Some comments on this thread.... Flying an aeroplane is NOTHING like driving a car. Use you common instinct as to how things work and you will shortly become a hole in the ground. Anybody reading this who thinks flying their own plane would be a neat idea, should first get a copy of "stick and rudder" and read it from cover to cover TWICE. While this book was first published in the 40's, it is still quite valid.
Now it will be possible to add computer automation to private aircraft eliminate the 'loose nut in the cockpit' (stupid pilot) there still remains the matter of navigation and weather. The former can be assisted by automation, but the latter never will be. If you have ever been up in a small plane in rough weather (let alone thunderstorms!!) you know you DON'T want to be! (Unless you LOVE riding rollercosters built in active combat zones). Besides the rough ride, there is vertigo (makes seassickness seem like a bit of gas). Large aircraft can get above the weather by going into the lower stratosphere, something light aircraft can't do without being pressurized and carring O2 (forget this for anything costing under $500,000).
Personal flying vehicles may replace motocycles, but not cars. The new generation of such vehicles will be usefull by public service and emergency operations though.
Actually/. was caught with their pants down, they posted the story without reading the whole thing and had to add a qualifier after the fact. The Register did a good number on them.
I agree that Linus was caught in a "do what I say, not what I do" bind though. Either that, or he is just a bit TOO friendly with Larry and the two of them had their hands in each other's pockets.
IMHO, Larry just go home and take your ball with you!
The diffused laser beams mentioned in the article would be as safe as a high powered lamp, such as those used by the tower to guide planes in for a landing when their radios have failed.
Since lasers are VERY monochromatic, and operate on a few specific wavelengths it would be possible to develop protective eyeware that would block the laser beams, but still allow normal vision. These would protect pilots from "terrorist" laser attacks.
I'm waiting for laser pointer pens to be outlawed because of the 'threat' to air travel.
If I disasemble your code to find out how you did something and then make my own version that is probably a clear case of reverse engineering.
If I use your product for a period of time and keep notes of all it's features (and bugs!) and then create a work alike based on my notes is that also reverse engineering?
Samba was clearly reverse engineered, and it HAD to be done that way because M$ dosen't publish any details on the workings of their net protocols necessary to build a work alike. Does M$ gain anything from Samba? Perhaps they don't lose some sales of Office and Windows OS because by having Samba available a customer can choose to keep their windows desktop sytems and applications while using Unix for their inferstructure.
I cannot fault BK for having an anti-reverse engineering clause in their eula for the 'free' version of the product. As long as someone had purchased the 'enterprise' version I would think some form of functional reverse engineering (not necessarly disassembly and copy) would be fair game.
I'm waiting for NASA to rent space on the side of the shuttle for banner ads. Can you picture Ronald McDonald holding up a big mac airbrushed on the shuttle's underside during takeoff?
The idea of DST is to have the daylight hours occur during the hours people are actually awake. Since most of us sleep 8 hours (or wish we did anyway) we are awake for 16 hours. During the summer there can be as much as 16 hours of daylight (depends on your latitude) so we can shift the clock to make this work. HOWEVER during the winter the situation is reversed. Some parts of the country will have as 16 hours of NIGHT, so it doesn't make much difference if you shift an hour, you still don't have enough daylight hours to cover the average waking day! In SFL, this might work, but in Moose Country you would come up short on one end or the other in March and November so why bother?
Well maybe, but maybe not. Linus liked Bitkeeper, because it was the right tool for the job. The only thing that has changed is the price. So there are two choices... 1: switch tools. 2: BUY LEGAL COPIES OF BITKEEPER. Linus can continue to use Bitkeeper on Bitmovers terms by cutting them a check and signing their G.D. EULA.
But somehow....I don't thing this is going to happen.
If you look real close at the screen on a shadowmask picture tube (NOT an aperture mask tube IE: trinitron or linitron) you will also see stuck on or stuck off dots. This is caused by the electron beam being missguided by a bent hole in the mask or a defective phosphor dot. Good picture tubes will have few of these. I think that Heathkit used to buy picture tubes that were rejected by the 'better' makers (Curtis Mathus maybe?) to save some bucks. Both of my Heathkit color tv's had a few wayward phospher dots on their tubes.
About the Doom game teaching kids to go on shooting rampages. Really now, just how much DOES media influence kids. Tell me, did anybody get the urge to blow up things watching Wille-Coyotoe and the road runner? How about Elmer-Fudd and his shot gun blowing Daffy Ducks head off (over and over again), did that make you want to go get a shot gun and shoot peoples heads off? The only diference between yesterday's cartoons and today's video games, is the resolution (very real looking gore), Oh, and sex.
Maybe there should be (and there already is to some point) a ratings system for games, and the really 'adult' games kept in the back room (like the X rated videos) so teens and pre-teens can't buy or rent them (unless their asshole parents do the wrong thing). However, other than giving parents the tools to take their responsibilty over what their children are exposed to (and maybe put some teeth in there for parents who DON'T) keep your legal hands off the gamers. If you want to treat them the same way you do P0rN providers, that's probably not going too far (given the pornographic nature of some of today's games!).
He said digital STANDARD cable, not PREMIMUM channels. In my neck of the woods that is about $10 for very basic service + $20 for digital level I + $30 for digital level II (level one adds things like CNN, Superstations, etc, level two adds stuff like disney, scifi, etc). Premimum channels are about $10-15 each after that. SO basic digital cable should be about $30-40 (including STB rental) I think their internet service adds $30-$40 depending on speed. Sounds like he should be paying $20-30 LESS than he is.
DRM is suitable for 'rental' such as pay per view, but NOT for 'purchase'. The problem is that idiots such as the RIAA and MPAA (and Micro$oft) tell us we don't buy the software, but rather a license to use it and get a copy of the software on media that we do own (the media NOT the software). That would be ok as long as they agree to REPLACE said media when it becomes un-readable due to it wearing out, or because of hardware changes (IE: CD's obsolete, now need SADVD). Problem is to separate the cost of the media (nominal) from the license. Don't tell me I need to buy the whole frag'in thing all over again!!!!!!
Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. No matter which HD brand you recommend SOMEONE is going to tell you they had bad luck with them. I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor. I have had two go bad on me, one was due to overheating (4 disk drives stacked one next to each other in a tight case and not enough air flow). The middle drive would go south (seek errors up the wazoo). The other failure was a case of static zap. I should have grounded myself before yanking cables to swap drives around. First time I EVER had a hd stop working. COMPLETLY. The bios couldn't find it. Maxtor replaced the zapped drive by mail real quick. The other drive actually starting working again when I gave it some room to breath (removed the extra drives from the box and cut down on the heat).
BTW the CompUSA branded Maxtor drives just might be better made. And I've heard nothing but bad news about Segate and WD (and in the past IBM. Don't know if Hattachi has made things any better).
A few years ago, I was sitting at home and got a call from Nike Online. Within about 10-15 seconds of that call, I had a call from Visa Loss Prevention on call waiting. Someone had stolen my Visa number and attempted to use it to buy a lot of Nike stuff from the online store. Both Nike and Visa caught the fraudulent purchase at the time of sale. They were able to get in touch with me, the local police department, and set up a sting to get the thief. I wasn't charged anything, and had only a minor problem while I waited for my new card to arrive since they had to kill the old number (which sucked as I had just memorized it and the code on the back). On a few occasions when I attempted to make a large purchase with a Visa card it was refused at the terminal and the cashier had to either call the bank or have his/her supervisor make the call (depending on the stupidity level of the cashier). In all cases this was due to the large purchase setting off a 'red flag' at the bank. I had to then talk to the person at the bank in order to make the purchase. They wanted proof that the card was being used by the card holder. (We are talking about purchases in the 4 figure dollar amounts, not an everyday thing at Walmart, but it can happen at the HomeDepot or Sears).
You are very lucky you were able to get your money back. I will NEVER have a debit card! I have cut up and destroyed (cross-cut shreader) all offers from banks for Debit cards. Debit cards are probably suitable ONLY for people with shitty credit history that CAN'T qualify for a credit or charge card.
If I were running the credit card companies, I would hold the vendors responsible for any loss due to fraud that was a result of their NOT checking signatures and ID's. THAT would put a stop to that.
I wish I had a dollar for every time some mental midget on a motorcycle decided he had the right to carve out his own lane, between two lanes of slow moving traffic. I sometimes wish the next asshole that does that becomes the 'meat' in an 18 wheel sandwitch.
Well here I have some insight. While nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light there is NOTHING that prevents SPACE ITSELF from expanding faster than the speed of light! The fact is that the big bang created not only all the matter and energy in our universe, it also created the UNIVERSE itself! Imagine the universe as a big container that is growing larger by the microsecond, and everything that exists is INSIDE this container. Now the container may be expanding at a rate faster than light, which gives the illusion that any two objects IN the container are moving apart from each other faster than light, but they are NOT. What this means is that while the universe may be only 15 billion years old, the most distant point visable from earth could be MORE THAN 15 BILLION LIGHT YEARS away! This does NOT contradict special relativity! (BTW the current issue of Scientific American has an article explaining this).
Sarge is/finally/ almost ready. Great! When it finally DOES release Sarge will be only 2 years obsolete compaired with Woody's 3!
Tell you what WOULD be nice. If Debian had an Apt-Emerge option to allow automatic back port builds of packages from 'testing' or 'unstable' from source into the current 'stable'. Granted this wouldn't be perfect, some packages can't be back-ported just by building against older libs, but it would be a start!
So long as the intent is to provide security for documents that the computer user has created, or has to work with this can be something usefull and not evil. So anybody creating a 'sensitive' document with say MS office applications could prevent those documents from being read by anybody other than the intended audiance. It seems from the Atmel spec that the 'fritz' chip is nothing more than an encryption engine, and that the trusted computer hardware is based on the use of encryption. Only the allowed applications on a computer with the right keys can decrypt the protected document.
Taking this a bit futher, if the computer operating system got involved only approved applications could be loaded and run. If the bios got involved, then only an approved OS could be loaded. However in the last case, this would be a 'setting' in the bios that the computer owner could control from the bios setup screen. Now in the case of a computer in an employee's office the bios would have a password for access and the computer case would be locked so you couldn't reset the bios by removing the battery.
Any computer that you or I would buy for our own use would not have those restrictions. We would still not be able to read 'protected' documents (word, media, etc) without running the required applications and having the hardware authorization in concert with those applications. Of course, encryption can sometimes be broken so this scheme is only as secure as the encryption. (how many bits long did you say the key was?)
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Some comments on this thread ....
Flying an aeroplane is NOTHING like driving a car. Use you common instinct as to how things work and you will shortly become a hole in the ground. Anybody reading this who thinks flying their own plane would be a neat idea, should first get a copy of "stick and rudder" and read it from cover to cover TWICE. While this book was first published in the 40's, it is still quite valid.
Now it will be possible to add computer automation to private aircraft eliminate the 'loose nut in the cockpit' (stupid pilot) there still remains the matter of navigation and weather. The former can be assisted by automation, but the latter never will be. If you have ever been up in a small plane in rough weather (let alone thunderstorms!!) you know you DON'T want to be! (Unless you LOVE riding rollercosters built in active combat zones). Besides the rough ride, there is vertigo (makes seassickness seem like a bit of gas). Large aircraft can get above the weather by going into the lower stratosphere, something light aircraft can't do without being pressurized and carring O2 (forget this for anything costing under $500,000).
Personal flying vehicles may replace motocycles, but not cars. The new generation of such vehicles will be usefull by public service and emergency operations though.
Actually /. was caught with their pants down, they posted the story without reading the whole thing and had to add a qualifier after the fact. The Register did a good number on them.
I agree that Linus was caught in a "do what I say, not what I do" bind though. Either that, or he is just a bit TOO friendly with Larry and the two of them had their hands in each other's pockets.
IMHO, Larry just go home and take your ball with you!
The diffused laser beams mentioned in the article would be as safe as a high powered lamp, such as those used by the tower to guide planes in for a landing when their radios have failed.
Since lasers are VERY monochromatic, and operate on a few specific wavelengths it would be possible to develop protective eyeware that would block the laser beams, but still allow normal vision. These would protect pilots from "terrorist" laser attacks.
I'm waiting for laser pointer pens to be outlawed because of the 'threat' to air travel.
If I disasemble your code to find out how you did something and then make my own version that is probably a clear case of reverse engineering.
If I use your product for a period of time and keep notes of all it's features (and bugs!) and then create a work alike based on my notes is that also reverse engineering?
Samba was clearly reverse engineered, and it HAD to be done that way because M$ dosen't publish any details on the workings of their net protocols necessary to build a work alike. Does M$ gain anything from Samba? Perhaps they don't lose some sales of Office and Windows OS because by having Samba available a customer can choose to keep their windows desktop sytems and applications while using Unix for their inferstructure.
I cannot fault BK for having an anti-reverse engineering clause in their eula for the 'free' version of the product. As long as someone had purchased the 'enterprise' version I would think some form of functional reverse engineering (not necessarly disassembly and copy) would be fair game.
I'm waiting for NASA to rent space on the side of the shuttle for banner ads. Can you picture
Ronald McDonald holding up a big mac airbrushed on the shuttle's underside during takeoff?
The idea of DST is to have the daylight hours occur during the hours people are actually awake. Since most of us sleep 8 hours (or wish we did anyway) we are awake for 16 hours. During the summer there can be as much as 16 hours of daylight (depends on your latitude) so we can shift the clock to make this work. HOWEVER during the winter the situation is reversed. Some parts of the country will have as 16 hours of NIGHT, so it doesn't make much difference if you shift an hour, you still don't have enough daylight hours to cover the average waking day! In SFL, this might work, but in Moose Country you would come up short on one end or the other in March and November so why bother?
Well maybe, but maybe not. Linus liked Bitkeeper, because it was the right tool for the job. The only thing that has changed is the price. So there are two choices...
1: switch tools.
2: BUY LEGAL COPIES OF BITKEEPER.
Linus can continue to use Bitkeeper on Bitmovers terms by cutting them a check and signing their G.D. EULA.
But somehow....I don't thing this is going to happen.
I'd like to hear what S. Hawking has to say about this one.
Did anybody ever read "the adventure of the orange pips"?
If you look real close at the screen on a shadowmask picture tube (NOT an aperture mask tube IE: trinitron or linitron) you will also see stuck on or stuck off dots. This is caused by the electron beam being missguided by a bent hole in the mask or a defective phosphor dot. Good picture tubes will have few of these. I think that Heathkit used to buy picture tubes that were rejected by the 'better'
makers (Curtis Mathus maybe?) to save some bucks. Both of my Heathkit color tv's had a few wayward phospher dots on their tubes.
About the Doom game teaching kids to go on shooting rampages. Really now, just how much DOES media influence kids. Tell me, did anybody get the urge to blow up things watching Wille-Coyotoe and the road runner? How about Elmer-Fudd and his shot gun blowing Daffy Ducks head off (over and over again), did that make you want to go get a shot gun and shoot peoples heads off? The only diference between yesterday's cartoons and today's video games, is the resolution (very real looking gore), Oh, and sex.
Maybe there should be (and there already is to some point) a ratings system for games, and the really 'adult' games kept in the back room (like the X rated videos) so teens and pre-teens can't buy or rent them (unless their asshole parents do the wrong thing). However, other than giving parents the tools to take their responsibilty over what their children are exposed to (and maybe put some teeth in there for parents who DON'T) keep your legal hands off the gamers. If you want to treat them the same way you do P0rN providers, that's probably not going too far (given the pornographic nature of some of today's games!).
1 2 3 4
Just like on space balls.
only KLINGONS fart in airlocks.
He said digital STANDARD cable, not PREMIMUM channels. In my neck of the woods that is about
$10 for very basic service + $20 for digital level I
+ $30 for digital level II (level one adds things like CNN, Superstations, etc, level two adds stuff like disney, scifi, etc). Premimum channels are about $10-15 each after that. SO basic digital cable should be about $30-40 (including STB rental)
I think their internet service adds $30-$40 depending on speed. Sounds like he should be paying $20-30 LESS than he is.
DRM is suitable for 'rental' such as pay per view, but NOT for 'purchase'. The problem is that idiots such as the RIAA and MPAA (and Micro$oft) tell us we don't buy the software, but rather a license to use it and get a copy of the software on media that we do own (the media NOT the software). That would be ok as long as they agree to REPLACE said media when it becomes un-readable due to it wearing out, or because of hardware changes (IE: CD's obsolete, now need SADVD). Problem is to separate the cost of the media (nominal) from the license. Don't tell me I need to buy the whole frag'in thing all over again!!!!!!
Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. No matter which HD brand you recommend SOMEONE is going to tell you they had bad luck with them. I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor. I have had two go bad on me, one was due to overheating (4 disk drives stacked one next to each other in a tight case and not enough air flow). The middle drive would go south (seek errors up the wazoo). The other failure was a case of static zap. I should have grounded myself before yanking cables to swap drives around. First time I EVER had a hd stop working. COMPLETLY. The bios couldn't find it. Maxtor replaced the zapped drive by mail real quick. The other drive actually starting working again when I gave it some room to breath (removed the extra drives from the box and cut down on the heat).
BTW the CompUSA branded Maxtor drives just might be better made. And I've heard nothing but bad news about Segate and WD (and in the past IBM. Don't know if Hattachi has made things any better).
A few years ago, I was sitting at home and got a call from Nike Online. Within about 10-15 seconds of that call, I had a call from Visa Loss Prevention on call waiting. Someone had stolen my Visa number and attempted to use it to buy a lot of Nike stuff from the online store. Both Nike and Visa caught the fraudulent purchase at the time of sale. They were able to get in touch with me, the local police department, and set up a sting to get the thief. I wasn't charged anything, and had only a minor problem while I waited for my new card to arrive since they had to kill the old number (which sucked as I had just memorized it and the code on the back).
On a few occasions when I attempted to make a large purchase with a Visa card it was refused at the terminal and the cashier had to either call the bank or have his/her supervisor make the call (depending on the stupidity level of the cashier). In all cases this was due to the large purchase setting off a 'red flag' at the bank. I had to then talk to the person at the bank in order to make the purchase. They wanted proof that the card was being used by the card holder. (We are talking about purchases in the 4 figure dollar amounts, not an everyday thing at
Walmart, but it can happen at the HomeDepot or Sears).
You are very lucky you were able to get your money back. I will NEVER have a debit card! I have cut up and destroyed (cross-cut shreader) all offers from banks for Debit cards. Debit cards are probably suitable ONLY for people with shitty credit history that CAN'T qualify for a credit or charge card.
If I were running the credit card companies, I would hold the vendors responsible for any loss due to fraud that was a result of their NOT checking signatures and ID's.
THAT would put a stop to that.
The IMAX 3d format is the ONLY way to go. I saw the 'Polar Express' in IMAX 3d and it just blows you away!
I wish I had a dollar for every time some mental midget on a motorcycle decided he had the right to carve out his own lane, between two lanes of slow moving traffic. I sometimes wish the next asshole that does that becomes the 'meat' in an 18 wheel sandwitch.
Well here I have some insight. While nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light there is NOTHING that prevents SPACE ITSELF from expanding faster than the speed of light! The fact is that the big bang created not only all the matter and energy in our universe, it also created the UNIVERSE itself! Imagine the universe as a big container that is growing larger by the microsecond, and everything that exists is INSIDE this container. Now the container may be expanding at a rate faster than light, which gives the illusion that any two objects IN the container are moving apart from each other faster than light, but they are NOT. What this means is that while the universe may be only 15 billion years old, the most distant point visable from earth could be MORE THAN 15 BILLION LIGHT YEARS away! This does NOT contradict special relativity!
(BTW the current issue of Scientific American has an article explaining this).
Sarge is /finally/ almost ready.
Great! When it finally DOES release Sarge will be
only 2 years obsolete compaired with Woody's
3!
Tell you what WOULD be nice. If Debian had an Apt-Emerge option to allow automatic back port builds of packages from 'testing' or 'unstable' from source into the current 'stable'. Granted this wouldn't be perfect, some packages can't be back-ported just by building against older libs, but it would be a start!
So long as the intent is to provide security for documents that the computer user has created, or has to work with this can be something usefull and not evil. So anybody creating a 'sensitive' document with say MS office applications could prevent those documents from being read by anybody other than the intended audiance. It seems from the Atmel spec that the 'fritz' chip is nothing more than an encryption engine, and that the trusted computer hardware is based on the use of encryption. Only the allowed applications on a computer with the right keys can decrypt the protected document.
Taking this a bit futher, if the computer operating system got involved only approved applications could be loaded and run. If the bios got involved, then only an approved OS could be loaded. However in the last case, this would be a 'setting' in the bios that the computer owner could control from the bios setup screen. Now in the case of a computer in an employee's office the bios would have a password for access and the computer case would be locked so you couldn't reset the bios by removing the battery.
Any computer that you or I would buy for our own use would not have those restrictions. We would still not be able to read 'protected' documents (word, media, etc) without running the required applications and having the hardware authorization in concert with those applications. Of course, encryption can sometimes be broken so this scheme is only as secure as the encryption. (how many bits long did you say the key was?)
"EAT SHIT, 20 Billion flies CAN'T be wrong!"