The original Hummer was built by AM General. It has a tough aluminum body (doesn't rust). There are geared reductors on each wheel allowing the drive shafts to be placed above the center of the wheel, thus giving it good obstacle passing capability (try looking under one) but also limiting the top speed to a bit over 80 mph. I understand it's not extremely comfortable to sit in. I remember prices for the civilian version went from $60k to $80k but there were lots of options too.
GM bought the Hummer name from AM General to cash in on the reputation the Hummer has built. The H2 has NOTHING in common with the original Hummer except for the name.
H2 is built on a Tahoe/Suburban platform (not Tacoma, that's a Toyota). As for its off-road prowess, just look at its front and see how little real ground clearance there is. IMHO reviewers were influenced by the fact that this oddity is called Hummer and might have assumed it inherits anything from the original.
Someone at Microsoft decided that it's better to not scare users with too much technical information, and give them just bits of it (literally - it works/ it didn't work). IE is not exactly known for its informative error messages.
"Page cannot be displayed". Could it be because the site fell off the face of the planet, the file is missing on the server or your office network is down ? doesn't matter to IE so long as you can feel warm and fuzzy inside that it tried and it's definitely not your fault. Yeah, okay, let's put the actual error mesage at the bottom of the page so users need to scroll to see it, if they really want to, but why should they anyway. It is irritating, but this by itself probably made jobs for thousands of IT people who could "research" what happened.
Even with certs. IE refuses to work with wildcard certificates (*.domain.com) when the * part needs to match two names like a.b.domain.com. But the error message says "The cert does not match the name of the site", it pops on each SSL connection (i.e. each individual image on the page), and you can't say "OK, accept for this session" like you can when the cert expired.
I doubt that completely removes the risks. I bet most processors now use the 'net to submit data to their central database when they get it either by phone or on paper. It's the obvious thing to do, not many want to develop their own modem-based secure networks when this cheap Internet is already here.
RTFA or quit trolling. The problem is not the SSL certificates or who creates them, but the browsers accepting a "plain" encryption scheme when setting up the secure channel. I haven't actually seen this but it's entirely within reason that a "plain text" encryption was available in the SSL libraries for debugging communications in SSL apps.
I think it should be fairly simple to update the browsers so they require some encryption by default. Voila. Problem solved and we don't have to kill OpenSSL or "pay a root certificate authority" for the privilege of having encryption.
Since they already allowed a Hummer, that provision about not destroying everything in the vehicle's path must have been dropped.
So may I suggest that next year someone use one of these: GAZ 3937 Dragun or Vodnik. It runs on an amphibious platform, it costs less than a Humvee and it appears to be even better at all-terrain handling. And it has a better potential for irony.
Starting with Windows XP Service Pack 2, on processors which support it (according to the web page, currently AMD K8, Itanium, and AMD64), the stack and heap will not be executable. If you try to execute the stack or the heap, an exception will be raised and the code will not execute. In other words, execute page protection will soon be enforced, now that processors exist that support it. (Actually, I believe Windows XP for Itanium already used this new protection level, so those of you who have been playing around with your Itanium may have seen this already.)
If you were a good developer and followed the rules on page protections, then this has no effect on you. But if you cheated the rules and took advantage of specific hardware implementation details, you may find yourself in trouble. Consider yourselves warned.
Worth rehashing, because this story looks more and more normal every day, until we're going to discard it with a "naturally! and what are you complaining about ?"
Excerpt from the "The Right to Read" article:
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.
A quick google search turns up the link shown at the end of this post, from which I quote:
The gzip Recovery Toolkit
The gzip Recovery Toolkit has a program - gzrecover - that attempts to skip over bad data in a gzip archive and a patch to GNU tar that enables that program to skip over bad data and extract whatever files might be there. This saved me from exactly the above situation. Hopefully it will help you as well.
[...]
Here's an example:
$ ls *.gz
my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ gzrecover my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ ls *.recovered
my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered
$ tar --recover -xvf my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered >/tmp/tar.log 2>&1 &
$ tail -f/tmp/tar.log
> From: Dion Johnson <dionj@caldera.com>
> To: wht@minnie.tuhs.org
> Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 15:03:37 -0800
> Subject: Liberal license for ancient UNIX sources
> Dear Warren, and friends,
>
> I'm happy to let you know that Caldera International has placed
> the ancient UNIX releases (V1-7 and 32V) under a "BSD-style" license.
> I've attached a PDF of the license letter hereto.
The problem is, that kind of noise will only appear in areas with low exposure (due to the gain control which amplifies the noise). When the sensor is getting sufficient light, the noise becomes less pronounced to invisible.
Since you said "uniform noiseless areas (sky)" - funny thing is, the sky is one of the most difficult things to get an "uniform" picture of. All digital cameras I know of produce "sky noise" in various proportions.
A picture of the sky is how you can quickly check how noisy of an image the camera can make (part of it can be internal image processing, of course).
The camera saves focus, zoom and exposure settings in the EXIF header of each image. So you'd have to blow it up to real size so camera can focus at the same distance, and use the exact brightness so the camera uses the same exposure.
The camera stores information about focus distance, focal length (zoom) and exposure parameters as well as other data in each image (in EXIF format, commonly). Example:
Camera make : SANYO Electric Co.,Ltd
Camera model : J1
Date/Time : 2004:01:15 14:21:22
Resolution : 2048 x 1536
Flash used : No
Focal length : 6.0mm
Exposure time: 0.400 s (1/2)
Aperture : f/2.9
ISO equiv. : 113
Metering Mode: center weight
Exposure : program (auto)
(focus distance is manufacturer-dependent and jhead couldn't get it).
Also, you'd also have to account for the distortion effects that are measurable and reproducible with each camera model. For example, barrel or pincushion distortions compound if you take a shot of an existing picture.
You know why they are conceding, that's because the new HD DVD standard will have a different kind of protection, and this time they will get it "right" by patenting some part of it (hopefully not).
As a practical matter, history records that the aileron was invented by Glenn Curtiss in an attempt to get around the Wright patent on the airplane.
Well, there was this Romanian dude called Henry Coanda who kind of invented the aileron in 1910, together with a couple other nifty things such as the reactive engine, the gas tanks in the wings, the "sesquiplan" layout (double wing with the lower one shorter and hanging behind to improve aerodynamics) as well as discovering what is known as the "Coanda Effect".
I remember that NetApp (and other appliance companies such as EMC) are of the position that you must buy a new software license if you plan to use second-hand hardware. Just something to think about, it's probably worth negotiating that first with them before buying the hardware.
The machines are pretty good at what they do though, but the software and support licenses are fairly high.
I am sure we will find a way to defeat this "improvement". Possible options include (with the caveat that they might find another way to do this):
Have the browser (or proxy, for unfriendly browsers) pair a "www.domain.com A" lookup with a "domain.com NS" (expecting the NS query to return NXDOMAIN)
If the NS query does not fail and returns something, we can check that the domain nameserver's address is NOT owned by a Verisign or affiliated company (using black lists if we must, since this is not the kind of setup that is easy to change). I am expecting them to use a different set of nameservers for this than the roots (because the roots are critical infrastructure and the others are not, and also because these fake nameservers will be a different type of setup, database, management and all), so it should be fairly easy to catch. This might also cause the temporary domain pages to become unreachable, I am sure no one will miss them. I don't know how we would handle people who use redirects with them though.
If the NS record looks suspicious (such as if it has the same TTL as the www record, or some other indicator that suggests it has been returned and cached from the previous www.domain.com query) force a direct query to the root servers to make sure. This might cause unnecessary load on them but hey they are asking for it.
Variations of the above such as trying to query the SOA and MX records on the domain and check them against the www record.
Do whois on the domain (slow).
Do not use Verisign's root servers. The zone files for.com and.net are available. (requires significant resources, but I am sure someone out there, such as larger ISPs will do this)
Use bayesian filtering on the web pages to make the browser learn of the pages you do not want to see and the ones you do. This can probably work for a lot of other things too. Distribute a pre-taught package that is able to discriminate the verisign and other annoying content. Even better, have proxy modules for squid and the like that can enable the proxy to participate in the filtering.
I'm sure there are a lot more possibilities. Oooh let them try and do this.
What if I take and publish a photo of one of the painted public buildings ? What if a news report or published security camera footage happens to show it in the background ?
I have an idea, if this works, celebrities could just wear a cap with some copyrighted text on it, and no one could ever publish their photos without infringing on some copyright. Hah!
I am Daze McBride and I am sorry but cannot disclose where exactly are my copyrighted graffitis since they are a trade secret. I can say this much, that I now own ALL versions of this GTA software since they are a derivative work of my graffiti, as it's obvious GTA could not have reached this level of gaming experience without my technology, processes and methods. So I am sueing Take Two for 3 billion dollars.
Soon I will release my protection^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H licensing plan for GTA users so they can use the game legally without fear of being sued for copyright infringement. Stay tuned for details.
It's a sad day when a company decides to not build a product because the target market is "only" 1.8 million people.
What's next ? FOX deciding that SpeedVision (RIP) should carry more NASCAR because the rally/motorcycle racing market is much less than the oval-racing crowd ? Or Clear Channel not airing independent music because let's face it, Britney is simply more successful ? Or companies deciding to ignore other OSs because Windows sells more than all of them combined ? Oh wait...
I for one am glad Microsoft have finally identified the gaping security hole in that otherwise fine operating system that causes all these worms and insecurity on the Internet. Today is a great day for Windows users, for they are finally safe from all the Internet hackers once and for all.
If you forget about java and a VGA display, you can do a lot of fun things in C with a single microcontroller chip. Microchip makes an entire range of fairly cheap, very low-power microcontrollers, flash- or one-time programmable. There are also other companies that make enhanced versions of the venerable 80C51 such as the Philips 80C552 with integrated A/D converters and PWM outputs although depending on your soldering/wrapping abilities you might not want to use them as they have quite a few pins!
Microcontrollers are extremely small, low-powered devices containing a CPU, some code/data memory peripheral interfaces. You might have seen them at work in your preferred game station mod chip...
I think Motorola, AMD and Intel also have a line of powerful 68xxx- and x86-, respectively, -based microcontrollers that might be closer to the capabilities of a PC processor.
There are also some chips that you can program in Basic (ugh) via a small interpreter in their boot code. It really depends on what you are planning to do.
If this kind of licensing can be enforceable, this means that people buying used digital cameras, set-top boxes, DVD players, cellphones can be prevented from using them by means of a simple non-transferrable software license (since they all use some embedded software).
When you are buying the product, you are buying an appliance that is designed to do a certain job through whatever means, be it hardware or software. Maybe it's a bunch of gears, maybe it's microcode or visual basic, it should not matter.
Slashdot Mirror
GM bought the Hummer name from AM General to cash in on the reputation the Hummer has built. The H2 has NOTHING in common with the original Hummer except for the name.
H2 is built on a Tahoe/Suburban platform (not Tacoma, that's a Toyota). As for its off-road prowess, just look at its front and see how little real ground clearance there is. IMHO reviewers were influenced by the fact that this oddity is called Hummer and might have assumed it inherits anything from the original.
Sandstorm had been driving with new code for reducing speed in the corners.
Someone at Microsoft decided that it's better to not scare users with too much technical information, and give them just bits of it (literally - it works/ it didn't work). IE is not exactly known for its informative error messages.
"Page cannot be displayed". Could it be because the site fell off the face of the planet, the file is missing on the server or your office network is down ? doesn't matter to IE so long as you can feel warm and fuzzy inside that it tried and it's definitely not your fault. Yeah, okay, let's put the actual error mesage at the bottom of the page so users need to scroll to see it, if they really want to, but why should they anyway. It is irritating, but this by itself probably made jobs for thousands of IT people who could "research" what happened.
Even with certs. IE refuses to work with wildcard certificates (*.domain.com) when the * part needs to match two names like a.b.domain.com. But the error message says "The cert does not match the name of the site", it pops on each SSL connection (i.e. each individual image on the page), and you can't say "OK, accept for this session" like you can when the cert expired.
I doubt that completely removes the risks. I bet most processors now use the 'net to submit data to their central database when they get it either by phone or on paper. It's the obvious thing to do, not many want to develop their own modem-based secure networks when this cheap Internet is already here.
RTFA or quit trolling. The problem is not the SSL certificates or who creates them, but the browsers accepting a "plain" encryption scheme when setting up the secure channel. I haven't actually seen this but it's entirely within reason that a "plain text" encryption was available in the SSL libraries for debugging communications in SSL apps.
I think it should be fairly simple to update the browsers so they require some encryption by default. Voila. Problem solved and we don't have to kill OpenSSL or "pay a root certificate authority" for the privilege of having encryption.
Since they already allowed a Hummer, that provision about not destroying everything in the vehicle's path must have been dropped.
So may I suggest that next year someone use one of these: GAZ 3937 Dragun or Vodnik. It runs on an amphibious platform, it costs less than a Humvee and it appears to be even better at all-terrain handling. And it has a better potential for irony.
Quoting from the article linked below:
Starting with Windows XP Service Pack 2, on processors which support it (according to the web page, currently AMD K8, Itanium, and AMD64), the stack and heap will not be executable. If you try to execute the stack or the heap, an exception will be raised and the code will not execute. In other words, execute page protection will soon be enforced, now that processors exist that support it. (Actually, I believe Windows XP for Itanium already used this new protection level, so those of you who have been playing around with your Itanium may have seen this already.)
If you were a good developer and followed the rules on page protections, then this has no effect on you. But if you cheated the rules and took advantage of specific hardware implementation details, you may find yourself in trouble. Consider yourselves warned.
posted on Tuesday, November 04, 2003 3:38 AM
http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11 /04/55560.aspx
Worth rehashing, because this story looks more and more normal every day, until we're going to discard it with a "naturally! and what are you complaining about ?"
Excerpt from the "The Right to Read" article:
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.
The gzip Recovery Toolkit
/tmp/tar.log 2>&1 & /tmp/tar.log
http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/hacking/gzrt/gzrThe gzip Recovery Toolkit has a program - gzrecover - that attempts to skip over bad data in a gzip archive and a patch to GNU tar that enables that program to skip over bad data and extract whatever files might be there. This saved me from exactly the above situation. Hopefully it will help you as well.
[...]
Here's an example:
$ ls *.gz
my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ gzrecover my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ ls *.recovered
my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered
$ tar --recover -xvf my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered >
$ tail -f
http://www.linuxarkivet.nu/mlists/openbsd-announce /02/msg00001.html
> From: Dion Johnson <dionj@caldera.com>
> To: wht@minnie.tuhs.org
> Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 15:03:37 -0800
> Subject: Liberal license for ancient UNIX sources
> Dear Warren, and friends,
>
> I'm happy to let you know that Caldera International has placed
> the ancient UNIX releases (V1-7 and 32V) under a "BSD-style" license.
> I've attached a PDF of the license letter hereto.
Feels like it happened such a long time ago...
The problem is, that kind of noise will only appear in areas with low exposure (due to the gain control which amplifies the noise). When the sensor is getting sufficient light, the noise becomes less pronounced to invisible.
Since you said "uniform noiseless areas (sky)" - funny thing is, the sky is one of the most difficult things to get an "uniform" picture of. All digital cameras I know of produce "sky noise" in various proportions.
A picture of the sky is how you can quickly check how noisy of an image the camera can make (part of it can be internal image processing, of course).
The camera saves focus, zoom and exposure settings in the EXIF header of each image. So you'd have to blow it up to real size so camera can focus at the same distance, and use the exact brightness so the camera uses the same exposure.
original post.
The camera stores information about focus distance, focal length (zoom) and exposure parameters as well as other data in each image (in EXIF format, commonly). Example:
Also, you'd also have to account for the distortion effects that are measurable and reproducible with each camera model. For example, barrel or pincushion distortions compound if you take a shot of an existing picture.
You know why they are conceding, that's because the new HD DVD standard will have a different kind of protection, and this time they will get it "right" by patenting some part of it (hopefully not).
Well, there was this Romanian dude called Henry Coanda who kind of invented the aileron in 1910, together with a couple other nifty things such as the reactive engine, the gas tanks in the wings, the "sesquiplan" layout (double wing with the lower one shorter and hanging behind to improve aerodynamics) as well as discovering what is known as the "Coanda Effect".
http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/coanda.htm
The machines are pretty good at what they do though, but the software and support licenses are fairly high.
I'm sure there are a lot more possibilities. Oooh let them try and do this.
I have an idea, if this works, celebrities could just wear a cap with some copyrighted text on it, and no one could ever publish their photos without infringing on some copyright. Hah!
Soon I will release my protection^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H licensing plan for GTA users so they can use the game legally without fear of being sued for copyright infringement. Stay tuned for details.
What's next ? FOX deciding that SpeedVision (RIP) should carry more NASCAR because the rally/motorcycle racing market is much less than the oval-racing crowd ? Or Clear Channel not airing independent music because let's face it, Britney is simply more successful ? Or companies deciding to ignore other OSs because Windows sells more than all of them combined ? Oh wait...
Monoculture, here we come!
I for one am glad Microsoft have finally identified the gaping security hole in that otherwise fine operating system that causes all these worms and insecurity on the Internet. Today is a great day for Windows users, for they are finally safe from all the Internet hackers once and for all.
Microcontrollers are extremely small, low-powered devices containing a CPU, some code/data memory peripheral interfaces. You might have seen them at work in your preferred game station mod chip...
I think Motorola, AMD and Intel also have a line of powerful 68xxx- and x86-, respectively, -based microcontrollers that might be closer to the capabilities of a PC processor.
There are also some chips that you can program in Basic (ugh) via a small interpreter in their boot code. It really depends on what you are planning to do.
SCO vs IBM event timeline
When you are buying the product, you are buying an appliance that is designed to do a certain job through whatever means, be it hardware or software. Maybe it's a bunch of gears, maybe it's microcode or visual basic, it should not matter.