Try looking at the output in your favorite text editor. (yes, text editor. it just sends the scan to the keyboard port; no special software required).
It looks like this:
.C3nZC3nZC3nZCxjWENrYCNnY.fHmc.C3f2Cxj2DNz1D3P3. or, generally,.text.text.text.
The first one is the serial number, the second is the type of bar code, and the third is the value.
Here's another scan:
.C3nZC3nZC3nZCxjWENrYCNnY.cGf2.ENr7C3r1CNzZD3P1C xzYENP6.
Notice that the first part is the same. --
Large caveat: This applies only to QT free edition; that is, QT/Unix. Those who wish to develop cross-platform applications will still have to look elsewhere for their toolkit.
Note: Don't bother replying with flames about GTK+ sucking for Windoze. At least the port exists, is free software, and has the chance to improve eventually.
Up until now, it would have been perfectly ok. You're just creating an implementation of a protocol, and protocols IIRC cannot (and should not) be patented. Even if it is possible to patent a protocol, I doubt that protocol was patentable.
However, the DMCA introduces a new twist. Even if the protocol is not obfuscated, one could argue that setting up a sniffer would be bypassing their protections. It's a stupid argument, but it might be a valid argument under the DMCA. --
The author, along with many top people from many companies, asserts that the "anything" box is dead and that the future is moving towards smaller, specialized computers. This is the logic of the network machine, the logic of the compact car. It seems to make more sense than the all-purpose desktop computer + PDA -- and it is also doomed to failure.
The American infatuation with the desktop computer and the PDA is very similar to our love affair with the car. Cars are big, cars are possessions. While successful in many other cities, shared car plans have never really caught on (although there is a plan in the works for Cambridge, or so I have heard). Why? Americans like owning big cars, SUVs and cadillacs. They like owning them. A car is not just a tool to get from one place to another -- it is a lifestyle.
In the same way, cell phones are far more popular in Scandinavia and gadget-crazy Japan than in the U.S. While there are many factors that can help account for this, one important observation is that Americans treat computers like they do cars. We don't want gadgets. We don't want a bunch of specialized devices that each only do one thing. We want a big mother****ing computer fully loaded with an AM/FM cassette, kitchen sink available as an option.
Linux didn't used to be about money... While many people in the Linux community, including myself, didn't welcome RedHat's IPO, it shows how valuable Linux has become
Why, oh why, do people always think that open-source or software liber implies that nobody can make money off of it? Contrary to many peoples' opinions, RMS does not mind if you make money. Why is it bad that RedHat went IPO? What can they possibly do to the community? The very nature of the GPL is that no one person can run off with the code. There is no chance that they would make the kernel non-free or anything like that, like many people were claiming would happen. Instead, what has happened to the free software community as a result of the IPO?
They've hired programmers to work on the kernel
They've hired programmers to work on GNOME
They've helped bring the ideas of the open-source community to the masses.
The last is the most important of all. Hiring programmers has been a great help to ensuring the success of critical parts of the GNU/Linux system, but that by itself would have meant very little without their support of the free software community. Without freedom, it would have just been another software project. Instead, their help of the GNOME project as well as the kernel has helped prepare the platform for their most important aid to our community. That aid was in spreading our ideas to the world. Yes, they are taking more of an open-source pragmatist approach as opposed to the free software idealistic approach. But even exposure to the former will help, and eventually some of the users will open their minds towards the ethics of free software, not just the business of open-source.
Of course there's a way to do that. The question is whether your filter lets you do so. There are no filters that have released source code, and there is only one that I am aware of that allows you to edit the blocked list. And this one does not let you edit the keywords IIRC, only the list of sites.
So the answers are (1) it's not a programming question, and (2) no.
You simply can't do it. You would either have to do it by hand (yuck) or install censorware (yuck). The latter would filter about.01% of the material, while the latter would filter maybe 50% of the material and be wrong 10% of the time.
A better option?
1. Put the computer near the counter or wherever your guys stand. People won't mess around when their screen can be seen by employees.
2. Post usage policies next to the computer in a _visible_ location.
It acts on the same principle that should hopefully keep our libraries uncensored: People wanting to avoid public embarrassment.
The article on osOpinion (analog "piracy") was interesting but slightly uninformed.
Wonder why analog tapes cost so much? The RIAA imposes a TAX on every one. This piracy issue has arisen before with analog cassetes and vcrs; in both cases, the RIAA was scared out of its collective minds (or what little minds it has). Eventually, the manufacturers of blank tapes were forced to pay to the RIAA a small fee for each blank tape to cover the cost of piracy. Nowadays, not that many people know about this.
The glass isn't half-empty, and it's not half-full either.
Come on. We're all engineers, engineer wannabees, or computer heads. What does this mean? You have twice as much glass as you need![*]
Of course, this would fall under the 50% that complain about poll choices... you need to redefine your options to include that.
[*] Unless you work at (NASA, a nuclear plant, pick one). Then it's a safety margin. If you work at Microsoft, you leave the glass the way it is but put holes in the side, hiding them with advertisements. --
Dude, most/.'ers are libertarians. Here's a brief explanation of where they stand:
Imagine that instead a 1-dimensional political spectrum(left-wing and right-wing), it is 2-dimensional: One axis represents personal freedoms, while the other represents economic freedoms.
Democrats support personal freedoms but not economic freedoms
Republicans support economic freedoms but not personal freedoms
Authoritarians support neither economic freedoms nor personal freedoms
Libertarians support both economic and personal freedoms
Note that "freedoms" is not the most accurate term. On the economic axis, "more freedom" really means small government, less welfare, etc. etc. On the personal axis, "less freedom" includes censorship, abortion bans, and drug prohibition (anything that's "for the children").
Also note that this is not a precise description of where the parties actually stand; it just is a useful generalization.
The +2 was because I started it at +2, not because it was moderated up.
One of the posts will probably get modded down to 0 or -1, and rightly so. If the other gets moderated up, it will have to get up to 4 or 5 just to break even. Which really sucks for my karma.
Moral: Don't double-post:-)
P.S. It's not my fault; the MS Proxy where I work often times out on/., connecting within.5 seconds one time and timing out another.
What happens is that the farmer finds a new job. While this is the way society works (people complained about the sewing machine displacing labor; this happens with almost every new invention), we don't want this to happen to our culture. The horse is already out of the proverbial barn when it comes to music -- we can never go back to the old system again. But now we desperately must find a new revenue model, some incentive to produce, or our cultural output will suffer greatly. --
Yes, we had decentralization in the pre-1900's. Yes, software also spread in the 1980's. Then we got the Internet, and the same thing happens... ten time faster. Can you imagine millions of people every day trading mp3s via sneakernet (pretend they fit on a disk)?
Consider the following:
It took billions of years for the Earth to form
It then took millions of years for humans to arise.
It then took thousands of years for the invention of electricity
It then took ~100 years for the first mainframe to be invented
It then took 30 years until the internet, 20 years until the web, and then we arrive at the present.
It hasn't happened yet with space flight, but then too will spaceflight achieve the same rapid growth.
Yes, the free flow of information was slightly tapered by the rise of corporatism. This will only be a blip in history; already, the flow is beginning to resume its exponential course.
So therefore, the article was correct as far as it went. What it failed to release is that these sorts of trends are natural, and the dramatic information explosion and indeed the growth factor of the internet is not anything new. It is just yet one more pin being knocked down in technology's, the universe's, and indeed life itself's ever-increasing acceleration. --
Yes, we had decentralization in the pre-1900's. Yes, software also spread in the 1980's. Then we got the Internet, and the same thing happens... ten time faster. Can you imagine millions of people every day trading mp3s via sneakernet (pretend they fit on a disk)?
Consider this:
It took billions of years for the Earth to form
It then took millions of years for humans to arise.
It then took thousands of years for the invention of electricity
It then took ~100 years for the first mainframe to be invented
It then took 30 years until the internet, 20 years until the web, and then we arrive at the present.
It hasn't happened yet with space flight, but then too will spaceflight achieve the same rapid growth.
Yes, the free flow of information was slightly tapered by the rise of corporatism. This will only be a blip in history; already, the flow is beginning to resume its exponential course.
So therefore, the article was correct as far as it went. What it failed to release is that these sorts of trends are natural, and the dramatic information explosion and indeed the growth factor of the internet is not anything new. It is just yet one more pin being knocked down in technology's, the universe's, and indeed life itself's ever-increasing acceleration. --
I suspect that they did so for precisely that reason: To keep out mp3s. The system was designed to be a safeguard for free speech; if someone wanted to speak out against $CAUSE then he could do so without fear of retribution by (corporation, government, cia, pick one). There already is a perfectly good system (several in fact) for trading mp3s, so these guys wanted to focus on issues that, dare I suggest it, matter more in life than music.
1. Debian's package management system rocks. Just "apt-get update" (updates the list of available packages) and "apt-get distupgrade" (was it apt-get upgrade? w/e, it updates all available packages).
2. It is stable as heck. Whenever debian releases a "stable" release, they really mean it. If you want more modern libraries, you can just as easily get the "unstable" version, a bleeding-edge repository that is still just as stable as what normally gets released as "stable" by commercial distributions.
3. It very strongly upholds the free software ideals. For those that want certain non-free versions, there is a separate repository for non-free software. The main distribtion installed by defalt is 100% pure-as-in-stallman's-weird-church-of-free-softwar e-thing-that-he-does-at-his-lectres free.
If they don't distribute their application, they don't have to release the source. The GPL allows for internal use without redistribution.
[Note that the QPL does not have this clause; technically, everyone who rights an extension to QT is in violation of the license until they release the code -- even if they're only using it internally (e.g. when it's not done yet). They are required instead to pay a large fee for usage of the "professional edition". Since this is turning into a rant about QT anyway, let me just say that you're never going to get truly cross-platform code with the QPL because windoze use requires the professional edition also. GTK for windows may suck at the moment, but it eventually will be a good, free toolkit for windoze and *nix. QT has no such chance.] --
Karma seems to be stuck for people above 50. Last time I checked moderation _does_ affect karma in the hidden sids, but there's a chance that that has been disabled to prevent abuses (creating 50 accounts that post slowly in hidden sids to gain moderation tokens, using those to moderate the person's main alias up. --
Dude. Do you really want to have 50 copies of libc hanging around? Or what if each (Windoze) program came with its own copy of directx?
There's a reason for dynamic linking. It's because some of these libraries are huge! System libraries that many applications are based upon should always be dynamically linked. Not everyone has an 80-gig hard drive, you know.
That's nothing... have you found the Duke Nukem in Appogee's Cosmo Episode II? It's in level 5 or 6 IIRC, one of the blue ice levels. Anyhow, there's a certain piece of ice that looks like all the others except you can fall through it. You go there and just keep walking through the ice (it's hard because you can't actually see Cosmo) until you arrive at a large opening. There, you see a little guy stuck in a block of ice. You plant a bomb next to it, it knocks off the ice, and out pops Duke Nukem! He says something along the lines of "thanks little dude, check me out in my new game coming soon!" He then gives you a hamburger (gives you an extra health slot (not extra health)) and blasts off with his rocket boots. That's still one of the best cameos of all time.:-)
BTW, the original Duke Nukem, Duke2, and Cosmo are still the best side-scrollers out there. Cosmo is good for little kids but it can get hard too; Duke Nukem is an absolute classic and it can get really hard on the higher difficulties. It has almost none of the find-the-key-and-go-to-the-door problems that plague many modern action games.
FYI, AbiWord uses an XML-based format for its documents. It also exports rtf, html, utf, and LaTeX. It's also free software and GTK. It's not feature-complete yet (no bullets or lists for one thing) but it is very lean and fast. It's also evolving fast, so anything that isn't supported yet should be RSN.
Slashdot Mirror
Try looking at the output in your favorite text editor. (yes, text editor. it just sends the scan to the keyboard port; no special software required).
.
.text.text.text.
C xzYENP6.
It looks like this:
.C3nZC3nZC3nZCxjWENrYCNnY.fHmc.C3f2Cxj2DNz1D3P3
or, generally,
The first one is the serial number, the second is the type of bar code, and the third is the value.
Here's another scan:
.C3nZC3nZC3nZCxjWENrYCNnY.cGf2.ENr7C3r1CNzZD3P1
Notice that the first part is the same.
--
OK, you asked, so you got it ...
A patent the patent office would not grant:
Method for Calculation through Graphite Scratches on Dead Trees (also known as pencil-and-paper calculations)
--
(from the spoilsport dept.)
Large caveat: This applies only to QT free edition; that is, QT/Unix. Those who wish to develop cross-platform applications will still have to look elsewhere for their toolkit.
Note: Don't bother replying with flames about GTK+ sucking for Windoze. At least the port exists, is free software, and has the chance to improve eventually.
--
IANAL, BIWJJ (But I Watch Judge Judy :-))
Up until now, it would have been perfectly ok. You're just creating an implementation of a protocol, and protocols IIRC cannot (and should not) be patented. Even if it is possible to patent a protocol, I doubt that protocol was patentable.
However, the DMCA introduces a new twist. Even if the protocol is not obfuscated, one could argue that setting up a sniffer would be bypassing their protections. It's a stupid argument, but it might be a valid argument under the DMCA.
--
The author, along with many top people from many companies, asserts that the "anything" box is dead and that the future is moving towards smaller, specialized computers. This is the logic of the network machine, the logic of the compact car. It seems to make more sense than the all-purpose desktop computer + PDA -- and it is also doomed to failure.
The American infatuation with the desktop computer and the PDA is very similar to our love affair with the car. Cars are big, cars are possessions. While successful in many other cities, shared car plans have never really caught on (although there is a plan in the works for Cambridge, or so I have heard). Why? Americans like owning big cars, SUVs and cadillacs. They like owning them. A car is not just a tool to get from one place to another -- it is a lifestyle.
In the same way, cell phones are far more popular in Scandinavia and gadget-crazy Japan than in the U.S. While there are many factors that can help account for this, one important observation is that Americans treat computers like they do cars. We don't want gadgets. We don't want a bunch of specialized devices that each only do one thing. We want a big mother****ing computer fully loaded with an AM/FM cassette, kitchen sink available as an option.
--
No, it used to be "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince".
Now he's changed his name back, so I guess it's "Prince, Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known as Prince."
But I'll just call him Bob.
--
Linux didn't used to be about money ... While many people in the Linux community, including myself, didn't welcome RedHat's IPO, it shows how valuable Linux has become
Why, oh why, do people always think that open-source or software liber implies that nobody can make money off of it? Contrary to many peoples' opinions, RMS does not mind if you make money. Why is it bad that RedHat went IPO? What can they possibly do to the community? The very nature of the GPL is that no one person can run off with the code. There is no chance that they would make the kernel non-free or anything like that, like many people were claiming would happen. Instead, what has happened to the free software community as a result of the IPO?
They've hired programmers to work on the kernel
They've hired programmers to work on GNOME
They've helped bring the ideas of the open-source community to the masses.
The last is the most important of all. Hiring programmers has been a great help to ensuring the success of critical parts of the GNU/Linux system, but that by itself would have meant very little without their support of the free software community. Without freedom, it would have just been another software project. Instead, their help of the GNOME project as well as the kernel has helped prepare the platform for their most important aid to our community. That aid was in spreading our ideas to the world. Yes, they are taking more of an open-source pragmatist approach as opposed to the free software idealistic approach. But even exposure to the former will help, and eventually some of the users will open their minds towards the ethics of free software, not just the business of open-source.
Sorry if this turned out to be a rant.
--
Of course there's a way to do that. The question is whether your filter lets you do so. There are no filters that have released source code, and there is only one that I am aware of that allows you to edit the blocked list. And this one does not let you edit the keywords IIRC, only the list of sites.
So the answers are (1) it's not a programming question, and (2) no.
--
You simply can't do it. You would either have to do it by hand (yuck) or install censorware (yuck). The latter would filter about .01% of the material, while the latter would filter maybe 50% of the material and be wrong 10% of the time.
A better option?
1. Put the computer near the counter or wherever your guys stand. People won't mess around when their screen can be seen by employees.
2. Post usage policies next to the computer in a _visible_ location.
It acts on the same principle that should hopefully keep our libraries uncensored: People wanting to avoid public embarrassment.
--
In the RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) test: So, this test is of most impotency for us all
Really? Dude! I mean, I knew RFI was bad and stuff, but I never knew it would get like that! Ouch, I'd better go recalibrate my ham transceiver.
--
The article on osOpinion (analog "piracy") was interesting but slightly uninformed.
Wonder why analog tapes cost so much? The RIAA imposes a TAX on every one. This piracy issue has arisen before with analog cassetes and vcrs; in both cases, the RIAA was scared out of its collective minds (or what little minds it has). Eventually, the manufacturers of blank tapes were forced to pay to the RIAA a small fee for each blank tape to cover the cost of piracy. Nowadays, not that many people know about this.
--
The glass isn't half-empty, and it's not half-full either.
Come on. We're all engineers, engineer wannabees, or computer heads. What does this mean? You have twice as much glass as you need![*]
Of course, this would fall under the 50% that complain about poll choices... you need to redefine your options to include that.
[*] Unless you work at (NASA, a nuclear plant, pick one). Then it's a safety margin. If you work at Microsoft, you leave the glass the way it is but put holes in the side, hiding them with advertisements.
--
Dude, most /.'ers are libertarians. Here's a brief explanation of where they stand:
Imagine that instead a 1-dimensional political spectrum(left-wing and right-wing), it is 2-dimensional: One axis represents personal freedoms, while the other represents economic freedoms.
Democrats support personal freedoms but not economic freedoms
Republicans support economic freedoms but not personal freedoms
Authoritarians support neither economic freedoms nor personal freedoms
Libertarians support both economic and personal freedoms
Note that "freedoms" is not the most accurate term. On the economic axis, "more freedom" really means small government, less welfare, etc. etc. On the personal axis, "less freedom" includes censorship, abortion bans, and drug prohibition (anything that's "for the children").
Also note that this is not a precise description of where the parties actually stand; it just is a useful generalization.
--
The +2 was because I started it at +2, not because it was moderated up.
:-)
/., connecting within .5 seconds one time and timing out another.
One of the posts will probably get modded down to 0 or -1, and rightly so. If the other gets moderated up, it will have to get up to 4 or 5 just to break even. Which really sucks for my karma.
Moral: Don't double-post
P.S. It's not my fault; the MS Proxy where I work often times out on
--
now what?
What happens is that the farmer finds a new job. While this is the way society works (people complained about the sewing machine displacing labor; this happens with almost every new invention), we don't want this to happen to our culture. The horse is already out of the proverbial barn when it comes to music -- we can never go back to the old system again. But now we desperately must find a new revenue model, some incentive to produce, or our cultural output will suffer greatly.
--
and so is the entire universe that we live in.
Yes, we had decentralization in the pre-1900's. Yes, software also spread in the 1980's. Then we got the Internet, and the same thing happens... ten time faster. Can you imagine millions of people every day trading mp3s via sneakernet (pretend they fit on a disk)?
Consider the following:
It took billions of years for the Earth to form
It then took millions of years for humans to arise.
It then took thousands of years for the invention of electricity
It then took ~100 years for the first mainframe to be invented
It then took 30 years until the internet, 20 years until the web, and then we arrive at the present.
It hasn't happened yet with space flight, but then too will spaceflight achieve the same rapid growth.
Yes, the free flow of information was slightly tapered by the rise of corporatism. This will only be a blip in history; already, the flow is beginning to resume its exponential course.
So therefore, the article was correct as far as it went. What it failed to release is that these sorts of trends are natural, and the dramatic information explosion and indeed the growth factor of the internet is not anything new. It is just yet one more pin being knocked down in technology's, the universe's, and indeed life itself's ever-increasing acceleration.
--
and so is the entire universe that we live in.
Yes, we had decentralization in the pre-1900's. Yes, software also spread in the 1980's. Then we got the Internet, and the same thing happens... ten time faster. Can you imagine millions of people every day trading mp3s via sneakernet (pretend they fit on a disk)?
Consider this:
It took billions of years for the Earth to form
It then took millions of years for humans to arise.
It then took thousands of years for the invention of electricity
It then took ~100 years for the first mainframe to be invented
It then took 30 years until the internet, 20 years until the web, and then we arrive at the present.
It hasn't happened yet with space flight, but then too will spaceflight achieve the same rapid growth.
Yes, the free flow of information was slightly tapered by the rise of corporatism. This will only be a blip in history; already, the flow is beginning to resume its exponential course.
So therefore, the article was correct as far as it went. What it failed to release is that these sorts of trends are natural, and the dramatic information explosion and indeed the growth factor of the internet is not anything new. It is just yet one more pin being knocked down in technology's, the universe's, and indeed life itself's ever-increasing acceleration.
--
I suspect that they did so for precisely that reason: To keep out mp3s. The system was designed to be a safeguard for free speech; if someone wanted to speak out against $CAUSE then he could do so without fear of retribution by (corporation, government, cia, pick one). There already is a perfectly good system (several in fact) for trading mp3s, so these guys wanted to focus on issues that, dare I suggest it, matter more in life than music.
--
1. Debian's package management system rocks. Just "apt-get update" (updates the list of available packages) and "apt-get distupgrade" (was it apt-get upgrade? w/e, it updates all available packages).
r e-thing-that-he-does-at-his-lectres free.
2. It is stable as heck. Whenever debian releases a "stable" release, they really mean it. If you want more modern libraries, you can just as easily get the "unstable" version, a bleeding-edge repository that is still just as stable as what normally gets released as "stable" by commercial distributions.
3. It very strongly upholds the free software ideals. For those that want certain non-free versions, there is a separate repository for non-free software. The main distribtion installed by defalt is 100% pure-as-in-stallman's-weird-church-of-free-softwa
--
If they don't distribute their application, they don't have to release the source. The GPL allows for internal use without redistribution.
[Note that the QPL does not have this clause; technically, everyone who rights an extension to QT is in violation of the license until they release the code -- even if they're only using it internally (e.g. when it's not done yet). They are required instead to pay a large fee for usage of the "professional edition". Since this is turning into a rant about QT anyway, let me just say that you're never going to get truly cross-platform code with the QPL because windoze use requires the professional edition also. GTK for windows may suck at the moment, but it eventually will be a good, free toolkit for windoze and *nix. QT has no such chance.]
--
That's not all. In fact, rumor has it that they may be patenting the bicycle as well sometime around 2013.[*]
[*] And then they will promptly sue all bicycle owners and bicycle manufacturers for infringement.
--
Karma seems to be stuck for people above 50. Last time I checked moderation _does_ affect karma in the hidden sids, but there's a chance that that has been disabled to prevent abuses (creating 50 accounts that post slowly in hidden sids to gain moderation tokens, using those to moderate the person's main alias up.
--
Dude. Do you really want to have 50 copies of libc hanging around? Or what if each (Windoze) program came with its own copy of directx?
There's a reason for dynamic linking. It's because some of these libraries are huge! System libraries that many applications are based upon should always be dynamically linked. Not everyone has an 80-gig hard drive, you know.
--
That's nothing... have you found the Duke Nukem in Appogee's Cosmo Episode II? It's in level 5 or 6 IIRC, one of the blue ice levels. Anyhow, there's a certain piece of ice that looks like all the others except you can fall through it. You go there and just keep walking through the ice (it's hard because you can't actually see Cosmo) until you arrive at a large opening. There, you see a little guy stuck in a block of ice. You plant a bomb next to it, it knocks off the ice, and out pops Duke Nukem! He says something along the lines of "thanks little dude, check me out in my new game coming soon!" He then gives you a hamburger (gives you an extra health slot (not extra health)) and blasts off with his rocket boots. That's still one of the best cameos of all time. :-)
BTW, the original Duke Nukem, Duke2, and Cosmo are still the best side-scrollers out there. Cosmo is good for little kids but it can get hard too; Duke Nukem is an absolute classic and it can get really hard on the higher difficulties. It has almost none of the find-the-key-and-go-to-the-door problems that plague many modern action games.
--
FYI, AbiWord uses an XML-based format for its documents. It also exports rtf, html, utf, and LaTeX. It's also free software and GTK. It's not feature-complete yet (no bullets or lists for one thing) but it is very lean and fast. It's also evolving fast, so anything that isn't supported yet should be RSN.
--