought when it was new) is over 30 years old. Copyright was originally set for 14 years. That was it an era when it took many months for a message to travel from New York to London. Ideas moved much, much slower then. Today, with Internet Time.... and the corporations have bought themselves copyright enforcement 50 years after the death of the author, have bought themselves the DMCA, and have bought themselves the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002.
OK, look at it this way. The RIAA, MPAA, Disney, et al have used their enormous profit margins to buy politicians to pass laws that enforce their business model and protect their profit margins. The judical system and the rest of the power elite has been crushing the idea of jury nullification for several generations now. Jury nullification has been a part of English Common Law going back many, many centuries. It is a way for the people to effectively question bad and corrupt laws.
The RIAA (and anyone else who wants to lock up ideas in the shackles of property ownership to the end of time) can piss off.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
This is not about insecure company networks so much as it is about free neighborhood networks. All those free wireless neighborhood networks sprouting up in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, et al. If they continue to catch on and as they begin to overlap there will emerge a wireless Internet. People will be able to wirelessly send email, visit websites, trade files, and all the things they did on the original Internet but without the creeping centralization and control that is starting to pervert the Internet into just another Mass Media distribution system.
The real fly in the soup from the Feds point of view is that there would be no choke points such as ISPs to get ahold of it. Such a wireless mesh would truly route around any obstacles.
Just when the FBI has essentailly been given a green light to monitor the 'net, email, chatrooms, etc along comes a tech that has the potential to break their control. If you think they are going to sit back and let that happen I have a bridge to sell you.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
In light of the FBI's claim that wireless networks are terrorist tools.
This type of mesh networking is the the ultimate in P2P networking. The FBI can't install their Carnivore network sniffer in a prevasively meaningful way in such a system.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
I would probably have to admit that the trend had already begun before Symantec bought SecurityFocus this past summer. But as someone who has been reading bugtraq and other similar lists daily for years I feel the vigor in the bugtraq community isn't quite there any more. Heh, time will tell.
There is a contingent of Blackhats that would agree that revealing exploit code is irresponsible. They are quite vocal against doing so. The reason is simple. They don't want the holes they exploit closed. The more noise they make the more assured I am that releasing proof of concept/exploit code is the right thing to do.
When the buffer overflow technique became common knowledge and discussion of it became mundane the communities of programmers where this had happened greatly reduced the number of such bugs. The programmer communities where these bugs are still produced have little feedback/discussion or where young programmers have an arrongance that precludes them from learning from history/older programmers. (The latter observation explains why so many of the same errors keep getting made in software on a generational timespan.)
YMMV 8-)
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
MD5 checksums are only good for checking that the download process did not corrupt the file. More and more developers are using gpg or pgp to sign the checksums. So, this one should be labelled ignorance not fear.
The bullet labelled ignorance does not parse to a logical argument.
Sloth should be relabelled - if you can't do this sort of stuff with ease you have no business being a sys-admin.
Hardware is cheap. Having a development box for testing and compiling should be a given in this day and age.
There are many tools that provide much better control than Windows Update (loser) for example Red Hat Up2date Agent, Red Carpet, RPM, Ports, and on and on. Again if you are not competent enough to use this tools you have no business being a sys-admin (they are very easy to use).
If a company wants a person to do both sys-admin and some other task then they need to make sure that said individual is qualified to do both tasks. Now we are starting to get to some of the real underlying problem. Most companies (that fall into this category) don't have a job description for a sys-admin and thus don't have a clue what a qualified one looks like. This is where certs such as those from LPI or Red Hat come into play. They do not replace ignorance on the employers part but may act as a general guide for the clueless in hiring someone who may be qualified to actually do the work as it should be done. Of course, the best guide is demonstrated hands-on experience. (We have all met the comp-sci prof we would not let touch our server.)
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
I agree. This 1% is the most superficial bugs. Once M$ fixes these there will be another deeper crop waiting to cause crashes. And another after that and so on.
There is no way they will clean up everything in a year. Besides that it will not be many crops of bugs before they start hitting fundamental design mistakes. Design decisions that were made for marketing reasons rather than be based on sound computer science engineering principles.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
I was at a security conference a couple of weeks ago and this subject came up. One of the attendees there is the CIO for a backbone provider who has been looking at these two edicts from Congress.
The problem? They conflict. And not just a little.
I have not had time to read these acts in full. Thus I am unable to offer specific details. The 40k feet view is that the Patriot Act requires user identification and burdensome record keeping that in detail is intended to make it extremely easy to determine who, what, when, where.
HIPAA on the other hand is almost the exact opposite.
A lot of time and effort went into the crafting of HIPPA. On the other hand, the Patriot Act was a kneejerk approval of a very focused special interest group's agenda. An agenda that they have been forcing before Congress every year for many years and were soundly shot down every year.
What the hell is it with the naming of the nasty ones that get passed by Congress? The "Patriot Act" guts all the ideals that the United States was founded on.
I better stop here before I started on rant mode.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
It wasn't intended for long term use but a file server on the our LAN that is an LFS based system now has:
...
$ uptime
6:37am up 479 days, 21:26
It is nearly out of drive space so it will be taken off-line in the near future for hardware upgrade.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
Chief Gadgeteer
Elegant Innovations
Macs != decent prices
regardless of who you buy them from
But is is easy to swallow companies making a lot more than a buck off of radio spectrum because the govenment has given them a monopoly to use it? Or the vast tracts of spectrum set aside for the military that go unused?
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
I would ask him to come out here but at 1500 feet he would not even make it out to the highway let alone to the nearest backbone. Note: I rent a small place on a cattle ranch that is a mile down a gravel road from a rural route highway.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
This is a symptom of the onset of adult reality. It's a "reality bites"-thing when Mommy and Daddy start to cut the purse strings. Some folks have such a strong reaction to this that they are willing to give up all sorts of things if the government will just assume the role of Mommy and Daddy.
Folks who look to the government in this manner are sometimes called socialists. At other times they are called not so nice names. One of the basic assumptions of democracy is personal responsiblity.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
This is an example of "having only one tool". The adage is about a hammer but in this case it is Free Software but defined as "free as in beer".
I love Open/Free Software, so much so I founded the local LUG. But nowhere (except by such clueless as Mr. Oh) in all of Open/Free Software philosophy does it say you can not make money. At no time has RMS ever said a person can not make money. He merely advocates limits to the models which might be used to make money. Providing a service is a viable model.
Let's look at it from another direction. Microsoft was guilty of using illegal business methods by providing IE free with its operating system. It was a loss leader for the purpose of breaking Netscape's business model.
Mr. Oh is giving away Internet access that costs his company money to break Starbuck's added-service model. Bandwidth costs money. Perhaps in some future utopia bandwidth will be free but today it costs money. It costs significant amounts of money to create/obtain more bandwidth. There is no "copy" command for creating more bandwidth. CD burners can not make more for the price of a blank.
He is a luser when it comes to wireless. 1500 feet is only 500 yards, barely over a quarter mile. While the car is a mobile point, the link between it and his office is still a point-to-point link. The APs mounted on the car are point-to-multipoint and have a range of only 300 feet!?! Off-the-shelf equipment does better than this. I am currently playing with some gear at 1 1/2 miles without modifications.
It is my sincere hope that wireless will massively drive down the cost of bandwidth. Out where I live APs have to have a minimum of two miles range or they would not be cost effective. Point-to-point links for backhaul need to run 10 miles or more at a shot. Out past me from town those distances rise rapidly. This is doable tech. Wireless ISPs in rural settings are the fastest growing sector of the ISP market. There are now 3000+ wISPs in the US. In rural areas wireless is the only option possible for boardband access. I and millions of other rural residents will never have the option of cable or xDSL.
Thankfully this infrastructure is being built today by commercial, co-op, and community organizations.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m
Chief Gadgeteer, Elegant Innovations
As one poster commented, "pay me $5000 per year and I will vouch for ya". 5k $ is a lot of money for an individual or small business. All that money so that someone (JBOSS) can put up a website and print up some dead tree product that basically asserts that they are an authority. Hum... I think I will advertise elsewhere.
Support your local user group. Do things for the community and put it on the lug website. This establishes that you are civic minded and advertises your skills. It can be something as simple as giving a presentation. Which if you are a consultant, you should be jumping at every chance to get out there and talk about what you do in any venue you can find. Clients will not cause your phone to ring if they do not know it's there.
For example, if you are going to be anywhere near Bozeman, Montana the last Thursday of the month contact me about talking to a room full of people. Additionally, you and your company name will end up in the monthly newsletter which is published via mailing list and on the web.
Human networking at the grassroots level.
ken_i_m BozemanLUG dot org
"Doing my part to spread the Free and Open Software memes"
Your use of the verb "netstumbling" attempts to provide validity to a scriptkiddie tool in the way that intellectual property asserts validity to ownership claims beyond those provided by law. Specifically, by attempting to redefine the terms used in public debate by introducing a term which if accepted grants said validity and moves the debate onto other issues. As practiced, the use of Netstumbler does not contribute to the improved security of wireless networks. In practice, through the use of "warchalking" and on-line database mapping it contributes to the breaching of said systems.
As my reference to "draconian laws" indicates the last thing I am suggesting is a legal bandaid. I am questioning what appears to be a lack of thinking through the implications of what is being done.
As for the fallacious argument of using such a tool for a site survey, it is very weak. Wireless networks are not even the majority of usage in the spectrums in question. Ask anyone who actually does site surveying (for a WISP, for example) and they will tell you that the proper tool is a spectrum analyzer.
There are some wireless equipment vendors that promote the use of propietary protocols as a defense against wardriving. If the use of Netstumbler continues to grow as a "kewl" thing to do these vendors may well succeed. Then there will be a fine mess of incompatible equipment and protocols holding back the adoption of wireless.
Yes, the security of the 802.11x protocols needs to be improved. "Warchalking" and "netstumbling" does not contribute in a positive manner to that improvement.
I would no more welcome making the use of such programs illegal then I do laws against smoking (Disclaimer: I am and always have been a non-smoker). Yet, like smoking I would gently discourage its use. Which is what I am doing by questioning the rising tide of the acceptance of such practice.
(BTW, I define "hacking" in the manner of the old schoolers, which is why I used the term "scriptkiddie". "Cracker" could also be used.)
It seems that it has become hip to download scriptkiddie tools *cough*netstumbler*cough* to hack networks.
What part of "scriptkiddie" is a low-level, lifeform similar to scum that these hipsters don't get?
The 'l33+ $ki77z d0odz behind the above unmentioned tool have been in the irc scene for a number of years. A scene not known for legal use of other folk's servers.
Leaving the MPAA and the RIAA and their arguments out of this. This type of activity is often cited as justification for enacting the draconian laws that we all hate.
It is primarily this activity that is being used by the Media and others (not friends of wireless) to spread FUD about how wireless is not to be trusted and is a giant security hole. Wireless is our only hope of getting out from under the thumb of the telecos. (Telecos == that ever increasing bill you have been paying every month, all of your life.)
Want to have to submit DNA sample to your "trusted computing platform" so that you can log on? Then support this type of scriptkiddie activity.
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I think, therefore, ken_i_m
Pawn shops are like a bizaar where you haggle with the shop owner. View it as an exercise in social engineering. The first thing to know is that pawn shops only pay for the metal the rock is set in. Ignore what the setting looks like, look at the rock(s). Haggle like crazy. Any money you pay beyond the value of the metal is like buying bluesky. Once you have your rocks have them set in a custom ring by a small independent jeweler. She will have a one of a kind ring to wear and you will not have supported the extraction of yet another rock from the ground.
meetup.com's website said not enough people had signed up for a /. meetup here. um... whatever. There were 5 of us at the BozemanLUG meeting. The LUG meets the last Thursday of each month so we will have a conflict anyway. Nonetheless, I am surprised because Bozeman is a very high-tech oriented area. Linux Meetup Day is August 6th and there will be one of those here.
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I think, therefore, ken_i_m
"Doing my part to spread the open and free software memes."
Hmm... while I can't begin to explain hardware considerations (you know I'm no engineer!), I can say this:
This is a perfect example of the different trains of thought between artists and engineers. It seems to me, this fellow is looking at the situation backwards.
" a modeling package more geared to hardware capabilities,
??? That's like cursing the horse's design because he can't pull a cart.
It's only been VERY recently that game engines and real-time texture rendering engines/ hardware have evolved to being slightly worth a shit. And, that is due to the fact that 3D imaging tools haven't sat around waiting for game hardware or anyone else to catch up. They've striven to provide the artists with the tools and capabilities they need to produce true-to-life images. That's the Grail they seek.
And, haven't the amazing advances in 3D imaging been the major player in what has pushed the game industy's technological advancement? I seriously doubt gaming would have become a $9 billion annual industry if we were still playing Frogger and Pac Man.
Ironically, it's the game industry's lack of standardization that's the leading problem. There are literally thousands of game engines out there. And, of course, cutting edge hardware today is under-strength tomorrow. Game Developers would love to be able create games they knew everyone could play. Those could be marketed to X-box, PS2, Cube, PC, and online users all at the same time, instead, each has it's own special considerations that have to be designed for.
As a 3D artist I can tailor my project's creation to suit my output needs, whether that's real-time or pre-rendered. The modelling program you discribe sounds to me like going to an auto mechanic, chaulking a circle on the ground, dumping over his toolbox, throwing away all the tools that didn't land inside the circle, and then asking him to repair your car.
Why haven't 3D developers designed software specifically for game development? You should ask; How could they? Why should they?
The bit about "polygon strips/fans" ... I don't know what that means, clearly I could learn something from this gentleman. He goes on to say how it's very hard to "avoid generating polygons that will never be seen (the inside surface of a pipe for example)." To this an artist would ask; "Why didn't you just model a cylinder instead of a pipe?" Unless I can actually see the inside of this pipe it is only past experience that tells me it's hollow. Further more, if this isn't a prominant prop in my scene, I could even use a 2-dimensional plane with a gradiated texture that would give the illusion it's a rounded piece of geometry. Thus, this "pipe' has been reduced to just one polygon. maybe he might be able to learn something from me too.
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Chief Gadgeteer
Elegant Innovations
Corporations and governments are interested in only power and money/money and power. Infringing on your privacy, stifling innovation, or otherwise degrading quality of life not directly related to more money and power for corporations and governments is but a small price to pay.
Disadvantages:
Joe Mega-corp contacts IPSTAG holder. "Hey, make the www.joe-mega-corp-sucks.com website go away."
IPSTAG holder: "No problem."
IPSTAG holder kills DNS service for www.joe-mega-corp-sucks.com. Does not bother to make contact with webmaster for two reasons. 1) Does not know why Joe Mega-corp wants the site killed. 2) Too much effort to go to all that trouble of actually contacting them. It is easier to simply stop the DNS service and eventually the webmaster will figure out that no one can see them anymore.
Think this does not happen? Sure it does. Interactive Digital Software Association brags of 3000 "takedowns". This is one organization. There are quite a few self-appointed-types doing "takedowns" for many different reasons. Got a political view? There is someone who disagrees with it. Maybe enough to get your website on a "takedown" list.
MAP was scheduled to launch last fall. The astronomy club I belong to does a winter lecture series. March of 2000 Dr. Niels Cornish (Physics Dept. at MSU) gave a talk about the physics involved and what they are looking for. It promises to provide considerable data about the early universe via a technique different from the bulk of the work done to date. Way cool stuff.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m