Persistence-of-vision toys are fun and easy to make. They're a great way to learn how to solder. (You, the teacher, would need to download messages into them.) Kids quickly see the results of their work and it piques their interest for more technology.
POV Kits are available at many places online for $10-$20 each, probably less in bulk. One place I know is http://adafruit.com/
*sniff*
Oh, it's so cute. First they were just Baby Apple, playing nice with the other kiddies and corporations. Then they took their first steps - their first lock-in schemes, their first anticompetitive business practices. It was sooo adorable!
Now they just did the darndest thing - they're finally lying to government investigators. Awww. They're growing up to be just like their big brother Microsoft!
Many corporate execs seem to think that whole-disk encryption alone will save their butts in case their laptop ever gets stolen. They use it as a kind of insurance against carelessness. Not quite.
It's worth noting that encryption by itself does not stop a data breach from happening. It only mitigates the short-term consequences. To truly protect your company, you still need a full-service security deployment, and all the inconveniences that come with it.
Once the data has left your hands, encrypted or not, the damage has been done and there's nothing you can do to stop it. A bad guy could copy it, keep it on the shelf, and wait 15 years until we have quantum computers that can break RSA. Then he knows all your old secrets which could still be very damaging 15 years later.
A few months ago, someone stole a local hospital's backup tapes from a courier van. Although the tapes were properly encrypted, the hospital still freaked out about it, with good reason. They even paid for credit monitoring for everyone on the tapes. Once the cops recovered the stolen tapes, they sent them to the FBI to assess whether the tapes had been accessed by the thief.
I am a ham radio operator and concern myself with disaster preparedness. With POTS (plain old telephone system) everyone is guaranteed their own connection, complete with line backup power so you can use the phone even if the power's out. Sometimes the switches overload and "all circuits are busy" but in most situations it's worked pretty well for the last century.
I worry about the trend to move to cell phones. We rely on both our cell phone's battery and the cell tower to stay powered. We also rely on available frequencies to use the tower. In Katrina and recently the San Diego fires, everyone immediately got on their cell phones and jammed all of the towers. Is there enough redundancy, power, and capacity to handle the next disaster? I don't think we should wait for the next hurricane to prove if cell towers can handle an emergency.
Here is a fascinating history of ClarisWorks from one of its original authors. It was quite an accomplishment to pack all that functionality into a megabyte of RAM. Ahh... nostalgia...
It's interesting that a story (somewhat) critical of Intel should get posted on Slashdot. IIRC, Intel has been paying Slashdot big bucks to publish an "Intel Opinion Center" spamvertisement for several months now. Curious: this Intel-sponsored "section" shut down three days ago without any clear reason. Conincidence? Maybe there's been a boardroom fight?
(No, it's not open source, but...) PowerOne Graph is a commercial program that got me through high school and college classes. I bought a cheapie Sony Clie off eBay and installed PowerOne. For $40 for the Clie and $60 for the software, the handheld ran circles around TI graphing calculators and I found it well worth the investment. It was quite nice to have a high-rez color screen and about double the features you'll get with a TI-89 (though do read the manual - it has slightly different syntax than TI's.) Using the stylus to do more work instead of tedious arrow keys was also a big plus. Two caveats -- it's not programmable, and you can't use it on college entrance exams or AP tests (so borrow your classmate's when the time comes.) Other than that, I found it well worth it.
The whole idea of packet-routing and proprietary extensions to the USB protocol seems waay to complicated for the purpose of sharing periperals between PCs. Why not just a dumb electrical switch box? Sure, you have to turn the switch, but it's ten times simpler and ten times more robust. Not to mention cost-effective for the average consumer.
Banning binary modules is a bad way to spread the open-source/free-software philosophy. By giving users the choice between FLOSS and proprietary software, we can hope they'll make the "right" choice and choose FLOSS. OSS developers around the world work hard on their projects to prove that FLOSS is technically superior while also politcally purer. Removing this option altogether, in a way, is the same sort of guerilla vendor lock-in tactics that are used by DRM purveyors. We shouldn't force people to use a completely open-sourced kernel stack -- we should show them that it is superior and let them choose for themselves.
This higlights the danger in not using the open industry standard for telecommunications: the INTERNET PROTOCOL! Granted, ATMs and banking networks have been around longer than the last 20 years when Internet adoption exploded. But all they need to do is update their networks to use an IP layer, and then encrypt the traffic with IPsec or TLS. Then you have end-to-end security on any communication channel, whatever the traffic flows. Problem solved?
...it's called Punycode. It's just a way of encoding Unicode into the 37 characters supported by normal DNS. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE7 give a transparent implementation, all with different protections against homograph attacks.
I list my email address using an ASCII art "big" figlet font. Stupid lamness filter won't let me show it here, but check on my website.
Here is one site where you can make your own.
I think Apple did a pretty good job optimizing Aqua for OS X. The minimum requirements, IIRC, are just a G3 processor and 256 MB RAM. You still get all the lickable widgets and compositing goodness, with much fewer resources.
Careful how you read those report cards. A check mark or red X does NOT mean the congressman voted for/against the stated issue -- this is remarkably misleading. The check mark or X actually shows whether or not the congressman voted in alignment with C|Net's political views. I wish they would have just given the REAL data and let the reader decide what is and what isn't tech-friendly.
I've found some goodies at the Mutopia Project. This website has many out-of-copyright pieces that have been typeset by volunteers and uploaded for all to use. Music is available in PDF, MIDI, and LilyPond (an open-source Finale-ish format).
Perhaps by reducing the number of people who see its name in print, Unisys will lower the chances of someone being reminded of "LZW" and "patent troll." This is a good thing for their corporate image. Plus, how many of today's CIOs would remember the GIF fiasco from a decade ago?
Slashdot Mirror
Persistence-of-vision toys are fun and easy to make. They're a great way to learn how to solder. (You, the teacher, would need to download messages into them.) Kids quickly see the results of their work and it piques their interest for more technology.
POV Kits are available at many places online for $10-$20 each, probably less in bulk. One place I know is http://adafruit.com/
*sniff*
Oh, it's so cute. First they were just Baby Apple, playing nice with the other kiddies and corporations. Then they took their first steps - their first lock-in schemes, their first anticompetitive business practices. It was sooo adorable!
Now they just did the darndest thing - they're finally lying to government investigators. Awww. They're growing up to be just like their big brother Microsoft!
Many corporate execs seem to think that whole-disk encryption alone will save their butts in case their laptop ever gets stolen. They use it as a kind of insurance against carelessness. Not quite.
It's worth noting that encryption by itself does not stop a data breach from happening. It only mitigates the short-term consequences. To truly protect your company, you still need a full-service security deployment, and all the inconveniences that come with it.
Once the data has left your hands, encrypted or not, the damage has been done and there's nothing you can do to stop it. A bad guy could copy it, keep it on the shelf, and wait 15 years until we have quantum computers that can break RSA. Then he knows all your old secrets which could still be very damaging 15 years later.
A few months ago, someone stole a local hospital's backup tapes from a courier van. Although the tapes were properly encrypted, the hospital still freaked out about it, with good reason. They even paid for credit monitoring for everyone on the tapes. Once the cops recovered the stolen tapes, they sent them to the FBI to assess whether the tapes had been accessed by the thief.
There. Fixed that for you.
This is what I do every morning to get into work.
Start up a VNC server on the remote box and leave it running. No need to open holes in your firewall except for SSH, which is pretty safe to do.
To tunnel through the firewall and log in, type these commands on your local machine:
Voila: VNC connection, secured by SSH. When you are done just
. :1 VNC session, 5902 means :2, etc.
Note that 5901 means the
The girl's name is Taylor Leming. This cannot be a coincidence.
I am a ham radio operator and concern myself with disaster preparedness. With POTS (plain old telephone system) everyone is guaranteed their own connection, complete with line backup power so you can use the phone even if the power's out. Sometimes the switches overload and "all circuits are busy" but in most situations it's worked pretty well for the last century.
I worry about the trend to move to cell phones. We rely on both our cell phone's battery and the cell tower to stay powered. We also rely on available frequencies to use the tower. In Katrina and recently the San Diego fires, everyone immediately got on their cell phones and jammed all of the towers. Is there enough redundancy, power, and capacity to handle the next disaster? I don't think we should wait for the next hurricane to prove if cell towers can handle an emergency.
Here is a fascinating history of ClarisWorks from one of its original authors. It was quite an accomplishment to pack all that functionality into a megabyte of RAM. Ahh... nostalgia...
This must be NASA's latest effort to get a head of the Russians'. /me ducks
Here is the blog in question if you'd like to read for yourself.
Better yet, fight fire with fire. Just use this handy-dandy Anti-Telemarketer counterscript. Works every time!
It's interesting that a story (somewhat) critical of Intel should get posted on Slashdot. IIRC, Intel has been paying Slashdot big bucks to publish an "Intel Opinion Center" spamvertisement for several months now. Curious: this Intel-sponsored "section" shut down three days ago without any clear reason. Conincidence? Maybe there's been a boardroom fight?
Perhaps this is HP's response to the full-page-width MemJet technology mentioned earlier on ./?
(No, it's not open source, but...) PowerOne Graph is a commercial program that got me through high school and college classes. I bought a cheapie Sony Clie off eBay and installed PowerOne. For $40 for the Clie and $60 for the software, the handheld ran circles around TI graphing calculators and I found it well worth the investment. It was quite nice to have a high-rez color screen and about double the features you'll get with a TI-89 (though do read the manual - it has slightly different syntax than TI's.) Using the stylus to do more work instead of tedious arrow keys was also a big plus. Two caveats -- it's not programmable, and you can't use it on college entrance exams or AP tests (so borrow your classmate's when the time comes.) Other than that, I found it well worth it.
The whole idea of packet-routing and proprietary extensions to the USB protocol seems waay to complicated for the purpose of sharing periperals between PCs. Why not just a dumb electrical switch box? Sure, you have to turn the switch, but it's ten times simpler and ten times more robust. Not to mention cost-effective for the average consumer.
Banning binary modules is a bad way to spread the open-source/free-software philosophy. By giving users the choice between FLOSS and proprietary software, we can hope they'll make the "right" choice and choose FLOSS. OSS developers around the world work hard on their projects to prove that FLOSS is technically superior while also politcally purer. Removing this option altogether, in a way, is the same sort of guerilla vendor lock-in tactics that are used by DRM purveyors. We shouldn't force people to use a completely open-sourced kernel stack -- we should show them that it is superior and let them choose for themselves.
This higlights the danger in not using the open industry standard for telecommunications: the INTERNET PROTOCOL! Granted, ATMs and banking networks have been around longer than the last 20 years when Internet adoption exploded. But all they need to do is update their networks to use an IP layer, and then encrypt the traffic with IPsec or TLS. Then you have end-to-end security on any communication channel, whatever the traffic flows. Problem solved?
Was it just me, or did I read "ATM network" and thought that it meant Asyncronous Transfer Mode network?
...it's called Punycode. It's just a way of encoding Unicode into the 37 characters supported by normal DNS. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE7 give a transparent implementation, all with different protections against homograph attacks.
I list my email address using an ASCII art "big" figlet font. Stupid lamness filter won't let me show it here, but check on my website. Here is one site where you can make your own.
I think Apple did a pretty good job optimizing Aqua for OS X. The minimum requirements, IIRC, are just a G3 processor and 256 MB RAM. You still get all the lickable widgets and compositing goodness, with much fewer resources.
Careful how you read those report cards. A check mark or red X does NOT mean the congressman voted for/against the stated issue -- this is remarkably misleading. The check mark or X actually shows whether or not the congressman voted in alignment with C|Net's political views. I wish they would have just given the REAL data and let the reader decide what is and what isn't tech-friendly.
I've found some goodies at the Mutopia Project. This website has many out-of-copyright pieces that have been typeset by volunteers and uploaded for all to use. Music is available in PDF, MIDI, and LilyPond (an open-source Finale-ish format).
Perhaps by reducing the number of people who see its name in print, Unisys will lower the chances of someone being reminded of "LZW" and "patent troll." This is a good thing for their corporate image. Plus, how many of today's CIOs would remember the GIF fiasco from a decade ago?