I came here to post this. What's more, they use double density disks. Even the newer machines. What's a floppy drive cost for these things? Hundreds of dollars, of course. It's pretty silly.
And the quality of floppy disks has been going down. We get a lot more disks now that fail quickly. My last shop wiped/wrote disks for every job, which is more likely to wear them out quickly of course, but this place keeps a mirror of all the files on our server on disks out in the shop. Still, we run into files with bad sectors in them more often in the new disks than the old ones.
There are solutions that let you use USB sticks now, but again... very expensive.
"Steel has also come up with the E=mc2 of procrastination, a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (G) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D). It looks like this and uses the Greek letter (capital gamma): Utility = E x V / GD"
Something interesting to note here -- if you are something like me, you may have built up an expectancy of failure not due to skill, but due to procrastination. That is, I tend to expect that I won't complete a project, not that I am incapable of doing so. E = 0 is a pretty bad case given the math! How does one rectify such a situation? I'll let you know when I figure it out. I plan to begin studying it tomorrow...
Hell.com sold their e-mail list to spammers. My only registered address with them, besides the @hell one, was a forwarding address of the form hell.com@ADomainIOwn.com -- and a couple years ago I started receiving all sorts of nasty spam to it (mostly questionably legal forms of porn). I contacted them and suggested maybe they had been compromised, but was greeted with denials and the response that they "don't even keep the e-mail list on a server". After this, I never had any dealings with them again. It's too bad they are likely to make out so much on this deal, what a bunch of crap that is.
'Our informal corporate motto is "Don't be evil."...'
That site has lots of interesting stuff on it regardless, and is worth a read. For all those crying 'hypocrisy!', I don't see how Google's recent actions have in any way conflicted with the information presented on that page.
I'm surprised at how many people are getting such a simple phrase wrong. But when they misquote it AND make an argument based on the exact phrasing... and then get modded up to 5? I had to say something. "Don't be evil" is rather different from "Do no evil", when you think about it.
You may not recognize me, but I was recently elected, quite democratically, as the supreme overlord of humanity. I'm still getting used to the office, but my first act as supreme overlord of humanity is to declare that all beings on this planet must think like I do, and behave according to my own personal ideals. This includes you, China! And you too, Google! Everybody shall henceforth do what I say, because I'm right. How could I not be? I'm the supreme overlord of humanity!
--
If I may move out of character for a bit: A note on freedom. I see some of you writing things like "Google's new motto: Do not be evil (unless pressured by a government)" and so forth. But none of these people are any better. You are essentially saying to the rest of us "Everybody should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it agrees with my point of view." Freedoms conflict, guys.
China has been around for quite some time, and it gets by OK. China is free to run itself how it believes. You are free to dislike it. The Chinese people are free to rebel, and the Chinese government is free to suppress rebellion. That's freedom in the broadest sense of the word.
So why don't you all come down off those high horses and join the real world? Google has two choices: Provide some search capability to the Chinese people, or provide none. They chose 'some'. This is to the benefit of the Chinese, as they now have one more resource than otherwise. And no text filter is perfect.
I used to type over 100 wpm on Qwerty, with peaks around 150 wpm. When I started getting wrist pains and such, I decided to try out Dvorak.
Switching is easy, if you follow a simple rule: whatever you do, don't touch a Qwerty keyboard until you've learned Dvorak. Move your keycaps around and force yourself to hunt and peck until you learn the keys. The positioning really makes a lot of sense. Also, do something that requires a lot of typing during this time. I use IRC constantly, so that part was pretty easy.
I was touch typing within a week of changing to Dvorak, and I gained about 5 wpm a day until I hit somewhere around 45 wpm. After that it took me a month plus until I started typing in phrases instead of letters, and now I can type over 100 wpm again, though not quite as fast as my old Qwerty speeds. I attribute this mostly to the fact that I am no longer in a situation where I'm trying to type fast.
As far as speeds go, I have shared a screen with a friend of mine who types perl on a Qwerty keyboard so sickeningly fast that it looks like he's just pasting it over a slow modem connection. That alone convinced me that there isn't necessarily much of a speed bonus for switching. However, I haven't been able to beat Dvorak for comfort.
Originally I planned to switch back to Qwerty after I learned Dvorak and train myself to be 'bilingual', but I liked Dvorak too much to bother with it. Recently I took a job that has me using the keyboard a lot again, and I found that with very little effort I was able to touch type Qwerty again at a reasonable speed. I don't get confused between the layouts when at work and home, as the environments give me cues that help, but I do find myself slipping back into Dvorak mode occasionally at work. I expect this to occur less the more I use the computer here.
A side-effect you may not have thought of, however, is if other people use your computer they will be utterly lost at the keyboard. My siblings couldn't use my computer until after I'd learned to touch-type Dvorak and changed the keycaps back to Qwerty (and showed them how to toggle the language).
All in all, however, I've found the switch to be a good choice, and one that hasn't caused me any noticeable problems. If I ever reach a situation where I really just need to type Dvorak, it is pretty simple to switch the layout at any (Windows?) computer, and I can then type away at max speed. I have only done this once, when I was typing something being dictated to me, and I'm not even sure I'd have to do it anymore.
Re:Simliar, but cheaper...
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
The weights are for the fingers you use to press the particular keys, not for the character those keys generate.
That's the entire point. The application calls functions that a rootkit would hook and alter.
Then, it reads all the same data at the lowest level by using its own code to read the filesystem and registry files in a way that can't be hooked except at that same very lowest level in a very complex fashion.
Compare the two, and you can see everything that is being hidden from the standard API calls, thus bringing to your attention files and registry entries etc. that are hidden by the rootkit.
Peercast is more like um... eMule than BitTorrent, if that makes any sense. What I'd be interested is a dedicated swarming network for a specific stream, in the same way that BitTorrent is a dedicated file transfer network per group of files.
This comment evidences one of the more annoying attitudes I've noticed pop up about BitTorrent. The problem is that all the people using it to illegally share movies, files, mp3s, and such aren't using it properly. Sure, you can make do with a few DSL modems as seeds and there are always those awesome ratio trackers that set ridiculous ratio requirements.
However, BitTorrent was designed to be used in such a way as to augment bandwidth, not create it. Your seeds should be fast and reliable, and then your torrent will be too. Most people who create torrents cannot or don't care to provide one or both of these, and that is why people like you develop attitudes like this.
As an aside, I'm happy to see some of the recent forays into more dynamic swarming applications. I'd love to see a swarmed version of HTTP, or some other protocol to distribute web content. Imagine if everyone who visited a website also helped seed for that website while it was open in a browser window? Bittorrent won't cut it, however, as there is no way to keep the same torrent but alter/update its content. And of course, dynamic website content wouldn't work at all.
You could just about always find an expansion to LORD with a bank that let you deposit negative dollars. Much faster than the casino route; one deposit and you can get yourself that nice shiny Death Sword, hmm?
(I fail as a nerd; I had to look up the name of the best sword...)
I had a Science teacher in high school who would put subtle jokes into his test. He said he did it so he could tell about how far the students were. He had to stop doing it, because the students stopped getting the jokes.
I was really interested in that keyboard evolution layout thing, but I was of the opinion he missed some considerations. Sometime much later I got curious and looked up some background on the design of the Dvorak keyboard and guess what? Most of those points coincided with what I'd decided -- and he had ignored!
Anyhow, even though one-handed dvorak is designed for a full size keyboard, using the arrow pad as a shift might make it fairly interesting to try and adapt the layout to this keyboard anyway. You fill in the home row with the Dvorak home row, then use the up-arrow to scroll it upwards, right to scroll it right, etc such that the top keys are now the top row and so on. Much could still be gained from the Dvorak layout's optimized positioning -- you'd not have to shift near as many keys in order to type certain things.
Actually, thinking about it more you'd only need one shift to access the outer alphabetical characters, then you could have a symbol shift, a numeric shift, and a 'special' shift? Should a key be reserved for space on the main layout (probably)?
Dvorak left-handed layout:
` [ ] / P F M L J 4 3 2 1 ; Q B Y U R S O . 6 5 = \ - K C D T H E A Z 8 7 ' X G V W N I , 0 9
How about:
Y U R S O D T H E A W N Ispc
Alpha shift: (bring top row 'down', move QB and KCD to same row, space -> return)
P F M L J Q B K C Z X G Vrtn
Numeric shift: (/ and * being the 'uppercase' forms of - and + perhaps?)
4 3 2 1 -(/) 8 7 6 5 +(*) 0 9.rtn
Symbolic shift: (arbitrarily hijacked from the normal dvorak layout: ' , . and ; will all feel familiar... maybe fill the gaps with special function keys?)
' , . [ ] / = \ - ? ; ? ? ?
I seem to have left off the ability to capitalize characters. I wonder if that button on the side counts? It'd probably work well enough.
I used to own (one of?) the first cd/mp3 players ever; I think it was later named the Tavura. Forget who it was by. I actually had to change the batteries once about halfway through each mp3 CD, so I'd always have 2 pair charging and one in the device.
Later I bought the AVC Soul (same thing as the Rio Volt), both of which were made by... you guessed it... iRiver. I wore my Soul into the ground, and immediately bought a top-of-the-line iRiver player (the imp-550). I love the thing.
iRiver has had a history of putting out decently priced hardware that _does_ look good, is functional, is upgradable, and has pretty much anything you could ask for. (Though I'm still waiting for more than one song dynamic playlists(?)).
Their players have nice battery life too (hell, the 550 shipped with a pair of 1450 mAh prismatic-type batteries; I couldn't even FIND ratings that high for the same battery type online...)
If I needed this kind of a device, iRiver would definitely be my first pick to buy from.
That aside, I'm kind of curious -- does anyone have any idea why nobody has put out a media player with open source upgradable firmware yet? It seems to me that if they put the right hardware in the thing it'd be a huge attraction both to geeks and non-geeks (who would benefit from the doubtless interesting firmwares put out by OS people). And the company wouldn't have to put much money into developing the firmware itself! I don't see what the deal is...
'Security through Obscurity' = relying on people not knowing HOW a given security method works. This is NOT the same as not knowing what the 'password' is.
This method is interesting for preventing broadly targetted attacks; the kind of attacks that select a given exploit and scan large ranges of IP addresses for vulnerable computers. It also helps prevent people just scanning for computers with any given service [for example, finding open FTP servers]. And lastly, it helps remove the threat of worms exploiting many servers. Anyone who wants to run a private service available to arbitrary IP addresses could use this method to make access depend on knowledge, knowledge that a written worm would not have access to.
As for the comment about not remembering the port sequence, that's pretty easy: just use a text password, hash it, and derive the port sequence from the password hash. Then the user only has to remember the password, which is easier and probably more randomized than a set sequence of ports.
It doesn't help as much against a targetted attack, the kind where an attacker decides "I want to get access to THIS machine" and goes about trying to find a way in. If he knows, suspects, or simply tries to find out if the machine uses 'port knocking', he can attempt to sniff the sequence if he is able to get access to a host that can do so.
Either way, it is 1) useful and 2) clearly not 'security through obscurity', so I definitely agree with the parent Re: quit your complaining.
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I came here to post this. What's more, they use double density disks. Even the newer machines. What's a floppy drive cost for these things? Hundreds of dollars, of course. It's pretty silly.
And the quality of floppy disks has been going down. We get a lot more disks now that fail quickly. My last shop wiped/wrote disks for every job, which is more likely to wear them out quickly of course, but this place keeps a mirror of all the files on our server on disks out in the shop. Still, we run into files with bad sectors in them more often in the new disks than the old ones.
There are solutions that let you use USB sticks now, but again... very expensive.
Entirely true for me.
"Steel has also come up with the E=mc2 of procrastination, a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (G) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D). It looks like this and uses the Greek letter (capital gamma): Utility = E x V / GD"
Something interesting to note here -- if you are something like me, you may have built up an expectancy of failure not due to skill, but due to procrastination. That is, I tend to expect that I won't complete a project, not that I am incapable of doing so. E = 0 is a pretty bad case given the math! How does one rectify such a situation? I'll let you know when I figure it out. I plan to begin studying it tomorrow...
Hell.com sold their e-mail list to spammers. My only registered address with them, besides the @hell one, was a forwarding address of the form hell.com@ADomainIOwn.com -- and a couple years ago I started receiving all sorts of nasty spam to it (mostly questionably legal forms of porn). I contacted them and suggested maybe they had been compromised, but was greeted with denials and the response that they "don't even keep the e-mail list on a server". After this, I never had any dealings with them again. It's too bad they are likely to make out so much on this deal, what a bunch of crap that is.
Ironically enough, I checked Google before even posting that:e .com+evil&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Agoogl
'Our informal corporate motto is "Don't be evil."...'
That site has lots of interesting stuff on it regardless, and is worth a read. For all those crying 'hypocrisy!', I don't see how Google's recent actions have in any way conflicted with the information presented on that page.
I'm surprised at how many people are getting such a simple phrase wrong. But when they misquote it AND make an argument based on the exact phrasing... and then get modded up to 5? I had to say something. "Don't be evil" is rather different from "Do no evil", when you think about it.
Hello.
You may not recognize me, but I was recently elected, quite democratically, as the supreme overlord of humanity. I'm still getting used to the office, but my first act as supreme overlord of humanity is to declare that all beings on this planet must think like I do, and behave according to my own personal ideals. This includes you, China! And you too, Google! Everybody shall henceforth do what I say, because I'm right. How could I not be? I'm the supreme overlord of humanity!
--
If I may move out of character for a bit: A note on freedom. I see some of you writing things like "Google's new motto: Do not be evil (unless pressured by a government)" and so forth. But none of these people are any better. You are essentially saying to the rest of us "Everybody should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it agrees with my point of view." Freedoms conflict, guys.
China has been around for quite some time, and it gets by OK. China is free to run itself how it believes. You are free to dislike it. The Chinese people are free to rebel, and the Chinese government is free to suppress rebellion. That's freedom in the broadest sense of the word.
So why don't you all come down off those high horses and join the real world? Google has two choices: Provide some search capability to the Chinese people, or provide none. They chose 'some'. This is to the benefit of the Chinese, as they now have one more resource than otherwise. And no text filter is perfect.
Google made the best choice available to them.
I used to type over 100 wpm on Qwerty, with peaks around 150 wpm. When I started getting wrist pains and such, I decided to try out Dvorak.
Switching is easy, if you follow a simple rule: whatever you do, don't touch a Qwerty keyboard until you've learned Dvorak. Move your keycaps around and force yourself to hunt and peck until you learn the keys. The positioning really makes a lot of sense. Also, do something that requires a lot of typing during this time. I use IRC constantly, so that part was pretty easy.
I was touch typing within a week of changing to Dvorak, and I gained about 5 wpm a day until I hit somewhere around 45 wpm. After that it took me a month plus until I started typing in phrases instead of letters, and now I can type over 100 wpm again, though not quite as fast as my old Qwerty speeds. I attribute this mostly to the fact that I am no longer in a situation where I'm trying to type fast.
As far as speeds go, I have shared a screen with a friend of mine who types perl on a Qwerty keyboard so sickeningly fast that it looks like he's just pasting it over a slow modem connection. That alone convinced me that there isn't necessarily much of a speed bonus for switching. However, I haven't been able to beat Dvorak for comfort.
Originally I planned to switch back to Qwerty after I learned Dvorak and train myself to be 'bilingual', but I liked Dvorak too much to bother with it. Recently I took a job that has me using the keyboard a lot again, and I found that with very little effort I was able to touch type Qwerty again at a reasonable speed. I don't get confused between the layouts when at work and home, as the environments give me cues that help, but I do find myself slipping back into Dvorak mode occasionally at work. I expect this to occur less the more I use the computer here.
A side-effect you may not have thought of, however, is if other people use your computer they will be utterly lost at the keyboard. My siblings couldn't use my computer until after I'd learned to touch-type Dvorak and changed the keycaps back to Qwerty (and showed them how to toggle the language).
All in all, however, I've found the switch to be a good choice, and one that hasn't caused me any noticeable problems. If I ever reach a situation where I really just need to type Dvorak, it is pretty simple to switch the layout at any (Windows?) computer, and I can then type away at max speed. I have only done this once, when I was typing something being dictated to me, and I'm not even sure I'd have to do it anymore.
The weights are for the fingers you use to press the particular keys, not for the character those keys generate.
That's the entire point. The application calls functions that a rootkit would hook and alter.
Then, it reads all the same data at the lowest level by using its own code to read the filesystem and registry files in a way that can't be hooked except at that same very lowest level in a very complex fashion.
Compare the two, and you can see everything that is being hidden from the standard API calls, thus bringing to your attention files and registry entries etc. that are hidden by the rootkit.
Peercast is more like um... eMule than BitTorrent, if that makes any sense. What I'd be interested is a dedicated swarming network for a specific stream, in the same way that BitTorrent is a dedicated file transfer network per group of files.
However, BitTorrent was designed to be used in such a way as to augment bandwidth, not create it. Your seeds should be fast and reliable, and then your torrent will be too. Most people who create torrents cannot or don't care to provide one or both of these, and that is why people like you develop attitudes like this.
As an aside, I'm happy to see some of the recent forays into more dynamic swarming applications. I'd love to see a swarmed version of HTTP, or some other protocol to distribute web content. Imagine if everyone who visited a website also helped seed for that website while it was open in a browser window? Bittorrent won't cut it, however, as there is no way to keep the same torrent but alter/update its content. And of course, dynamic website content wouldn't work at all.
Also, Shoutcast swarms could be especially nice.
(I fail as a nerd; I had to look up the name of the best sword...)
I had a Science teacher in high school who would put subtle jokes into his test. He said he did it so he could tell about how far the students were. He had to stop doing it, because the students stopped getting the jokes.
Sad, really...
I was really interested in that keyboard evolution layout thing, but I was of the opinion he missed some considerations. Sometime much later I got curious and looked up some background on the design of the Dvorak keyboard and guess what? Most of those points coincided with what I'd decided -- and he had ignored!
.rtn
Anyhow, even though one-handed dvorak is designed for a full size keyboard, using the arrow pad as a shift might make it fairly interesting to try and adapt the layout to this keyboard anyway. You fill in the home row with the Dvorak home row, then use the up-arrow to scroll it upwards, right to scroll it right, etc such that the top keys are now the top row and so on. Much could still be gained from the Dvorak layout's optimized positioning -- you'd not have to shift near as many keys in order to type certain things.
Actually, thinking about it more you'd only need one shift to access the outer alphabetical characters, then you could have a symbol shift, a numeric shift, and a 'special' shift? Should a key be reserved for space on the main layout (probably)?
Dvorak left-handed layout:
` [ ] / P F M L J 4 3 2 1
; Q B Y U R S O . 6 5 = \
- K C D T H E A Z 8 7
' X G V W N I , 0 9
How about:
Y U R S O
D T H E A
W N Ispc
Alpha shift:
(bring top row 'down', move QB and KCD to same row, space -> return)
P F M L J
Q B K C Z
X G Vrtn
Numeric shift:
(/ and * being the 'uppercase' forms of - and + perhaps?)
4 3 2 1 -(/)
8 7 6 5 +(*)
0 9
Symbolic shift:
(arbitrarily hijacked from the normal dvorak layout: ' , . and ; will all feel familiar... maybe fill the gaps with special function keys?)
' , . [ ]
/ = \ - ?
; ? ? ?
I seem to have left off the ability to capitalize characters. I wonder if that button on the side counts? It'd probably work well enough.
-myndzi
If you do it right, you can count to 1024... or 1048576 if you are really flexible!
-myndzi
I used to own (one of?) the first cd/mp3 players ever; I think it was later named the Tavura. Forget who it was by. I actually had to change the batteries once about halfway through each mp3 CD, so I'd always have 2 pair charging and one in the device.
... you guessed it ... iRiver. I wore my Soul into the ground, and immediately bought a top-of-the-line iRiver player (the imp-550). I love the thing.
Later I bought the AVC Soul (same thing as the Rio Volt), both of which were made by
iRiver has had a history of putting out decently priced hardware that _does_ look good, is functional, is upgradable, and has pretty much anything you could ask for. (Though I'm still waiting for more than one song dynamic playlists(?)).
Their players have nice battery life too (hell, the 550 shipped with a pair of 1450 mAh prismatic-type batteries; I couldn't even FIND ratings that high for the same battery type online...)
If I needed this kind of a device, iRiver would definitely be my first pick to buy from.
That aside, I'm kind of curious -- does anyone have any idea why nobody has put out a media player with open source upgradable firmware yet? It seems to me that if they put the right hardware in the thing it'd be a huge attraction both to geeks and non-geeks (who would benefit from the doubtless interesting firmwares put out by OS people). And the company wouldn't have to put much money into developing the firmware itself! I don't see what the deal is...
'Security through Obscurity' = relying on people not knowing HOW a given security method works. This is NOT the same as not knowing what the 'password' is.
This method is interesting for preventing broadly targetted attacks; the kind of attacks that select a given exploit and scan large ranges of IP addresses for vulnerable computers. It also helps prevent people just scanning for computers with any given service [for example, finding open FTP servers]. And lastly, it helps remove the threat of worms exploiting many servers. Anyone who wants to run a private service available to arbitrary IP addresses could use this method to make access depend on knowledge, knowledge that a written worm would not have access to.
As for the comment about not remembering the port sequence, that's pretty easy: just use a text password, hash it, and derive the port sequence from the password hash. Then the user only has to remember the password, which is easier and probably more randomized than a set sequence of ports.
It doesn't help as much against a targetted attack, the kind where an attacker decides "I want to get access to THIS machine" and goes about trying to find a way in. If he knows, suspects, or simply tries to find out if the machine uses 'port knocking', he can attempt to sniff the sequence if he is able to get access to a host that can do so.
Either way, it is 1) useful and 2) clearly not 'security through obscurity', so I definitely agree with the parent Re: quit your complaining.
-myndzi