You are missing the point. Instead of fruitles multiplication of people doing the same job, now we can code things that are really different.
I used to work in company that produced wireless routers (for our internal usage only; unfortunately we never reached the stage to sell them). They were based on Linux. In propriatery world, we would have to buy licence for OS. Then, we would be limited in changes we could made to them. And many many related things (no documentation, no source of drivers...). Company with 3 developers would have no chance to make anything similar.
So what is the point: Instead to write OS from the scratch; to write drivers and similar things we used existing free technology. My main task was to write bash scripts, to patch kernel and similar. Other guy wrote sofware for automated control.
Basically, we did not try to reinvent flowerpot hole (i.e. writing something that already exists), we focused on new value - i.e. things that were specific for own company.
I can say, without FOSS, what we tried to do would be totaly impossible. In this case, FOSS created 10 new jobs.
(Unfortunately, they lasted only one year, but it was not related to FOSS.)
In more general terms, FOSS enables you to move from general things to company specific things. All companies calculate taxes same way - but many many companies have their own in house built software for that. At the other side, there are no two same companies with exactly same business logic. FOSS, in theory at least, allows you to spare resources from coding tax logic (common tasks) and to transfer them to coding support for your business logic (specific taks).
To be honest, this happens also in propriatery world. SAP has same tools for all companies, but their (expensive) consultants will (hopefuly) customize their software for your own needs.
I used to work for a company that tried to deploy selfrouting 802.11b network.
If you talk about proof of concept, it works. But for real usage, it sucks. Main problem is to detect what is usuful neighbor. We used to send some control messages (although there already are beacon frames in 802.11), and to collect its signal. But signal strength is not a measure of link quality. As long as there is direct optical visibility, signal level can be really low, but link will be perfect. If you don't have optical visibility, you will receieve some packets, probably most of them - but once you try to send some real traffic over that link, everything will go to hell.
Algorithm (we used to use AODV) per se works ok; there is a whole theory about these algorithms; but in a case of 802.11b, there is no mean (at least no mean known to me) to detect what neighbor is useful one.
As a result, we had to abandon this idea, and we moved to static routes; but it does not help in case of moving vehicles.
All in all, don't expect this to work too reliably except when you are close to access points (or "access points", since this will be ad-hoc mode of 802.11b).
Also, in cases where it is very hard to replace bulbs, one trick is to use lower voltage. That will drastically increase bulbs' life. Unfortunately, I do not know exact benefit for specified voltage decrease.
Still, you should have in mind that spectrum will change; peak of the spectrum will be more close to red.
Well they don't have to lower greenhouse emission. In the case of Russia, for example, hey can actually riase their current levels of emission since they had more meissions in 1990.
Why they should not be allowed to rise their CO2 generation? Because God gave some right to Americans to generate most CO2 per capita in world? American CO2 production per capita is far largest in the world. Christians should believe that all people are equial, or maybe born-again Christians in USA believe that they are better than others?
I've been using Wikipedia almost exclusively as my encyclypedia for over a year now.
I have mod points, but there is no "+1 Optimistic"...
RND number generation and encription cards
on
Intro to Encryption
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
During my army service, I was told about random number generating cards. Basic idea is very simple, use thermal noise in conductors/semiconductors as a starting point for number generation.
So if you need random numbers for encryption, try some googling, and you will find many variations on this theme - serial port based equpment; noise from sound card (low cost solution - all you need is software). There are also schemes for do-it-yourself equipment.
Unfortunately, you should be a bit reluctant to accept the idea that all these things work as advertised. Just for beginning, although thermal noise is white noise by default, it get filtered in system during the processing. Its spectrum will not be the same as it was on the origin. (I am not an expert, but I think that spectral characteristics of the signal is not a requrement for randomness, but this is still good example of possible flaw in implementation.)
If I would start using this, I would test this generators with some mathematical tools.
Also, there are encription cards. I was able to see one made by Soekris. It has hardware implementation of DES. DES is designed to be done in hardware - shifting and xoring is easy to implement in hardware. Soekris makes 486 and P5 low-consumption small sized boxes. With this card, you may make good and fast IPSec firewall that runs on 133MHz 486 (!). Unfortunately, I am not in touch with this equipment any more, but problem was that Linux driver was in alpha state (situation from 10 months ago). BSD drivers were in release state.
(One idea came to my dirty mind - how interesting this card might be for crackers?)
1) Get 600MB of random noise data from listening for extra terrestrials from for instance SETI.
Don't do it!!! Simply, it's not safe. What if you take signal from some extraterestial inteligent species? That signal will not be completely random, and someone will be able to break it...
Actually, those who woted realy are further from the coast: most states that voted for W are in the central part of USA. New England and CA voted for Kerry. Florida voted for W, but that retired ppl living there correctly presume that they will die before the sealevel runs over their homes. Their graves will probably sooner or later be on the seabed, but who cares...
"W" obviously asumes that there are no jobs in areas near the sea.
Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
Poverty disgusts us all, but it's a far shot to blame the record companies for poverty.
With the current trend (where **AA with their enormous influence on US and other governments), they will screw copirights lows so tight, so they will own all newly created IP (and also prevent others to effectevly use any other IP). So we will be able to blame them for of decay of our whole civilization, not only for poverty.
I know about the guy who made very useful device, but with clasicall acumulator. No matter that solar cells are too week for road vehicle, they are quite sufficient for a small boat. So the guy took small boat, made a "roof" of solar panells. With small electrical motor and standard car battery, it is quite useful during the summer.
Ok, he does not use on the open see but on river Sava (tributary of Danube). It is very quiet, too, unlike standard motor boats.
I believe that here in Canada, there's a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits, since it's far easier to get losing sides to pay defendant's costs.
If you sue someone in Serbia, demanding amount of money X, but the court gives you only percent P of the X, losing party will have to pay only P percent of legal costs (court's fees, your lawyer costs etc.).
This prevents people to ask court for meaningles amounts of money.
I think that this mechanism is the same in all contintal legal systems.
I've seen some pretty bad stuff, horribly biased, (cut)
Actually, i was quite surprised about neutrality of some articles! Articles about NATO/Serbia war were much better than I expected. They had disclaimer about disputed neutrality, but they were just good.
Why is it scientists always use weird units? I have absolutely no clue of what "the implicit information storage that corresponds to all of the hard disks made in the world this year, multiplied by the number of years the universe has been around" actually represents in bytes.
It is imperial unit for large amount of data, you insensitive clod!
Is it possible to see any of USA or USSR equipment left there from Earth? (Using powerful telescopes, of course.)
Also, they mention "laser defractor" or something like that in articles, and if I understood correctly it is used for some kind of monitoring. Does anyone know a bit more about these things?
MS fights as hell to keep the status quo. They stopped development of the IE, because they do not want computer to be web. They want computer to be MS Windows.
But it could be seen even before. Even before the www, I recall that we dreamed about computer environment where you could move across the world, but just to aproach nearest terminal, log in, and there you are, your desktop, files and everything is there. We used to have Novell/Win3.11 network in our comp lab in university. OK, it was not across the world, but it worked fine. You could log whenever you wanted, and everything was there - PC's acted just like terminals, from your perspective. Next version, with NT network, never worked OK. Some programs could not be installed only on server (to be honest nonMS ones)... so the idea went away. Diskless stations had to be replaced with stations with HDDs...(actually, even in Novel/3.11 they were not diskless, but disks contained no real data). If you needed Corel, you had to pick exactly that station with Corel installed.
Then www appeared, but they never liked the idea. If they allow IE to act like complete PC - meaning that you can do text processing in it (for example) - they would replace OS with browser. They would replace their golden hen (desktop OS) with something they cannot control so tightly, and with something that other coulc probably copy. Why would they change current state of affairs? Thick client is what made them rich, and they will try to follow that model as much as they can. They don't like gmail, ebay and everything else ferature rich but web-based - since it is excactly the path what they do not like to happen.
Story from the country that had a dictator regime
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 1
For those who still do not believe that cameras are bad thing (tm), here is the story.
The coutry is Yugoslavia/Serbia.
Here is the preface: 1989, "TV" revolution in Romania. It was the last country in Europe with communistic dictator regime. I remember my family sitting and watching TV. We laughed - "finally will Romania be a normal country, just like us!". It may sound strange, but we considered our country to be at least decade in front of Eastern European countries. In that moment we had a good reason to believe that we are on the good track - last thing in our country that prevented us to compare to Western countries, the local communistic party, just lost its monopolly that year.
Ok, we were not free for Western standards, but we were on a good way. And there goes the part II - Slobodan Milosevic.
Next picture - Belgrade, 9th March 1991. Huge demostrations against Milosevic. Inittially peacefull demonstrations turned violent, due to police actions. Two people has been killed. I recall people captured on reporters' cameras. One of them was a guy from my high school. There was a photo where policemen beat him while he is lieing on the street. Everybody in our small town (not Belgrade) knew about photo, meaning that everybody knew that he was taking part in demostrations. Luckily for him, his father was a director in a big company, so he had no consequences in the school. But it could be a reason for kicking out the school, if you did not have some good background. In that moment Milosevic still had a support of about 60%.
Additional pictures: traffic monotoring cameras pointed to demonstrators on city's main square during every single oposition's action.
Now let us move this ancient story to more familiar environment (at least to you)- USA today.
Country is more-or-less democratic.
Suddenly, country moves to open dictature (or even worse, hidden dictatorship regime)
Country is under threath of war.
You dont like current regime.
You are in a minority.
The only thing you can do is to go to some peaceful demonstrations.
If you go there, you will be recorded by cameras.
If you get record in secret police... [your imagination here]. Actually nothing happens, but you are in their books, and they may show you that they know about you.
Actually, if you are "normal" citizen, they will not do a thing, even if they record you. Nothing will happen if you, an ordinary citisen, go to a foreign embassy on some unusual (but still unimportant) business. But if a member of secret police asks "informaly" your brother about it... That scares. That really scares. That scares just enough that you will consider carefully if you really shoud do
similar thing again. [This was my own experience.]
Having you in their records will just slow your actions. And that is what they want - they do not need you to be with them, they just want you to sit silent and not to act against them. Quite enough for them. It will buy them a decade or two, meanwhile they will cause WWII, atack Croatia and Bosnia, slaughter 400.000 people (examples taken from Germany, Serbia and Rwanda).
How much it takes for a country to become a dictature from democracy? Not too much. How much it takes for traffic survailance camera to become a tool for monitoring suspicious citizens? Same amount of time.
I really hope that USA will not follow Serbian pattern. Because, in Serbian time scale, you (USA) are somewhere in 1991/1992. With this pace, you will become a democratic country again somewhere
in 2012.
Meanwhile, sit home and wait your regime to fall to about 30% of support. Then you may appear in front of camera again, without any fear. But on 5th of October 1/16 of country will have to go to Washigtom to demostrate against electional fraud, and things will be settled again...
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing the point. Instead of fruitles multiplication of people doing the same job, now we can code things that are really different.
I used to work in company that produced wireless routers (for our internal usage only; unfortunately we never reached the stage to sell them). They were based on Linux. In propriatery world, we would have to buy licence for OS. Then, we would be limited in changes we could made to them. And many many related things (no documentation, no source of drivers...). Company with 3 developers would have no chance to make anything similar.
So what is the point: Instead to write OS from the scratch; to write drivers and similar things we used existing free technology. My main task was to write bash scripts, to patch kernel and similar. Other guy wrote sofware for automated control.
Basically, we did not try to reinvent flowerpot hole (i.e. writing something that already exists), we focused on new value - i.e. things that were specific for own company.
I can say, without FOSS, what we tried to do would be totaly impossible. In this case, FOSS created 10 new jobs.
(Unfortunately, they lasted only one year, but it was not related to FOSS.)
In more general terms, FOSS enables you to move from general things to company specific things. All companies calculate taxes same way - but many many companies have their own in house built software for that. At the other side, there are no two same companies with exactly same business logic. FOSS, in theory at least, allows you to spare resources from coding tax logic (common tasks) and to transfer them to coding support for your business logic (specific taks).
To be honest, this happens also in propriatery world. SAP has same tools for all companies, but their (expensive) consultants will (hopefuly) customize their software for your own needs.
I used to work for a company that tried to deploy selfrouting 802.11b network.
If you talk about proof of concept, it works. But for real usage, it sucks. Main problem is to detect what is usuful neighbor. We used to send some control messages (although there already are beacon frames in 802.11), and to collect its signal. But signal strength is not a measure of link quality. As long as there is direct optical visibility, signal level can be really low, but link will be perfect. If you don't have optical visibility, you will receieve some packets, probably most of them - but once you try to send some real traffic over that link, everything will go to hell.
Algorithm (we used to use AODV) per se works ok; there is a whole theory about these algorithms; but in a case of 802.11b, there is no mean (at least no mean known to me) to detect what neighbor is useful one.
As a result, we had to abandon this idea, and we moved to static routes; but it does not help in case of moving vehicles.
All in all, don't expect this to work too reliably except when you are close to access points (or "access points", since this will be ad-hoc mode of 802.11b).
Also, in cases where it is very hard to replace bulbs, one trick is to use lower voltage. That will drastically increase bulbs' life. Unfortunately, I do not know exact benefit for specified voltage decrease.
Still, you should have in mind that spectrum will change; peak of the spectrum will be more close to red.
During my army service, I was told about random number generating cards. Basic idea is very simple, use thermal noise in conductors/semiconductors as a starting point for number generation.
So if you need random numbers for encryption, try some googling, and you will find many variations on this theme - serial port based equpment; noise from sound card (low cost solution - all you need is software). There are also schemes for do-it-yourself equipment.
Unfortunately, you should be a bit reluctant to accept the idea that all these things work as advertised. Just for beginning, although thermal noise is white noise by default, it get filtered in system during the processing. Its spectrum will not be the same as it was on the origin. (I am not an expert, but I think that spectral characteristics of the signal is not a requrement for randomness, but this is still good example of possible flaw in implementation.)
If I would start using this, I would test this generators with some mathematical tools.
Also, there are encription cards. I was able to see one made by Soekris. It has hardware implementation of DES. DES is designed to be done in hardware - shifting and xoring is easy to implement in hardware. Soekris makes 486 and P5 low-consumption small sized boxes. With this card, you may make good and fast IPSec firewall that runs on 133MHz 486 (!). Unfortunately, I am not in touch with this equipment any more, but problem was that Linux driver was in alpha state (situation from 10 months ago). BSD drivers were in release state.
(One idea came to my dirty mind - how interesting this card might be for crackers?)
Actually, those who woted realy are further from the coast: most states that voted for W are in the central part of USA. New England and CA voted for Kerry. Florida voted for W, but that retired ppl living there correctly presume that they will die before the sealevel runs over their homes. Their graves will probably sooner or later be on the seabed, but who cares...
"W" obviously asumes that there are no jobs in areas near the sea.
I know about the guy who made very useful device, but with clasicall acumulator. No matter that solar cells are too week for road vehicle, they are quite sufficient for a small boat. So the guy took small boat, made a "roof" of solar panells. With small electrical motor and standard car battery, it is quite useful during the summer.
Ok, he does not use on the open see but on river Sava (tributary of Danube). It is very quiet, too, unlike standard motor boats.
We are lucky! Once when Kingston starts to make compilers, binaries will be even bigger...
This prevents people to ask court for meaningles amounts of money.
I think that this mechanism is the same in all contintal legal systems.
You will not need to protect yourself here that way.
Recomended reading related to the topic (copyrights that last forever): "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig.
It could be downloaded for free from: http://free-culture.org/get-it
Is it possible to see any of USA or USSR equipment left there from Earth? (Using powerful telescopes, of course.)
Also, they mention "laser defractor" or something like that in articles, and if I understood correctly it is used for some kind of monitoring. Does anyone know a bit more about these things?
Actually, I wander why it was not named "FreedomTalk"?
MS fights as hell to keep the status quo. They stopped development of the IE, because they do not want computer to be web. They want computer to be MS Windows.
l
You may read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
But it could be seen even before. Even before the www, I recall that we dreamed about computer environment where you could move across the world, but just to aproach nearest terminal, log in, and there you are, your desktop, files and everything is there. We used to have Novell/Win3.11 network in our comp lab in university. OK, it was not across the world, but it worked fine. You could log whenever you wanted, and everything was there - PC's acted just like terminals, from your perspective. Next version, with NT network, never worked OK. Some programs could not be installed only on server (to be honest nonMS ones)... so the idea went away. Diskless stations had to be replaced with stations with HDDs...(actually, even in Novel/3.11 they were not diskless, but disks contained no real data). If you needed Corel, you had to pick exactly that station with Corel installed.
Then www appeared, but they never liked the idea. If they allow IE to act like complete PC - meaning that you can do text processing in it (for example) - they would replace OS with browser. They would replace their golden hen (desktop OS) with something they cannot control so tightly, and with something that other coulc probably copy. Why would they change current state of affairs? Thick client is what made them rich, and they will try to follow that model as much as they can. They don't like gmail, ebay and everything else ferature rich but web-based - since it is excactly the path what they do not like to happen.
Driver in C++? You really don't like Bowie!
For those who still do not believe that cameras are bad thing (tm), here is the story.
The coutry is Yugoslavia/Serbia.
Here is the preface: 1989, "TV" revolution in Romania. It was the last country in Europe with communistic dictator regime. I remember my family sitting and watching TV. We laughed - "finally will Romania be a normal country, just like us!". It may sound strange, but we considered our country to be at least decade in front of Eastern European countries. In that moment we had a good reason to believe that we are on the good track - last thing in our country that prevented us to compare to Western countries, the local communistic party, just lost its monopolly that year.
Ok, we were not free for Western standards, but we were on a good way. And there goes the part II - Slobodan Milosevic.
Next picture - Belgrade, 9th March 1991. Huge demostrations against Milosevic. Inittially peacefull demonstrations turned violent, due to police actions. Two people has been killed. I recall people captured on reporters' cameras. One of them was a guy from my high school. There was a photo where policemen beat him while he is lieing on the street. Everybody in our small town (not Belgrade) knew about photo, meaning that everybody knew that he was taking part in demostrations. Luckily for him, his father was a director in a big company, so he had no consequences in the school. But it could be a reason for kicking out the school, if you did not have some good background. In that moment Milosevic still had a support of about 60%.
Additional pictures: traffic monotoring cameras pointed to demonstrators on city's main square during every single oposition's action.
Now let us move this ancient story to more familiar environment (at least to you)- USA today.
Country is more-or-less democratic.
Suddenly, country moves to open dictature (or even worse, hidden dictatorship regime)
Country is under threath of war.
You dont like current regime.
You are in a minority.
The only thing you can do is to go to some peaceful demonstrations.
If you go there, you will be recorded by cameras.
If you get record in secret police... [your imagination here]. Actually nothing happens, but you are in their books, and they may show you that they know about you.
Actually, if you are "normal" citizen, they will not do a thing, even if they record you. Nothing will happen if you, an ordinary citisen, go to a foreign embassy on some unusual (but still unimportant) business. But if a member of secret police asks "informaly" your brother about it... That scares. That really scares. That scares just enough that you will consider carefully if you really shoud do similar thing again. [This was my own experience.]
Having you in their records will just slow your actions. And that is what they want - they do not need you to be with them, they just want you to sit silent and not to act against them. Quite enough for them. It will buy them a decade or two, meanwhile they will cause WWII, atack Croatia and Bosnia, slaughter 400.000 people (examples taken from Germany, Serbia and Rwanda).
How much it takes for a country to become a dictature from democracy? Not too much. How much it takes for traffic survailance camera to become a tool for monitoring suspicious citizens? Same amount of time.
I really hope that USA will not follow Serbian pattern. Because, in Serbian time scale, you (USA) are somewhere in 1991/1992. With this pace, you will become a democratic country again somewhere in 2012.
Meanwhile, sit home and wait your regime to fall to about 30% of support. Then you may appear in front of camera again, without any fear. But on 5th of October 1/16 of country will have to go to Washigtom to demostrate against electional fraud, and things will be settled again...