I would imagine they'd already ported linux to the console for their own purposes, so putting it out there for others will not really require a large ammount of corporate effort.
I'm pretty sure Sony uses linux for in-house stuff...and for all i know, the professional dev kits for the PS2 ran linux, as well.
I also work in a small IT department, and we, of course, are guilty of this sort of bitching and moaning...behind closed doors. Some of our users are guilty of genuinely stupid mistakes stemming from them screwing with something they don't understand (which justifies us being a bit frustrated, IMHO), but sometimes we just get really tired of no one bothering to try and understand how their computer works.
That said, however, we never refuse service just because some one screwed their machine up themselves, or forgot to patch, or disabled their virus scanner, or what have you. Instead, we take their call, log a ticket, hang up, turn around, tell our coworkers about how tired we are of dealing with PhDs who don't know how to check their email...and then go fix the problem with a professional attitude. Sometimes you just need to vent, especially in a job where expectations are high and rewards are very low. We get it out of our system by talking to people who understand, then we move on. It's the best therapy most of us can afford:-)
Some of the color laser copiers/printers used in printing shops, as i understand, actually have circuitry to recognize US currency and prevent it from being copied in the first place. (This could be urban legend, however...i learned of it while working at an office supply store with a copying center, and it's possible the story was invented to discourage us from "supplementing" our paychecks)
also from the site: The main development was done by Daniel Pohl in less than six months with contribution for shading by several other students
This guy re-wrote the Quake3 engine to use raytracing pretty much by himself. I have serious doubts about his ability to optimize his OpenRT engine as well as id did the original engine (that is not meant as a slam towards this guy...id is comprised of people who can do things us mere mortals cannot). And, as pointed out by another poster, this is without on-chip algorithms. Ever run Quake3 in software mode?
While I agree this concept is not ready for prime time, it may not be as far over the horizon as it seems from the benchmarks.
From some AC responding to Dan Fernandez's blog and referring to Richard Grimes: At the bottom you'll find that he listed his email, but rather then use a contact me form, or listing it directly, he ENCODED HIS EMAIL address in Rot 13 encryption!! Do you really want to take advice on "usability" from someone who thinks it's a good idea to encrypt their email address?
I'm not sure I really need to comment further on this.
No, but it's trivial to decrypt all of the connections this way and look for a signature as the original article proposed.
Would they not be in serious shit as soon as they decrypt something which isn't copyrighted material, though? IIRC, the PATRIOT has a few things to say about misrepresenting network services, not to mention your standard eaves-dropping laws.
Of course, I suppose legislation would circumvent this by issuing what ammounts to a blanket wiretap warrant for the ISPs.
After actually looking at the google results page I got in galeon, I see you're right. I presumed he meant he was being redirected to MS's search page.
Can't figure out how on earth microsoft.com is the top result for http, though.
Well, I could give yet another success story about K12LTSP, but I think you get the point that it's really cool.
One thing to keep in mind: if the machines will primarily be used for web-browsing, you should look into epiphany as a web browser. We've found that it's trimmed down enough to allow some extra machines to run off our LTSP server as compared to our results with other browsers (although we did not try firefox, so I wouldn't rule that one out either). It hasn't really given us any headaches, and the whole library staff and the students seem very happy with it.
It was exactly the strict adherance to standards which you seem so eager to abandon that brought you things like the internet, plug and play monitors, and, oh, i don't know...QWERTY keyboards on every desk.
When you break standards for profit, you begin degenerating into situations like the wonderful browser wars that brought us the (ugh) blink tag, among other attrocities. And, as has been mentioned in another post, the reason things haven't been all THAT bad since verisign implemented this "innovation" is those very sysadmins whose opinions you seem to think don't matter.
Additionally, for those users who want this type of service, there is a popular and widely (too widely, IMHO) available technology which already addresses the issue at the user-agent level. It's called Internet Explorer. If users on a given network want something like this to be implemented system-wide, DNS admins are free to place wildcards in their own, local DNS caches. There are even situations where it's appropriate (we have such a system at our university for unregistered computers; when the user opens a web browser, they see the registration page...and that's all they can get to). But for Verisign to implement this for everyone is simply ludacris, and violates the trust put in them by ICANN and the *USERS* who utilize the internet every day.
While there is certainly some validity to your point, I must say that BASIC does, in my opinion, cause damage to budding programmers. I, too, started my programming career in BASIC (QuickBasic, to be exact), but I am now a more than competant programmer in C++.
That said, however...
When I reached the limits of what I could do in BASIC (which took a while...I was very inventive, and got to the point where I was using doing direct reads and writes to/from the video buffer for my graphics programs), I realized the next logical choice was this "C++" thing I'd heard so much about on the 'Net. I decided to check it out, got some example source code, and ran screaming into the night. It took me about 2 years from my initial exposure to C++ to actually get the drift of it, primarily because I was afraid of the code.
Had I not learned BASIC in the first place, I believe I would have been better off.
As an aside, the high school I went to offers 2 years of courses in programming, which I took both to see if I'd learn anything, and to add even more math credits;-) The first year is GW-BASIC. The second year is Pascal. Very old Pascal. While the second was mildly helpful to learning "real" languages, sitting through a year of "Structured Programming" in GW-BASIC helped erode my mental stability to its current very low level.
"...that operates on the basis of the neural activity of rat brain cells grown in a dish"
And, from the write-up:
"the layer of rat neurons is grown over an array of electrodes..."
Did you not pick up on the hint that these neurons were not taken from a rat? They were cultured in a fucking petri dish.
And if you really have such a problem with animal experimentation, you should realize two things: 1, that this type of testing can lead to a great many lives saved in the future, as well as the possible advent of cybernetic replacement for lost/malformed body parts, and 2, that the only alternatives are to volunteer yourself, or destroy the possibility of this branch of science reaching fruition.
One more thing. I'm not sure, but I believe that the human cerebellum is too complex in its input/output for us to perform this type of experiment with. We can do some work in that area, but this type of interface would be far beyond anything attempted thus far. (At least, that's my hypothesis...if someone knows otherwise, let me know)
There is more documentation for windows than i can shake a stick at. To this day, i haven't met one issue that i didn't resolve via MSDN, KB or Google/Newsgroups.
MSDN costs extra money, and as a fellow developer, I have to say it's complete crap. As in I get it for free, and can't bring myself to use it.
Considering you rarely need any support with Windows, and setting up the simplest things on Linux is a torture. Do we also want to spend the time figuing out something that the program creator should have?
Granted, double-clicking "Setup.exe" is a little easier than "rpm -ivh " or (gasp) "config;make;make install", but uninstalls are consitent and actually work in linux. Not to mention, you have a fall-back way to determine where software actually puts all the files it installs. In windows, there is no way (that I know of) to do this without buying additional software.
Windows also reports less annual bugs than Linux...
This has been brought up on slashdot before, but it remains an important question: how many of the listed security issues for linux are actually for third-party software which happens to be included on the distro cd?
Just some food for thought.
Slashdot Mirror
I would imagine they'd already ported linux to the console for their own purposes, so putting it out there for others will not really require a large ammount of corporate effort.
I'm pretty sure Sony uses linux for in-house stuff...and for all i know, the professional dev kits for the PS2 ran linux, as well.
i'd consider that closer to a low-level format than a patch, but good point ;-)
From a t-shirt at defcon:
"Social Engineering: because there is no patch for human stupidity"
I also work in a small IT department, and we, of course, are guilty of this sort of bitching and moaning...behind closed doors. Some of our users are guilty of genuinely stupid mistakes stemming from them screwing with something they don't understand (which justifies us being a bit frustrated, IMHO), but sometimes we just get really tired of no one bothering to try and understand how their computer works.
:-)
That said, however, we never refuse service just because some one screwed their machine up themselves, or forgot to patch, or disabled their virus scanner, or what have you. Instead, we take their call, log a ticket, hang up, turn around, tell our coworkers about how tired we are of dealing with PhDs who don't know how to check their email...and then go fix the problem with a professional attitude. Sometimes you just need to vent, especially in a job where expectations are high and rewards are very low. We get it out of our system by talking to people who understand, then we move on. It's the best therapy most of us can afford
They do. Try printing a dollar bill on a high end color laser printer some time.
1 124027979.htm
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004Nov/gee2004
Some of the color laser copiers/printers used in printing shops, as i understand, actually have circuitry to recognize US currency and prevent it from being copied in the first place. (This could be urban legend, however...i learned of it while working at an office supply store with a copying center, and it's possible the story was invented to discourage us from "supplementing" our paychecks)
also from the site:
The main development was done by Daniel Pohl in less than six months with contribution for shading by several other students
This guy re-wrote the Quake3 engine to use raytracing pretty much by himself. I have serious doubts about his ability to optimize his OpenRT engine as well as id did the original engine (that is not meant as a slam towards this guy...id is comprised of people who can do things us mere mortals cannot). And, as pointed out by another poster, this is without on-chip algorithms. Ever run Quake3 in software mode?
While I agree this concept is not ready for prime time, it may not be as far over the horizon as it seems from the benchmarks.
From some AC responding to Dan Fernandez's blog and referring to Richard Grimes:
At the bottom you'll find that he listed his email, but rather then use a contact me form, or listing it directly, he ENCODED HIS EMAIL address in Rot 13 encryption!! Do you really want to take advice on "usability" from someone who thinks it's a good idea to encrypt their email address?
I'm not sure I really need to comment further on this.
No, but it's trivial to decrypt all of the connections this way and look for a signature as the original article proposed.
Would they not be in serious shit as soon as they decrypt something which isn't copyrighted material, though? IIRC, the PATRIOT has a few things to say about misrepresenting network services, not to mention your standard eaves-dropping laws.
Of course, I suppose legislation would circumvent this by issuing what ammounts to a blanket wiretap warrant for the ISPs.
You mean you somehow get automatic money, despite having no conceivable real damage to yourself? Not even the debatable damages of lost sales?
Yup, otherwise the MPAA wouldn't be able to sue you for distributing copies of Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen movies...
After actually looking at the google results page I got in galeon, I see you're right. I presumed he meant he was being redirected to MS's search page.
Can't figure out how on earth microsoft.com is the top result for http, though.
Because you're using Internet Explorer?
No, you're not the only other one.
Well, I could give yet another success story about K12LTSP, but I think you get the point that it's really cool.
One thing to keep in mind: if the machines will primarily be used for web-browsing, you should look into epiphany as a web browser. We've found that it's trimmed down enough to allow some extra machines to run off our LTSP server as compared to our results with other browsers (although we did not try firefox, so I wouldn't rule that one out either). It hasn't really given us any headaches, and the whole library staff and the students seem very happy with it.
Then fucking move to China, where they already such "protections" and, of course, no one ever dies.
years.
Newer kernel branches have support for reading (in the 2.4 branch) and writing (in the 2.6 branch) NTFS partitions.
If you need NTFS write support and don't want to run a beta kernel(understandable), 2.6-final should be out by the end of the year.
Well, this will probably eliminate the cancer with a shot, as you mention.
;-)
Unfortunately, that shot will have to be administered directly into the tumor. That does not sound like my idea of a fun saturday afternoon
It was exactly the strict adherance to standards which you seem so eager to abandon that brought you things like the internet, plug and play monitors, and, oh, i don't know...QWERTY keyboards on every desk.
When you break standards for profit, you begin degenerating into situations like the wonderful browser wars that brought us the (ugh) blink tag, among other attrocities. And, as has been mentioned in another post, the reason things haven't been all THAT bad since verisign implemented this "innovation" is those very sysadmins whose opinions you seem to think don't matter.
Additionally, for those users who want this type of service, there is a popular and widely (too widely, IMHO) available technology which already addresses the issue at the user-agent level. It's called Internet Explorer. If users on a given network want something like this to be implemented system-wide, DNS admins are free to place wildcards in their own, local DNS caches. There are even situations where it's appropriate (we have such a system at our university for unregistered computers; when the user opens a web browser, they see the registration page...and that's all they can get to). But for Verisign to implement this for everyone is simply ludacris, and violates the trust put in them by ICANN and the *USERS* who utilize the internet every day.
unless this would fall under the "compatible software" clause, of course...
well, they have ported VNC, it would seem.
at least, the alpha linux geek at my university was running VNC on his Tungsten T the other day...
While there is certainly some validity to your point, I must say that BASIC does, in my opinion, cause damage to budding programmers.
;-) The first year is GW-BASIC. The second year is Pascal. Very old Pascal. While the second was mildly helpful to learning "real" languages, sitting through a year of "Structured Programming" in GW-BASIC helped erode my mental stability to its current very low level.
I, too, started my programming career in BASIC (QuickBasic, to be exact), but I am now a more than competant programmer in C++.
That said, however...
When I reached the limits of what I could do in BASIC (which took a while...I was very inventive, and got to the point where I was using doing direct reads and writes to/from the video buffer for my graphics programs), I realized the next logical choice was this "C++" thing I'd heard so much about on the 'Net. I decided to check it out, got some example source code, and ran screaming into the night. It took me about 2 years from my initial exposure to C++ to actually get the drift of it, primarily because I was afraid of the code.
Had I not learned BASIC in the first place, I believe I would have been better off.
As an aside, the high school I went to offers 2 years of courses in programming, which I took both to see if I'd learn anything, and to add even more math credits
From the article:
"...that operates on the basis of the neural activity of rat brain cells grown in a dish"
And, from the write-up:
"the layer of rat neurons is grown over an array of electrodes..."
Did you not pick up on the hint that these neurons were not taken from a rat? They were cultured in a fucking petri dish.
And if you really have such a problem with animal experimentation, you should realize two things: 1, that this type of testing can lead to a great many lives saved in the future, as well as the possible advent of cybernetic replacement for lost/malformed body parts, and 2, that the only alternatives are to volunteer yourself, or destroy the possibility of this branch of science reaching fruition.
One more thing. I'm not sure, but I believe that the human cerebellum is too complex in its input/output for us to perform this type of experiment with. We can do some work in that area, but this type of interface would be far beyond anything attempted thus far. (At least, that's my hypothesis...if someone knows otherwise, let me know)
There is more documentation for windows than i can shake a stick at. To this day, i haven't met one issue that i didn't resolve via MSDN, KB or Google/Newsgroups. MSDN costs extra money, and as a fellow developer, I have to say it's complete crap. As in I get it for free, and can't bring myself to use it. Considering you rarely need any support with Windows, and setting up the simplest things on Linux is a torture. Do we also want to spend the time figuing out something that the program creator should have? Granted, double-clicking "Setup.exe" is a little easier than "rpm -ivh " or (gasp) "config;make;make install", but uninstalls are consitent and actually work in linux. Not to mention, you have a fall-back way to determine where software actually puts all the files it installs. In windows, there is no way (that I know of) to do this without buying additional software. Windows also reports less annual bugs than Linux... This has been brought up on slashdot before, but it remains an important question: how many of the listed security issues for linux are actually for third-party software which happens to be included on the distro cd? Just some food for thought.