It seems that most voicemodems don't work with Asterisk. I'm not sure why, but they say something to do with them being half-duplex. Unless you are lucky enough to own one of the handful of modems that will actually work, you might have to invest in one of those Zaptel cards mentioned in the article.
I believe this stems from two roots. The first is the amount of "busy work" a typical student gets. Teachers often put very little thought into assignments and simply say "do these exercises from the book." A student then typically gets a "check" or something that just signifies completion.
I agree with this. Particularly in Maths, in my last few years of high school I would hardly ever complete homework assignments because the work set would involve doing the same exercise 20 or 30 times with small variations, presumably in an attempt to drive the "procedure" home. I decided that I would just do enough that I felt confident in my understanding of what was being taught and handed that in. I was old enough at this point that little was done about it aside from a periodic slap on the wrist, but when I think back to how much time I spent throughout my time at school doing these kinds of things it makes me quite sick.
(I'm in the UK, by the way. I assume the US education system operates similarly in this respect.)
I've often wished that the British education system allowed the flexibility of that in the US. Throughout my degree (since I was 18) my studies were strictly Computer Science. I would have enjoyed taking some introductory-level classes in some other, completely-different subjects, just to break it up a little.
I did okay learning a little about these things for myself in my spare time, but spending three years on the same subject does get a little too much. For my masters degree I switched to a slightly different subject, but it's still computer-related because that's what all of my qualifications say I can do.
I've heard some good things about The Open University; they structure their degrees in a similar way to that in the US, with courses contributing points and dependencies between courses. I've not looked into it in any great depth, but it seems that from there you can essentially design your own degree, although you do of course have to pick a "major" and do a certain quota of courses from that which decides what actually ends up on your certificate at the end.
It means that different elements of the work were created in different years. Some parts were released in 1998, while others in the years leading up to 2004. They should have changed it to 2005 to include the new elements in the latest release. Assuming a hypothetical copyright term of five years, some parts of Firefox would have become public domain in 2003, while the most recent security fixes would be covered until 2010. Of course, it would be up to the would-be distributor to determine which parts are public domain and which are not.
The copyright expiry year isn't included in the copyright statement, since it varies in different places and may be changed by alterations to the standard copyright term.
Maybe they should concentrate less on the expensive whizz-bang special effects and the overpaid superstars and just make a good story with some good actors. I'd watch 'em, just as I watched all of the old TV shows with the cheap hacks to create a nifty effect, and the unknown actors just playing a normal part rather than reprising their own type-cast character.
Today's movies cost far too much to make. You'd think that in the amount of time people have been making movies they'd have found a way to reduce costs like almost every other industry.
That would be great if all I wanted to do is run Asterisk. Unfortunately, I'm not made of money so I only have one server and have to run all of my services on that. I've successfully got Asterisk working for my SIP service already, but I would have loved a simple, near-pre-rolled distro of it back when I was installing it... something I can just install on my existing Linux box and have it work.
A few of my friends watched it on TV and then downloaded it to keep. A DVD full of MPEG4-encoded episodes beats a commercial box set, and it's easier than everyone hooking up equipment to record it themselves.
I'd probably buy more TV series on DVD if they came up with a DVD-like format that could store an entire US series on one disk.
The college I was at five years ago used RFID-based ID cards. They weren't used for attendance because I was attending an evening class where attendance was optional anyway, but they did track entering and leaving the college grounds as well as entry into "sensitive" areas like the computer labs and presumably other places where there was expensive equipment. My sister did a course at the same college a couple of years back and told me that they'd extended the scheme to cover most sections of the college more granularly.
I didn't really care at the time. They knew the class was on and I was likely to be there anyway, so I don't mind them having it on record that I was (or, indeed, wasn't). Using it to track attendance is just silly, for the reasons you describe in your post; I don't really see the privacy problem in the school itself.
This only really becomes an issue if shops that are aimed at school-age kids start reading RFIDs on entry and thus have a unique identifier for each student because they are forced to carry their RFID tags around with them at all times. A similar concern exists with the new RFID-based train cards in London, England: shops around stations could track repeat customers who have the cards. I think the exploitation of this is some way off, though.
I don't know anything about this fun new scheme from Macrovision, but one reason you can't just make an exact duplicate of a retail DVD on normal consumer equipment is that the part of the disc where the CSS key lives is not writable on a DVD-ROM. Without this key, players cannot decrypt the content on the disc.
If you've got the equipment you can, of course, press proper discs... but do you?
One of my friends has been playing around with things like this for years. While I'll admit that he lacks much of the background that the researchers who wrote these larger systems have, his experiences have been much the same as those of others including the Tierra project you describe here.
The programmer must artificially impose environmental constraints and it is usually easy to predict what the optimal "creature" will be given those constraints. It is very hard to create an artificial environment so complex that the creatures within it will evolve in unexpected ways, and there must be many, many constraints on the environment to avoid creating a completely optimal creature beyond which further evolution is impossible.
I'm not really in contact with said friend much anymore, but last I talked to him he had instead focused his attention on plant-like entities, because they are much more interesting to watch despite the fact that they don't really do anything "useful".
Allowing people to take their numbers with them is the opposite approach to the Internet. On the 'net, we let the numbers dictate the routing, which makes routing much simpler. To avoid user confusion, we layer on top the domain name system which not only avoids problems with location changes but also provides a much more memorable identifier for each endpoint.
Perhaps a DNS-like system for the telephone network should be considered. I'm imagining some kind of "nameserver" at each local exchange which the phones can talk to. It'll probably require changes to the hardware all over the place, though, so I guess it's unlikely to ever happen. At least VoIP can use symbolic identifiers. (It's still tied to your VoIP provider the way most people use it, of course. How long will it be before companies start to provide VoIP forwarding in similar vein to email forwarding, I wonder?)
If you are using it (GPLed Qt) internally within a company, then it could be argued that you must supply all interested employees with the source, which they would then be allowed to publically release under the GPL.
Unicode character 0x0456 is a Cyrillic character which usually uses the same glyph as the latin lowercase I. That would be a much better substitution than the inverted exclamation mark:
Sure, it would be pointless to do it now, but I'd be amazed if someone hadn't done it already given that it's been quite a while since the X11 version of Qt was released under the GPL.
Didn't someone external to Trolltech port the GPL-licenced code to Windows and licence it under the GPL? Without special clauses in the licence to prevent that, that would presumably be allowed.
Or, do the X11 and Windows versions differ so greatly that such a port is an insurmountable task?
My university has a long list of rules about passwords, and there are also some rejection reasons that aren't documented at all until you violate them. Changing passwords often takes several attempts, and thus I personally have taken to just using variations on a theme (since you must change every few months and can't reuse old passwords).
The problem with this technique is that if you take it too far you really limit the possible attack space. Sure, stop people using dictionary words because dictionary attacks are common, but beyond that you're just reducing the number of possible passwords and thus the time taken to brute force it.
Of course, in practice a brute-force attempt is likely to be noticed before it can get very far.
Presuably your college network required computers to join the domain, which XP Home can't do. It's perfectly able to do your average non-centralized network stuff.
However, there are plenty of other things that were deliberately disabled to "cheapen" XP Home. For example, most of the MMC snap-ins just display a message saying that you can't use them in XP Home, and there's no GUI for setting file permissions. (The cacls command-line utility is still supplied.)
I find it amusing that they actually put more effort into the cheaper product to make it "worse" than the Pro version rather than just improving the Pro version to exceed what they already had. If anything, the Home version should be more expensive!
In fact, as other people have been pointing out elsewhere SideTrack appears to do what I'm describing on a Mac laptop... or at least something like it. I don't have a Mac, so I've not tried it.
You have missed the point completely. Most people don't want to use a mouse with a laptop computer, they want to use the integrated touchpad. The integrated touchpad on an iBook has only one button and there's no (easy) way to change that.
My Dell laptop doesn't have a scroll wheel. Instead, a userspace part of the driver software tracks drags along the right and bottom edges of the touchpad and translates the movements into movements of the scrollbar. You can also "throw" the scrollbar down (release while still moving) and it'll keep scrolling until you put your finger back down still.
I find it even better than a scrollwheel, so much so that I installed the software on a friend's non-Dell laptop (as illegal as that probably is) so that she could do the same thing. Of course, this software doesn't work on a Mac, but I'm sure someone could create a similar thing for MacOS if they wanted to.
In case anyone is interested, the touchpad and software is created by Synaptics. They seem to have a generic version of the driver software, although I can't say whether or not that'll do everything that Dell's customized version does, or whether it'll work for non-Synaptics touchpads.
I clearly don't read enough Stargate websites. Despite the fact that I've followed Stargate intently for its entire run so far, I've never seen Tori'i written down before. Took me a good three minutes of head-scratching to figure out what that word was!
I had a similar moment (although it didn't take three minutes that time) the first time I saw naquada (naquida?) written down, since due to the way the actors pronounce it I'd got it into my head that it was "anaquada".
(There might be a small spoiler in the next paragraph. I'm not sure how much of SG-1 season 8 and Atlantis have been shown in the US to date, and as I recall we started the second half of the series early in the UK.)
Aside from all that, I do like Stargate. The current slight crossovers between SG1 and Atlantis, as silly as they perhaps are, is making me watch Atlantis despite my initial opinion that it was suffering from too much "spinoff-itis", and at least now it seems to be going somewhere. It's quite disappointing to finally meet The Ancients, though; after six or seven series of bigging them up, to find out that they're pretty-much just humans is a bit of a let down. I would have preferred them to remain a mystery.
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It seems that most voicemodems don't work with Asterisk. I'm not sure why, but they say something to do with them being half-duplex. Unless you are lucky enough to own one of the handful of modems that will actually work, you might have to invest in one of those Zaptel cards mentioned in the article.
I agree with this. Particularly in Maths, in my last few years of high school I would hardly ever complete homework assignments because the work set would involve doing the same exercise 20 or 30 times with small variations, presumably in an attempt to drive the "procedure" home. I decided that I would just do enough that I felt confident in my understanding of what was being taught and handed that in. I was old enough at this point that little was done about it aside from a periodic slap on the wrist, but when I think back to how much time I spent throughout my time at school doing these kinds of things it makes me quite sick.
(I'm in the UK, by the way. I assume the US education system operates similarly in this respect.)
I've often wished that the British education system allowed the flexibility of that in the US. Throughout my degree (since I was 18) my studies were strictly Computer Science. I would have enjoyed taking some introductory-level classes in some other, completely-different subjects, just to break it up a little.
I did okay learning a little about these things for myself in my spare time, but spending three years on the same subject does get a little too much. For my masters degree I switched to a slightly different subject, but it's still computer-related because that's what all of my qualifications say I can do.
I've heard some good things about The Open University; they structure their degrees in a similar way to that in the US, with courses contributing points and dependencies between courses. I've not looked into it in any great depth, but it seems that from there you can essentially design your own degree, although you do of course have to pick a "major" and do a certain quota of courses from that which decides what actually ends up on your certificate at the end.
The stated copyright year is just a formality. Copyright is automatic, so it's all copyrighted unless explicitly placed in the public domain.
It means that different elements of the work were created in different years. Some parts were released in 1998, while others in the years leading up to 2004. They should have changed it to 2005 to include the new elements in the latest release. Assuming a hypothetical copyright term of five years, some parts of Firefox would have become public domain in 2003, while the most recent security fixes would be covered until 2010. Of course, it would be up to the would-be distributor to determine which parts are public domain and which are not.
The copyright expiry year isn't included in the copyright statement, since it varies in different places and may be changed by alterations to the standard copyright term.
I guess you are probably talking about this article titled "What color are your bits?"
...and I guess I'm being a bit of a karma whore, but I liked the article, so never mind.
Maybe they should concentrate less on the expensive whizz-bang special effects and the overpaid superstars and just make a good story with some good actors. I'd watch 'em, just as I watched all of the old TV shows with the cheap hacks to create a nifty effect, and the unknown actors just playing a normal part rather than reprising their own type-cast character.
Today's movies cost far too much to make. You'd think that in the amount of time people have been making movies they'd have found a way to reduce costs like almost every other industry.
That would be great if all I wanted to do is run Asterisk. Unfortunately, I'm not made of money so I only have one server and have to run all of my services on that. I've successfully got Asterisk working for my SIP service already, but I would have loved a simple, near-pre-rolled distro of it back when I was installing it... something I can just install on my existing Linux box and have it work.
Where's that?
A few of my friends watched it on TV and then downloaded it to keep. A DVD full of MPEG4-encoded episodes beats a commercial box set, and it's easier than everyone hooking up equipment to record it themselves.
I'd probably buy more TV series on DVD if they came up with a DVD-like format that could store an entire US series on one disk.
The college I was at five years ago used RFID-based ID cards. They weren't used for attendance because I was attending an evening class where attendance was optional anyway, but they did track entering and leaving the college grounds as well as entry into "sensitive" areas like the computer labs and presumably other places where there was expensive equipment. My sister did a course at the same college a couple of years back and told me that they'd extended the scheme to cover most sections of the college more granularly.
I didn't really care at the time. They knew the class was on and I was likely to be there anyway, so I don't mind them having it on record that I was (or, indeed, wasn't). Using it to track attendance is just silly, for the reasons you describe in your post; I don't really see the privacy problem in the school itself.
This only really becomes an issue if shops that are aimed at school-age kids start reading RFIDs on entry and thus have a unique identifier for each student because they are forced to carry their RFID tags around with them at all times. A similar concern exists with the new RFID-based train cards in London, England: shops around stations could track repeat customers who have the cards. I think the exploitation of this is some way off, though.
I don't know anything about this fun new scheme from Macrovision, but one reason you can't just make an exact duplicate of a retail DVD on normal consumer equipment is that the part of the disc where the CSS key lives is not writable on a DVD-ROM. Without this key, players cannot decrypt the content on the disc.
If you've got the equipment you can, of course, press proper discs... but do you?
One of my friends has been playing around with things like this for years. While I'll admit that he lacks much of the background that the researchers who wrote these larger systems have, his experiences have been much the same as those of others including the Tierra project you describe here.
The programmer must artificially impose environmental constraints and it is usually easy to predict what the optimal "creature" will be given those constraints. It is very hard to create an artificial environment so complex that the creatures within it will evolve in unexpected ways, and there must be many, many constraints on the environment to avoid creating a completely optimal creature beyond which further evolution is impossible.
I'm not really in contact with said friend much anymore, but last I talked to him he had instead focused his attention on plant-like entities, because they are much more interesting to watch despite the fact that they don't really do anything "useful".
Allowing people to take their numbers with them is the opposite approach to the Internet. On the 'net, we let the numbers dictate the routing, which makes routing much simpler. To avoid user confusion, we layer on top the domain name system which not only avoids problems with location changes but also provides a much more memorable identifier for each endpoint.
Perhaps a DNS-like system for the telephone network should be considered. I'm imagining some kind of "nameserver" at each local exchange which the phones can talk to. It'll probably require changes to the hardware all over the place, though, so I guess it's unlikely to ever happen. At least VoIP can use symbolic identifiers. (It's still tied to your VoIP provider the way most people use it, of course. How long will it be before companies start to provide VoIP forwarding in similar vein to email forwarding, I wonder?)
If you are using it (GPLed Qt) internally within a company, then it could be argued that you must supply all interested employees with the source, which they would then be allowed to publically release under the GPL.
In practice it would be more complex, of course.
Unicode character 0x0456 is a Cyrillic character which usually uses the same glyph as the latin lowercase I. That would be a much better substitution than the inverted exclamation mark:
<a href="http://www.mіcrosoft.com/">Microsoft!< /a>
Sure, it would be pointless to do it now, but I'd be amazed if someone hadn't done it already given that it's been quite a while since the X11 version of Qt was released under the GPL.
I think by "use" they mean linking the library to your application. The application developer is the user of Qt, not the application user.
If you want to write an application and not release it under the GPL, you must purchase a commercial licence.
Didn't someone external to Trolltech port the GPL-licenced code to Windows and licence it under the GPL? Without special clauses in the licence to prevent that, that would presumably be allowed.
Or, do the X11 and Windows versions differ so greatly that such a port is an insurmountable task?
My university has a long list of rules about passwords, and there are also some rejection reasons that aren't documented at all until you violate them. Changing passwords often takes several attempts, and thus I personally have taken to just using variations on a theme (since you must change every few months and can't reuse old passwords).
The problem with this technique is that if you take it too far you really limit the possible attack space. Sure, stop people using dictionary words because dictionary attacks are common, but beyond that you're just reducing the number of possible passwords and thus the time taken to brute force it.
Of course, in practice a brute-force attempt is likely to be noticed before it can get very far.
Presuably your college network required computers to join the domain, which XP Home can't do. It's perfectly able to do your average non-centralized network stuff.
However, there are plenty of other things that were deliberately disabled to "cheapen" XP Home. For example, most of the MMC snap-ins just display a message saying that you can't use them in XP Home, and there's no GUI for setting file permissions. (The cacls command-line utility is still supplied.)
I find it amusing that they actually put more effort into the cheaper product to make it "worse" than the Pro version rather than just improving the Pro version to exceed what they already had. If anything, the Home version should be more expensive!
I enjoy programming. It's more fun and rewarding when you do it with other people.
Simple as that.
In fact, as other people have been pointing out elsewhere SideTrack appears to do what I'm describing on a Mac laptop... or at least something like it. I don't have a Mac, so I've not tried it.
You have missed the point completely. Most people don't want to use a mouse with a laptop computer, they want to use the integrated touchpad. The integrated touchpad on an iBook has only one button and there's no (easy) way to change that.
My Dell laptop doesn't have a scroll wheel. Instead, a userspace part of the driver software tracks drags along the right and bottom edges of the touchpad and translates the movements into movements of the scrollbar. You can also "throw" the scrollbar down (release while still moving) and it'll keep scrolling until you put your finger back down still.
I find it even better than a scrollwheel, so much so that I installed the software on a friend's non-Dell laptop (as illegal as that probably is) so that she could do the same thing. Of course, this software doesn't work on a Mac, but I'm sure someone could create a similar thing for MacOS if they wanted to.
In case anyone is interested, the touchpad and software is created by Synaptics. They seem to have a generic version of the driver software, although I can't say whether or not that'll do everything that Dell's customized version does, or whether it'll work for non-Synaptics touchpads.
I clearly don't read enough Stargate websites. Despite the fact that I've followed Stargate intently for its entire run so far, I've never seen Tori'i written down before. Took me a good three minutes of head-scratching to figure out what that word was!
I had a similar moment (although it didn't take three minutes that time) the first time I saw naquada (naquida?) written down, since due to the way the actors pronounce it I'd got it into my head that it was "anaquada".
(There might be a small spoiler in the next paragraph. I'm not sure how much of SG-1 season 8 and Atlantis have been shown in the US to date, and as I recall we started the second half of the series early in the UK.)
Aside from all that, I do like Stargate. The current slight crossovers between SG1 and Atlantis, as silly as they perhaps are, is making me watch Atlantis despite my initial opinion that it was suffering from too much "spinoff-itis", and at least now it seems to be going somewhere. It's quite disappointing to finally meet The Ancients, though; after six or seven series of bigging them up, to find out that they're pretty-much just humans is a bit of a let down. I would have preferred them to remain a mystery.