My Robostix was ordered last week, and should arrive next week. We'll be evaluating it to see how good a fit it is for the FlockBots, and how much effort there will be in switching to it (soldering ~40 pins per board adds up).
If nothing else, I look forward to a microcontroller that can keep up with the quadrature wheel encoders. Having to use polling on the Brainstem was less than ideal -- we had to slow the bots down a whole lot.
If you're running an SMP kernel then the exploit code may not work. He does have a comment in there about "may need modification for SMP." It might also just be a matter of trying it a lot more times.
Umm, how exactly are "age" and "sex" private information ??
You must not know many older women
The parents of students who have flunked several grades typically want the age of their child to be private
Parents of hermaphrodites also have an interest in keeping that information private.
And in any event, there should be no reason why a corporation should require this sort of information, especially when their ultimate goal is to collect this sort of information on every student in the country. If the technology can be implemented in a way which is less intrusive on privacy, which it could, then that's how it should be done.
I thought FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) generally prohibited schools from disclosing personal information about students. I guess Verisign is relying on the "Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school" exception. How do they propose implementing this if it passes the study? Certainly they should receive no excemption then.
Of course they could provide technology to schools so that schools could program their own tokens, thus eliminating the need to send private, federally protected inforamtion to Verisign. But, that would undermine Verisign's greedy, "let us mint certs which expire more frequently than necessary, so that we can sell you the same thing over and over again" strategy...
The point which seems to be missed in most of the replies I've read so far is that this is a feature for widescreen TVs, which have an aspect ratio of 19:6. Standard NTSC is a 4:3 ratio. When you view NTSC on a widescreen TV, you have black bars on the sides of the picture.
Most widescreen TVs provide several options for making a 4:3 image fill up a 16:9 screen (i.e. getting rid of the black bars). You can stretch (distort) the picture, or you can zoom in and crop some of the picture. What Sony has done is allow you to control which part of the 4:3 image is going to be cropped.
"...or is it WOMEN who don't like math, science, and engineering? "
This should prove to our readers (in response to some of the above posts) that there indeed is some serious gender bias out there. How depressing.
So it's my biases which are the reason why it's 90% guys in my math classes? Ah, that explains it.
I am going to concentrate really hard on removing that bias, so that hopefully I'll be the only male in my classes when they start up next week... Thanks for the tip!
And the freeddom to use the code in closed commercial applications makes it *even more free* than restricting it to only other open source projets.
The GPL does not preclude distribution by the copyright holder under another license as well. Just look at CUPS. It's released under the GPL, but Apple paid for a different license, so they are allowed to release binary only version with their proprietary additions.
If a company doesn't want to adhere to the GPL, then they should negotiate with they copyright holder(s), and obtain a different license for the code. Sure, you can't rob us programmers blind that way, but how exactly is that our problem?
break into your house to show you how easy it is. It will really help you out in the long run, and you should thank me.
show the pilot on the next flight I'm on how easy it is to get a gun through airport security
show the Secret Service (hey, this is sarcasm. I don't need you guys to visit) how easy it is to jump the fence at the whitehouse and run across the lawn
stick up the local bank to show them how bad their security is. I could write a really good article on that. Obviously I would give them their money back, so there isn't any harm in that. Right?
This was just a couple of punk-ass script kiddies trying to make the school administration look bad. Seriously, what did they think was going to happen? It's one thing to do serious research in an ethical manner, and another to play 31337 h@xor script kiddie under the guise of journalism. They aren't even good script kiddies -- they got caught way to easily.
As Computing professionals we should all be ashamed of the quality standards that we have allowed, and continue to allow, to be considered a production ready release.
I blame management. If they bought Ford vehicles and suffered the same problems as we get with Microsoft, I can guarantee that they would never buy Ford again. Microsoft screws them over on a regular basis (worms, price hikes, incompatibility issues, etc), and it's heresy to even suggest talking about ditching Microsoft.
I was lead developer on the team which was tasked with scanning all of the computers at my University for Y2K compliance. A couple of systems failed, because their BIOS wouldn't handle Y2K properly. So on the desktop support side we found problems ahead of time and fixed them.
Our programmers spent an enormous amount of time updating code which certainly wouldn't have worked after the date change. A lot of applications the University relies on would have failed had that work not been done.
Hoax? I don't think so.
More recently, OpenAFS experienced a January 10, 2004 bug (when UNIX time reached 2^30). The election mechanism broke, so servers stopped synchronizing databases, which meant that no new volumes, users or groups could be created. It turned out to be a wrong bitmask in one place, so it was easily fixed.
Y2K would have been far, far worse than this if the problem had not been pointed out ahead of time.
For Linux I just picked up a pchdtv card. It wasn't too bad to set up, and is capturing HDTV off the air ("for free") fine. I need a better antenna, but I knew that when I bought the card.
It's BTX form factor, so throw out the case too. It's not as bad as you are making it out to be. The same argument could have been made before the switch from ISA to PCI. You couldn't do the things you can today if that change had not occured.
When VESA came out, I had to get rid of my ISA video card. When PCI came out I had to get rid of my VESA card. When AGP came out I had to get rid of my PCI card. When PCI-E comes out I have to get rid of my AGP card. So? Why is the PCI-E move any worse than the move to AGP?
Don't get me started on the different types of memory which I've had over the years. But, I wouldn't sit around arguing that I was screwed over by the move to DDR, for example.
PCI-E paves the way for much higher network bandwidth, more bandwidth for graphics cards, etc. PCI-E will scale to at least 10 GigE, if not beyond. Some of this means more in the server room than on the desktop, but it's nice to see the bar significantly raised across the board.
I recall reading somewhere that some motherboards would probably ship with AGP slots as well (AGP->PCI-E bridge?). Legacy PCI slots will also be available on many/most boards. You don't have to buy the board which supports DDR2, so you should be able to use your existing DDR memory. So, you need a new motherboard, CPU and case and can then grow into the rest of the new technology which is offered on the board.
I doubt you'll hold the same opinion several years from now. I think you'll look back and see that this was a good move, just as moving to PCI was a good thing, moving to AGP was a good thing...
You'd be wrong. There are so many HDTV ready sets already on the market that it would be suicide for HD-DVD manufacturers to make their output incompatible with those existing sets.
Just like it would be suicide for them to introduce copy protection on DVI and break some existing sets? Oh, wait... they already did that -- it's called DVI-HDCP. Hmm, could it be that they don't have the consumer's best interests in mind!?!?!?
But suggesting that drug possession isn't legal evidence of drug use (because I might be a researcher working on coccaine addiction, bringing materials to my lab) would be... counterproductive.
But drugs are illegal whereas smart card programmers are legal. Prove that you don't use the photocopier at work to make illegal copies of copyrighted material... Lots of people make illegal copies, so you probably do to. So, pay up. That's the argument they're making, and it's just wrong.
So what exactly are the legitimate uses of having a card programmer?
A smart card is like a compact flash card in that you can store data on it. The difference is that your reader must communicate with an embedded microcontroller on the card instead of directly with the memory. The microcontroller can control how you access the data which is stored on the card.
A great use of smart cards is in computer security. You can have keys stored on the smart card which are usable by a user (typically a pin, or password is required) but can't be stolen out of the card. The private key never touches the computer which the smart card is plugged into, so it's safe to use even on a compromised system.
Oh, now I have to provide ?sufficient evidence? that I?m not guilty? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Shouldn?t the burden of proof be on their side?
In court, the burdon would be on them. They're saying that they will drop their charges if you prove your innocence to them.
I've looked into smartcard writers for legitimate purposes, and it's absurd that these clowns think they could demand money from me just for purchasing equipment which has many uses other than piracy. I would have to think long and hard about how I would respond if I got one of their letters, but a RICO counter-suit comes to mind (extortion anyone?).
What a shameful display of the american legal system when after a year and half all the court can say is "I'll grant you another extension and the trial won't be till september of 2005".
The SCO vs Novell case was filed on January 20, 2004, so that makes this case only 5 months old. They haven't even gotten to discovery yet, but it sounds like there aren't many facts which are disputed.
The legal wrangling to date has largely consisted of SCO trying to get the case moved to State court because the believe it's soley a contractual matter. Novell wants it in federal court, because they feel it's a matter of copyright law.
What has just happened is that the judge ruled that the case belongs in Federal Court, due to the copyright issues. He's also agreed with one of the two Novell arguments for why the case should be dismissed. Rather than dismiss it and have SCO re-file, he's given them 30 days to amend their claim with specifics about damages.
The core question is whether the copyrights were transfered to SCO or not. Both parties agree that the APA is a legitimate document, it's just a matter of how each side is interpreting it. SCO claims that it's sufficient to transfer the copyrights, while Novell claims that it's merely a promise to transfer the copyrights in the future, provided some vague criteria is met.
It's best for all of us if this case is not dismissed. The copyright issue needs to be settled one way or another. If it goes in Novell's favor, most or all of the other cases will collapse. If it turns out that SCO really does own the copyrights, then the other cases will have to play out. Ownership of the copyrights doesn't mean much if there isn't any infringing code (we're waiting for an answer on IBM's request for partial summary judgement). If it turns out that Novell does not own the copyrights, Novell will still probably win the Slander of Title case, because they had to knowingly claim to own the copyrights. Given that the judge isn't even sure at this point if the APA transfers them or not, it would be hard to argue that they knew they were in the wrong. So, Novell wins even if they loose.
The windows systems can't do TSIG DDNS updates directly to a BIND server because Microsoft doesn't implement IETF standard TSIG. The workaround is to have the DHCP server make the updates on the workstation's behalf, which is a separate option that I had listed.
Tasks that are trivial under Unix, have thus far eluded me. I still don't know how to set up DNS under Win2K.
What makes Windows even worse to administer is the non-standard way Microsoft implements standards. Try getting Windows to integrate into a mixed environment. Many times you'll have to choose between doing things the Microsoft way (in which case nobody else can play) or a standards compliant way.
A quick example -- Microsoft doesn't implement IETF standard TSIG in their DNS implementation. So, your DDNS options are:
Use MS DNS and workstations register using proprietary TSIG -- non-MS systems can't use DDNS
Use MS DNS and have MS DHCP server make DDNS entries on workstations behalf
Use non-MS DNS and TSIG from workstations -- MS systems can't use DDNS
Use non-MS DNS and non-MS DHCP and have DHCP make DDNS entries on workstations behalf
We're not talking about oddball protocols here. DNS is a pretty fundamental protocol for a functional Internet.
I don't use Microsoft for DNS or DHCP because they don't work correctly. The protocols which they seem to get right I don't use either because in my experience it's just a matter of time until they make them incompatible.
Re:So you're angling for the DARPA challenge too?
on
Old Toy Modding?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, it's like a mini-DARPA grand challenge. It just needs to drive itself around campus. It's certainly a lot cheaper than the real thing.
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If nothing else, I look forward to a microcontroller that can keep up with the quadrature wheel encoders. Having to use polling on the Brainstem was less than ideal -- we had to slow the bots down a whole lot.
If you're running an SMP kernel then the exploit code may not work. He does have a comment in there about "may need modification for SMP." It might also just be a matter of trying it a lot more times.
- You must not know many older women
- The parents of students who have flunked several grades typically want the age of their child to be private
- Parents of hermaphrodites also have an interest in keeping that information private.
And in any event, there should be no reason why a corporation should require this sort of information, especially when their ultimate goal is to collect this sort of information on every student in the country. If the technology can be implemented in a way which is less intrusive on privacy, which it could, then that's how it should be done.Of course they could provide technology to schools so that schools could program their own tokens, thus eliminating the need to send private, federally protected inforamtion to Verisign. But, that would undermine Verisign's greedy, "let us mint certs which expire more frequently than necessary, so that we can sell you the same thing over and over again" strategy...
Most widescreen TVs provide several options for making a 4:3 image fill up a 16:9 screen (i.e. getting rid of the black bars). You can stretch (distort) the picture, or you can zoom in and crop some of the picture. What Sony has done is allow you to control which part of the 4:3 image is going to be cropped.
This should prove to our readers (in response to some of the above posts) that there indeed is some serious gender bias out there. How depressing.
So it's my biases which are the reason why it's 90% guys in my math classes? Ah, that explains it.
I am going to concentrate really hard on removing that bias, so that hopefully I'll be the only male in my classes when they start up next week... Thanks for the tip!
The GPL does not preclude distribution by the copyright holder under another license as well. Just look at CUPS. It's released under the GPL, but Apple paid for a different license, so they are allowed to release binary only version with their proprietary additions.
If a company doesn't want to adhere to the GPL, then they should negotiate with they copyright holder(s), and obtain a different license for the code. Sure, you can't rob us programmers blind that way, but how exactly is that our problem?
This was just a couple of punk-ass script kiddies trying to make the school administration look bad. Seriously, what did they think was going to happen? It's one thing to do serious research in an ethical manner, and another to play 31337 h@xor script kiddie under the guise of journalism. They aren't even good script kiddies -- they got caught way to easily.
So what, the UN weapons inspectors will be called in to certify that Microsoft Windows has been removed from them?
I blame management. If they bought Ford vehicles and suffered the same problems as we get with Microsoft, I can guarantee that they would never buy Ford again. Microsoft screws them over on a regular basis (worms, price hikes, incompatibility issues, etc), and it's heresy to even suggest talking about ditching Microsoft.
Our programmers spent an enormous amount of time updating code which certainly wouldn't have worked after the date change. A lot of applications the University relies on would have failed had that work not been done.
Hoax? I don't think so.
More recently, OpenAFS experienced a January 10, 2004 bug (when UNIX time reached 2^30). The election mechanism broke, so servers stopped synchronizing databases, which meant that no new volumes, users or groups could be created. It turned out to be a wrong bitmask in one place, so it was easily fixed.
Y2K would have been far, far worse than this if the problem had not been pointed out ahead of time.
Making ASCII art pr0n possible?
For Linux I just picked up a pchdtv card. It wasn't too bad to set up, and is capturing HDTV off the air ("for free") fine. I need a better antenna, but I knew that when I bought the card.
When VESA came out, I had to get rid of my ISA video card. When PCI came out I had to get rid of my VESA card. When AGP came out I had to get rid of my PCI card. When PCI-E comes out I have to get rid of my AGP card. So? Why is the PCI-E move any worse than the move to AGP?
Don't get me started on the different types of memory which I've had over the years. But, I wouldn't sit around arguing that I was screwed over by the move to DDR, for example.
PCI-E paves the way for much higher network bandwidth, more bandwidth for graphics cards, etc. PCI-E will scale to at least 10 GigE, if not beyond. Some of this means more in the server room than on the desktop, but it's nice to see the bar significantly raised across the board.
I recall reading somewhere that some motherboards would probably ship with AGP slots as well (AGP->PCI-E bridge?). Legacy PCI slots will also be available on many/most boards. You don't have to buy the board which supports DDR2, so you should be able to use your existing DDR memory. So, you need a new motherboard, CPU and case and can then grow into the rest of the new technology which is offered on the board.
I doubt you'll hold the same opinion several years from now. I think you'll look back and see that this was a good move, just as moving to PCI was a good thing, moving to AGP was a good thing...
Just like it would be suicide for them to introduce copy protection on DVI and break some existing sets? Oh, wait... they already did that -- it's called DVI-HDCP. Hmm, could it be that they don't have the consumer's best interests in mind!?!?!?
I got my apology email from him. He also was kind enough to ask if I was interested in some Viagra...
But drugs are illegal whereas smart card programmers are legal. Prove that you don't use the photocopier at work to make illegal copies of copyrighted material... Lots of people make illegal copies, so you probably do to. So, pay up. That's the argument they're making, and it's just wrong.
A smart card is like a compact flash card in that you can store data on it. The difference is that your reader must communicate with an embedded microcontroller on the card instead of directly with the memory. The microcontroller can control how you access the data which is stored on the card.
A great use of smart cards is in computer security. You can have keys stored on the smart card which are usable by a user (typically a pin, or password is required) but can't be stolen out of the card. The private key never touches the computer which the smart card is plugged into, so it's safe to use even on a compromised system.
In court, the burdon would be on them. They're saying that they will drop their charges if you prove your innocence to them.
I've looked into smartcard writers for legitimate purposes, and it's absurd that these clowns think they could demand money from me just for purchasing equipment which has many uses other than piracy. I would have to think long and hard about how I would respond if I got one of their letters, but a RICO counter-suit comes to mind (extortion anyone?).
The SCO vs Novell case was filed on January 20, 2004, so that makes this case only 5 months old. They haven't even gotten to discovery yet, but it sounds like there aren't many facts which are disputed.
The legal wrangling to date has largely consisted of SCO trying to get the case moved to State court because the believe it's soley a contractual matter. Novell wants it in federal court, because they feel it's a matter of copyright law.
What has just happened is that the judge ruled that the case belongs in Federal Court, due to the copyright issues. He's also agreed with one of the two Novell arguments for why the case should be dismissed. Rather than dismiss it and have SCO re-file, he's given them 30 days to amend their claim with specifics about damages.
The core question is whether the copyrights were transfered to SCO or not. Both parties agree that the APA is a legitimate document, it's just a matter of how each side is interpreting it. SCO claims that it's sufficient to transfer the copyrights, while Novell claims that it's merely a promise to transfer the copyrights in the future, provided some vague criteria is met.
It's best for all of us if this case is not dismissed. The copyright issue needs to be settled one way or another. If it goes in Novell's favor, most or all of the other cases will collapse. If it turns out that SCO really does own the copyrights, then the other cases will have to play out. Ownership of the copyrights doesn't mean much if there isn't any infringing code (we're waiting for an answer on IBM's request for partial summary judgement). If it turns out that Novell does not own the copyrights, Novell will still probably win the Slander of Title case, because they had to knowingly claim to own the copyrights. Given that the judge isn't even sure at this point if the APA transfers them or not, it would be hard to argue that they knew they were in the wrong. So, Novell wins even if they loose.
I guess you're not familiar with Novell's marketing department...
The windows systems can't do TSIG DDNS updates directly to a BIND server because Microsoft doesn't implement IETF standard TSIG. The workaround is to have the DHCP server make the updates on the workstation's behalf, which is a separate option that I had listed.
What makes Windows even worse to administer is the non-standard way Microsoft implements standards. Try getting Windows to integrate into a mixed environment. Many times you'll have to choose between doing things the Microsoft way (in which case nobody else can play) or a standards compliant way.
A quick example -- Microsoft doesn't implement IETF standard TSIG in their DNS implementation. So, your DDNS options are:
- Use MS DNS and workstations register using proprietary TSIG -- non-MS systems can't use DDNS
- Use MS DNS and have MS DHCP server make DDNS entries on workstations behalf
- Use non-MS DNS and TSIG from workstations -- MS systems can't use DDNS
- Use non-MS DNS and non-MS DHCP and have DHCP make DDNS entries on workstations behalf
We're not talking about oddball protocols here. DNS is a pretty fundamental protocol for a functional Internet.I don't use Microsoft for DNS or DHCP because they don't work correctly. The protocols which they seem to get right I don't use either because in my experience it's just a matter of time until they make them incompatible.
Yeah, it's like a mini-DARPA grand challenge. It just needs to drive itself around campus. It's certainly a lot cheaper than the real thing.