Maybe he can save the movie companies from the pirates.
Then again, probably not.
Cliff's Notes: Start Using TCP Sequence Number
on
Examining ICMP Flaws
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The spec calls for a sequence number in the block. Vendors aren't checking it. There are a lot of technical details about how TCP connections can be slowed down by a ICMP attack, but if the vendors checked the sequence number it would make it almost impossible to implement these attacks.
Researcher found the bugs, tried to work with major vendors. Lawyers got involved, turns out Cisco had been working on a fix for years (so they say). Seems like vendors are more concerned about getting credit than fixing the bugs.
Reading between the lines, I take it the major vendors have patched their stacks and life is good. Linux implemented all the fixes for all the errors, but addressing the sequence number should be enough for now.
Makes me wonder: what did the guys writing the code back in the 80s think about the sequence number, anyway? It was obviously there for some reason. I guess because it wasn't part of the "official" spec it was ignored? Shame, that. That was back in the day when people probably didn't think of ICMP being used as a cyber attack vector.
The big American companies line up to sell to the vast Chinese market -- Microsoft, Google, E-bay, all mentioned in the accompanying article.
Is the problem the cost of displays? Seems like the cost of cheap displays should be approaching the competitve point with TV-PCs. For instance, I thought with the MIT $100 PC would be competitive with this Shanda idea -- which, according to the article, will not be released, identified, or priced!
It seems there are several technologies converging on third-world markets. I wonder if those will find their way into China and compete with this product?
Are you telling me that Ballmer and Gates know the details of every piece of communication that passes between Microsoft teams and partner teams? I doubt it. Most likely promises were made, or loose language led to inferences that just weren't true. Heck, I doubt if senior managers even know what's in the legal contracts -- that's probably delegated out to a platoon of lawyers.
I don't think there is a defense for Microsoft. In the same week that Microsoft writes a big check to IBM, they get slapped with another suit. Draw your own conclusions about the merits of GO.
But the long and short of it is that it's going to be impossible for Microsoft to prevent these kinds of suits. They have something like sixty thousand employees, for cripes sake, how could they possibly make sure that each and every employee isn't infringing in some way on somebody's IP?
In a way, it's poetic justice. Microsoft has led the war on patenting the universe, now they're getting a little of their own medicine.
Things to think about:
Girls break a nail, loose last month's vacation pictures!
Would you back up some of your nails on others? Perhaps you could use your toenails as "offline storage"
Sounds like fingernail polish would "erase" the storage. So then could you write to them again? Are nails only WORMs?
What would the readers look like? Would you stick your hand inside your computer? Gee. Hope there isn't any moisture in there.
So it's 3-D characters, interacting in real-time with what your 3-D character does and says, right?
But haven't we already been playing games like this for a while?
Maybe it's better at drama, by which I take it that the characters say dramatic things to each other, but is that really such a great improvement in game play? "Here's your sword" is just as dramatic to me as "Somewhere in the house, there is a killer" -- depends on why I'm playing the game to start with.
So it may be evolutionary for sure, next generation MYST perhaps, but it doesn't sound revolutionary. More hype than hope -- but definitely a new market niche for the genre.
Beer Kills Memories Of Ugly People?
Load up the cannons -- here's the perfect slashdot story: programming art or science?
That's like a story that's titled, "Chocolate Ice Cream, better than Vanilla?"
Art is subjective. If you believe that some part of science is subjective as well, then you understand that there is no easy answer to the question posed. If you think science has no subjectivity, then welcome to the food fight!
In related news, China will continue to be the world's leading supplier of hacked DVDs and CDS, they're just promising not to pester you about buying them.
Yeah. I know that -- p/q and all that. Didn't mean to imply that the numbers were irrational in the other sense of the word. Honestly, I don't know if that's true or not. I do know we're talking about the same latin root, ratio. The derivatives mean "to think" or more recently "to calculate" -- so it might be close enough for government work. For a nice history of the term, try this site Also try this site.
And You Guys Thought Working The Help Desk Sucked
on
When Computers Were Human
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This sounds like a demeaning, brutal job. Almost like a factory for addition. Can you imagine what these folks talked about when they went home at night?
"Had a bunch of sevens at the plant today. Thought we never add them all up."
There's a slide-rule connection here. Oddly enough, numbers that couldn't be computed on a slide rule were deemed irrational.
For those interested in slide rules, Here's a short history of the slide rule and here's a guy's collection of slide rules
"I think Amazon's biggest challenge is itself. They've really raised the bar for the entire industry," said Kurt Peters, editor of Internet Retailer, a monthly magazine covers the business.
Amazon is generally considered to be one of the pioneers in the field. If I remember my business theory correctly, there is a certain amount of time between when a new market opens up and when it becomes a commodity. Right now, the technical hurdles are still high enough to keep Mom and Pop out of the Amazon business (to a certain degree). But Amazon has obviously set the bar and defined the standard, even coming up with this distributed marketing deal where you can reommend books and get paid for it.
At some point, however, you've covered all the bases. Amazon is already selling everything imaginable on that site, and they're exploring a lot of the horizontal and vertical market tie-ins. To me, this means that the industry is ripe to move towards commoditization: farming out all the stuff that Amazon does and connecting the creator of the material directly to the consumer. My two cents only.
Hey. I saw this episode on Star Trek. The same thing kept happening over and over again until Data finally kept the ship from blowing up.
That's what's happening on/. Now we need to repeat all of our original posts, while sending a message with tachyon beams back to our original selves...
If I were this guy, instead of posting the directions on the blog, I'd be making little kits to sell on E-bay or something. This could be a useful little widget for all those new millions of Skype customers out there.
I'm not sure about product liability though -- I wonder if it's possible to completely disclaim any possible harm that could be caused to your phone or computer. Maybe a big red sticker that says, "You're an idiot if you plug this up! Warning!"
This is a really neat product, especially the instant-on, waterproof characteristics, and the 20GB HD. But at $700, I couldn't help wonder where the market niche was supposed to be? It's significantly more than a PDA, yet it doesn't look to price-compete against low-end notebooks (perhaps it does?). It's definitely way cheaper than tablets, but then again tablets have a lot more input features. So I'm not sure where it's supposed to compete in the market. Am I supposed to buy it instead of my PDA? Or my notebook?
I know when the same technique is used to compromise web sites with SQL in the back end it's called SQL injection. I guess this would be XML Injection? Or perhaps PHP Injection and XML is only the wrapper. XML Injection sounds cooler.
Ray has got it nailed. It's interesting how much agreement there is anymore on future technology predictions. Only a few decades ago, predictions were all over the place: flying cars, nuclear power plants in every home, etc. But lately it seems that most people agree on the basics: man and machine will merge in some fashion, biotech will begin to cure aging, etc. The details are still very fuzzy, but it's interesting that Ray can bring these pieces together in a way that is not that far away from mainstream thought.
Don't Forget The Cool Factor
on
Graphics in Science
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've struggled with the same question as a computer consultant -- do images always convey anything useful just because they are based on scientific data? I've created a lot of really cool graphs and 3-D animations, but as far as analyzing the data, most times the computer is a lot better at processing multi-dimensional data than our old Mark-1 eyeball.
But there is a cool factor involved with a lot of imaging. You can't deny that. Probably more disturbing is when images appear to convey data when they really don't. The use of false color is a great tool to bring out detail in astonomical images, but many times is misleading to the casual observer who may not understand that the images are "doped"
With all that outgassing, you would think a comet's surface would be a lot more sharp -- full of crevasses and ridges (like it was on Deep Impact) But this one seemed almost smooth, like an asteroid. I wonder if this will change the theory of how comets are constructed?
Isn't this the one where Mothra shows up and kicks Godzilla's butt?
Can you imagine going over that in a ship? That would be a heck of an ocean ride. Everybody's suits would be wrinkle-free.
One of the things that few companies do is integrated into the Windows Shell. Windows provides ample opportunities for an application to just dissapear and become part of the operating system. For instance, in a chat program, your chat buddies could appear as icons in a folder right alongside your other files --- dragging and dropping a file onto your friend's icon would start transferring the file. There are a lot of other examples, but part of the problem I think is pride (and not just in windows development) Everybody wants to do something a little differently. If you have a standardized skinnable shell and plug in your apps around that it would do a lot for the appeal of the product.
And don't even get started on annoying popups and those freaking MS Office icons like the paperclip guy.
To me, a big part of design is noticability: if I take my time to notice it, it's getting in the way of the work I want to do.
If I'm not mistaken, all forms of drugs were legal up until around the turn of the century. People used to be able to medicate themselves as they chose. But after society perceived that drugs were causing harm to the youth, there was a big push for leglislation.
If the political push continues against violence in video games (and I think it will), it will be interesting to see if this "war on game violence" plays out the same way. That would mean either some kind of certification to use games or perhaps some biometric age device hooked up to game players. I don't believe games harm anyone, btw, but in politics perception is everything.
But where do you really draw the line? Most of us spend a lot of time staring at a LCD, would laser-projected images in the retina be that much of a stretch? Gates himself has his company working hard on speech recognition -- which is obviously a step towards taking away the interfaces. It seems to me the clear path is towards zero interfaces: direct brain stimulation. That would truly be the easiest thing for most users to operate. (But I wouldn't want to get a GPF in my brain! Ouch!)
So it's easy to say you're against connecting up to the computer, but it's not a black-and-white situation. I imagine integration will happen over several decades, not all at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he can save the movie companies from the pirates.
Then again, probably not.
The spec calls for a sequence number in the block. Vendors aren't checking it. There are a lot of technical details about how TCP connections can be slowed down by a ICMP attack, but if the vendors checked the sequence number it would make it almost impossible to implement these attacks.
Researcher found the bugs, tried to work with major vendors. Lawyers got involved, turns out Cisco had been working on a fix for years (so they say). Seems like vendors are more concerned about getting credit than fixing the bugs.
Reading between the lines, I take it the major vendors have patched their stacks and life is good. Linux implemented all the fixes for all the errors, but addressing the sequence number should be enough for now.
Makes me wonder: what did the guys writing the code back in the 80s think about the sequence number, anyway? It was obviously there for some reason. I guess because it wasn't part of the "official" spec it was ignored? Shame, that. That was back in the day when people probably didn't think of ICMP being used as a cyber attack vector.
Smart Identification Of Cost Savings, One Key to Program Management
The big American companies line up to sell to the vast Chinese market -- Microsoft, Google, E-bay, all mentioned in the accompanying article.
Is the problem the cost of displays? Seems like the cost of cheap displays should be approaching the competitve point with TV-PCs. For instance, I thought with the MIT $100 PC would be competitive with this Shanda idea -- which, according to the article, will not be released, identified, or priced!
It seems there are several technologies converging on third-world markets. I wonder if those will find their way into China and compete with this product?
Tzhe Disease Of IT
Are you telling me that Ballmer and Gates know the details of every piece of communication that passes between Microsoft teams and partner teams? I doubt it. Most likely promises were made, or loose language led to inferences that just weren't true. Heck, I doubt if senior managers even know what's in the legal contracts -- that's probably delegated out to a platoon of lawyers.
I don't think there is a defense for Microsoft. In the same week that Microsoft writes a big check to IBM, they get slapped with another suit. Draw your own conclusions about the merits of GO.
But the long and short of it is that it's going to be impossible for Microsoft to prevent these kinds of suits. They have something like sixty thousand employees, for cripes sake, how could they possibly make sure that each and every employee isn't infringing in some way on somebody's IP?
In a way, it's poetic justice. Microsoft has led the war on patenting the universe, now they're getting a little of their own medicine.
What Part Of Software Development is Outsourcable?
Things to think about:
Girls break a nail, loose last month's vacation pictures!
Would you back up some of your nails on others? Perhaps you could use your toenails as "offline storage"
Sounds like fingernail polish would "erase" the storage. So then could you write to them again? Are nails only WORMs?
What would the readers look like? Would you stick your hand inside your computer? Gee. Hope there isn't any moisture in there.
Long Distance Tax Overturned. You May Be Due a Refund. But Good Luck Getting It.
So it's 3-D characters, interacting in real-time with what your 3-D character does and says, right?
But haven't we already been playing games like this for a while?
Maybe it's better at drama, by which I take it that the characters say dramatic things to each other, but is that really such a great improvement in game play? "Here's your sword" is just as dramatic to me as "Somewhere in the house, there is a killer" -- depends on why I'm playing the game to start with.
So it may be evolutionary for sure, next generation MYST perhaps, but it doesn't sound revolutionary.
More hype than hope -- but definitely a new market niche for the genre.
Beer Kills Memories Of Ugly People?
Load up the cannons -- here's the perfect slashdot story: programming art or science?
That's like a story that's titled, "Chocolate Ice Cream, better than Vanilla?"
Art is subjective. If you believe that some part of science is subjective as well, then you understand that there is no easy answer to the question posed. If you think science has no subjectivity, then welcome to the food fight!
Quality: It's a Numbers Game
In related news, China will continue to be the world's leading supplier of hacked DVDs and CDS, they're just promising not to pester you about buying them.
Screensavers as Corporate Message Boards?
Yeah. I know that -- p/q and all that. Didn't mean to imply that the numbers were irrational in the other sense of the word. Honestly, I don't know if that's true or not. I do know we're talking about the same latin root, ratio. The derivatives mean "to think" or more recently "to calculate" -- so it might be close enough for government work. For a nice history of the term, try this site Also try this site.
Marketing in RSS? Heavens To Betsy!
This sounds like a demeaning, brutal job. Almost like a factory for addition. Can you imagine what these folks talked about when they went home at night?
"Had a bunch of sevens at the plant today. Thought we never add them all up."
There's a slide-rule connection here. Oddly enough, numbers that couldn't be computed on a slide rule were deemed irrational. For those interested in slide rules, Here's a short history of the slide rule and here's a guy's collection of slide rules
Microsoft Taken To Task On Hiring Practices
At some point, however, you've covered all the bases. Amazon is already selling everything imaginable on that site, and they're exploring a lot of the horizontal and vertical market tie-ins. To me, this means that the industry is ripe to move towards commoditization: farming out all the stuff that Amazon does and connecting the creator of the material directly to the consumer. My two cents only.
Learn Management, Kid!
Hey. I saw this episode on Star Trek. The same thing kept happening over and over again until Data finally kept the ship from blowing up. /. Now we need to repeat all of our original posts, while sending a message with tachyon beams back to our original selves...
That's what's happening on
Blog's Up!
If I were this guy, instead of posting the directions on the blog, I'd be making little kits to sell on E-bay or something. This could be a useful little widget for all those new millions of Skype customers out there.
I'm not sure about product liability though -- I wonder if it's possible to completely disclaim any possible harm that could be caused to your phone or computer. Maybe a big red sticker that says, "You're an idiot if you plug this up! Warning!"
NASA blows up comet, gets sued for $300 million
This is a really neat product, especially the instant-on, waterproof characteristics, and the 20GB HD. But at $700, I couldn't help wonder where the market niche was supposed to be? It's significantly more than a PDA, yet it doesn't look to price-compete against low-end notebooks (perhaps it does?). It's definitely way cheaper than tablets, but then again tablets have a lot more input features. So I'm not sure where it's supposed to compete in the market. Am I supposed to buy it instead of my PDA? Or my notebook?
Things NOT to look for in your staff
I know when the same technique is used to compromise web sites with SQL in the back end it's called SQL injection. I guess this would be XML Injection? Or perhaps PHP Injection and XML is only the wrapper. XML Injection sounds cooler.
New wireless technology called XMax?
Ray has got it nailed. It's interesting how much agreement there is anymore on future technology predictions. Only a few decades ago, predictions were all over the place: flying cars, nuclear power plants in every home, etc. But lately it seems that most people agree on the basics: man and machine will merge in some fashion, biotech will begin to cure aging, etc. The details are still very fuzzy, but it's interesting that Ray can bring these pieces together in a way that is not that far away from mainstream thought.
What's the Other Slashdot Effect?
I've struggled with the same question as a computer consultant -- do images always convey anything useful just because they are based on scientific data? I've created a lot of really cool graphs and 3-D animations, but as far as analyzing the data, most times the computer is a lot better at processing multi-dimensional data than our old Mark-1 eyeball.
But there is a cool factor involved with a lot of imaging. You can't deny that.
Probably more disturbing is when images appear to convey data when they really don't. The use of false color is a great tool to bring out detail in astonomical images, but many times is misleading to the casual observer who may not understand that the images are "doped"
Is BitTorrent Next?
With all that outgassing, you would think a comet's surface would be a lot more sharp -- full of crevasses and ridges (like it was on Deep Impact) But this one seemed almost smooth, like an asteroid. I wonder if this will change the theory of how comets are constructed?
Ugliest Dog I Ever Saw
Isn't this the one where Mothra shows up and kicks Godzilla's butt? Can you imagine going over that in a ship? That would be a heck of an ocean ride. Everybody's suits would be wrinkle-free.
One of the things that few companies do is integrated into the Windows Shell. Windows provides ample opportunities for an application to just dissapear and become part of the operating system. For instance, in a chat program, your chat buddies could appear as icons in a folder right alongside your other files --- dragging and dropping a file onto your friend's icon would start transferring the file. There are a lot of other examples, but part of the problem I think is pride (and not just in windows development) Everybody wants to do something a little differently. If you have a standardized skinnable shell and plug in your apps around that it would do a lot for the appeal of the product.
And don't even get started on annoying popups and those freaking MS Office icons like the paperclip guy.
To me, a big part of design is noticability: if I take my time to notice it, it's getting in the way of the work I want to do.
If I'm not mistaken, all forms of drugs were legal up until around the turn of the century. People used to be able to medicate themselves as they chose. But after society perceived that drugs were causing harm to the youth, there was a big push for leglislation.
If the political push continues against violence in video games (and I think it will), it will be interesting to see if this "war on game violence" plays out the same way. That would mean either some kind of certification to use games or perhaps some biometric age device hooked up to game players. I don't believe games harm anyone, btw, but in politics perception is everything.
Can I Type What I Want In This Sig?
But where do you really draw the line? Most of us spend a lot of time staring at a LCD, would laser-projected images in the retina be that much of a stretch? Gates himself has his company working hard on speech recognition -- which is obviously a step towards taking away the interfaces. It seems to me the clear path is towards zero interfaces: direct brain stimulation. That would truly be the easiest thing for most users to operate. (But I wouldn't want to get a GPF in my brain! Ouch!)
So it's easy to say you're against connecting up to the computer, but it's not a black-and-white situation. I imagine integration will happen over several decades, not all at once.
Know What You're Talking About
I've actually patented the opening of gifts. So take that, Bezos!
Things are heating up!
The death of innovation is due to apathy.
I was going to invent a solution to the problem, but who cares?