Is anyone else sick of hearing these people called "detainees"? One of the things that disgusts me the most about the current US administration is the feeling that it's run my a marketing company. Detainee just sounds so much nicer than PRISONER, doesn't it? Just like enemy combatant sounds better than ILLEGAL PRISONER.
I even heard a report on NPR this morning where the PRISONERS at that maximum security prison riot/breakout in the Phillipines were referred to as "detainees". The practice seems to be spreading, and I for one think it's double-plus ungood.
Yeah, and remember Keith Courage? That game was awesome too. I haven't thought about my old TurboGrafx-16 in years and years. It got eclipsed by the NSES and Genesis pretty quickly, though, I don't think I had it for all that long before I sold it to a friend.
In reality, it's those 20+ sports channels that are subsidizing channels like Food Network, History Channel, Sci-Fi, A&E, and anything else the typical American common denominator (who loves thing like Ashlee Simpson, NSF, NBA, and Bachlorette/Survivor 9: The Quickening).
If you choose the a-la-carte way, any channel that isn't very popular with the vast majority of the American public (with whom I share little in the way of entertainment taste) will go off the air.
I had Netflix service in Tulsa, OK for the period of March-May of 2004, and I got great turnaround time. Send in a movie on Mon, get the next one on Wed (almost always). Now I live 30 miles from a distro center on the East Coast and it's the same.
I have a friend who worked as support staff at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and he said the scientific staff had an "Ice Before Christ" party, where they used ice from some core samples that were dated to several thousand years ago to make margaritas and use in their cocktails and such. Kinda neat, if a little silly.
Even if our oil/carbon deposit dependence isn't causing global warming, the world's reserves are still going to run out in the near/intermediate future. We'd better get to work on alternative methods while we still have the energy to do so, otherwise we'll be scrambling at the last minute while the world spirals into a huge energy crisis.
It's actually the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act, H.R. 3162, S. 1510, Public Law 107-56)"
So it's more like the USAbPATRtIaOTA.
I'm sure it was chosen for exactly the reason you think it was: marketing. After all, do you think the "Healthy Forests Restoration Act" provides us with healthy forests? No, it increases the amount of logging on federal land to "reduce the risk of forest fires". Sheesh!
well, I don't to DAA/C&A stuff for a living, but I picked up the cert in grad school getting a Comp Sci MS in InfoSec...anyway
You're mostly right....The Windows 2000 EAL4 certification is totally worthless, because they used a CAPP (Controlled Access Protection Profile) for the evaluation process, meaning that it's quite secure in totally non-hostile environment. This is about as far from what a typical server hooked up to the internet (running actual Services) will encounter as possible, so it's BS.
However, EAL4 is really the highest any commercial system can get. It becomes astronomically expensive and complicated to mathematically prove non-interference between users/composite systems as you go higher in EALs, and I think 4 is the highest that's ever been granted, IIRC.
Well, consider me stupid. I'm really suprised by that move, historically Apple's been very good about letting people do their own memory upgrades (which on the original Bondi Blue iMac was quite a challenge for Joe Consumer).
Whenever you're talking about kilo, mega, giga, etc, in terms of anything having to do with a computer (bits, bytes, words, double words, whatever), you're talking about POWERS OF 2! Always! Anyone who does otherwise is incorrect or misinformed. A megabit is 2^20 bits. People who do it otherwise are like those sleazy bankers that insist there are only 360 days in the "fiscal" calendar.
Dude, you can install your own memory in ANY Apple computer and not void your warranty. If you break something, it's not covered, but you are free to install your own memory or HD or other "user-servicable" part, it's just not "recommended" by Apple. Believe me, it's true.
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January 11, 2005 BitTorrent, eXeem, Meta-Torrent, Podcasting: "What? So What?"Email This EntryPrint This Entry Posted by Marc Eisenstadt
SUMMARY: The index that facilitates the sharing of files on a large scale is also the Achilles heel of peer-to-peer file-sharing, because it is vulnerable to litigation and closure. So what happens if the index is itself distributed? I try to get my head around the latest in peer-to-peer file sharing, and explain a bit about what I've learned, including the fact that BitTorrent's power rests in its 'swarm' distribution model, but not necessarily in your end-user download speed. What has this got to do with podcasting? (Answer: invisible P2P plumbing helps the podcasting wheel go round).
[Warning: lengthy article follows].
First, some history (skip ahead to the next section if you're already bored with the Napster, Gnutella, KaZaa, and BitTorrent saga).
Napster opened our eyes to the power of distributed file sharing on a massive scale. But it was closed down by lawsuits to stop it from listing copyrighted works for which the owners would naturally have preferred to collect royalties (there are thousands of commentaries on the pros and cons of such royalties, but that's not the focus of this posting). Successive generations of tools such as Gnutella, KaZaa, and now BitTorrent have created their own buzz, their own massive followings, their own headaches, and their own solutions to others' headaches. Here's my rundown of the 'big ideas' (and the people behind them):
Napster (Shawn Fanning): This was the Mother of big-time peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfers, i.e. my computer directly to yours, with a central server to maintain lists of who had what in order to initiate the transactions. It had a pretty decent user interface, plus the rapid growth, novelty, excitement and publicity that ensured plenty of good content. Those central server lists, leading to mass free trading of copyrighted material, also led it to be shut down.
Gnutella (Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, creators of WinAmp): This was an open-source protocol that linked autonomous 'nodes' (users of the network) to other nodes, thereby eliminating the need for a central server list. Searching reliability varies, however, because it is subject to outages according to the connection/disconnection of individual users along the way.
KaZaa (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who later created Skype): This technology built on a proprietary protocol called 'FastTrack', conceptually an extension to Gnutella, that deployed distributed 'supernode' search indices whose IP addresses were built in to the software, and which avoided the problems of (i) Napster's centralized lists and (ii) Gnutella's over-distributed nodes suffering outages and weakening the search. The prevalence of built-in 'adware' and the distribution of 'junk files' that masqueraded as originals were two of the weaknesses of the (still) wildly popular KaZaa.
BitTorrent (Bram Cohen): This was the next 'creative leap' in the P2P world, based on the following insight: distributing large files in fragments among large numbers of users, and requiring every downloader to be a partial uploader (of these fragments), enables the 'best of breed' of swarming behaviour -- as a file becomes more popular, so it becomes easier to download, rather than harder (as is the case with traditional file distribution)! A good overview explanation and a helpful analogy are provided in this excerpt from Brian Dessent's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide:
BitTorrent is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker band
Does this mean that if I call one of these credit bureaus and put a fraud report on my credit file (even though I'm not a GMA student or anything), I can get a free credit report? And that they call me before they increase my rates? Sounds like a plan...
I got sucked into programming when I was about 9 years old by reading some crazy book series (I can't remember the name, I got them at a HamFest with my Dad in 1989 or so) that was like those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books (if you fight the dragon, turn to page 120. If you try to run away, turn to page 67), except that it had BASIC programs in it that use used to solve little mysteries.
So you'd type in this BASIC program verbatim and run it, and it would print out some little ASCII map of a room or dungeon or something so you'd know where to go in the book. It was great fun, and I'd already been playing video games for years on my Atari 5200 and Mac Classic (ah, Dark Castle, those were the days), but this lead me into programming.
By the time I was 11 or 12, I was writing all sorts of stuff using HyperCard (simple encrypter/decrypters, password protected diary....err, journal (with intrusion detection! It would write to a file if my little brother tried to get into it with the wrong password), something that would print out my age in seconds/minutes/hours/days/etc every second)). Hypercard was awesome because you could do a LOT with it (honest!), and it was sort of OO in that you could have buttons that performed actions on other buttons, changed the state of things (as a matter of fact, it's just like Access 2003, except 13 years beforehand. Stupid Access).
Oh yeah, and I remember being in 5th grade and doing the old "10 PRINT "Bob is Gay!" 20 GOTO 10" routine on the old Apple ][e machines they had at school, and then walk away. That was classic.
Office on OS X (at least Word, which I use a lot) sucks up tons of RAM (like 200MB+) and eats about 20% of my 1.25GHz MDD G4 desktop's processor AT IDLE. I mean, it's just sitting there, what the hell is it doing using 20% of my processor? This case is with JUST Word open, blank document. Sux0r.
Fantastic point. Many cell towers are totally reliant on GPS to determine their location. It allows for generic software to be deployed to many, many cell towers. I would hope that since their location never changes they would cache this data (you'd be an idiot not to), but it IS a major part of how these things determine where they (and in turn others) are.
Dude, go pick up an extra 128MB or 256MB , it's cheap and even the oldest Bondi Blue iMacs can take up to 512MB (I think). You'll see a HUGE performance boost even with an extra 128MB, for about $20.
It's funny you should mention Secret of Mana, I also think it has some of the best RPG music around, even better than some of the FF games.
On another note, as music gets more and more orchestrated (meaning "real music", not SNES midi stuff), it's much harder to remember/get stuck in your head. I still remember almost all the music From FFII(US, the one with Cecil) and games like Mega Man 2, games I played like 12 years ago, but I can't for the life of me remember music from FFIX or X off-hand.
Hearing that old SNES music in orchestra form would be much more rewarding.
It would be amusing if the War of the Worlds TV trailer (which is refusing to play on my machine), was engineered to look like a news broadcast, and managed to cause panic like the radio series.
Nope, they're not that clever. And judging by a recent Spielberg/Cruise movie, this one will not be that great.
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Mod me offtopic if you wish, but...
Is anyone else sick of hearing these people called "detainees"? One of the things that disgusts me the most about the current US administration is the feeling that it's run my a marketing company. Detainee just sounds so much nicer than PRISONER, doesn't it? Just like enemy combatant sounds better than ILLEGAL PRISONER.
I even heard a report on NPR this morning where the PRISONERS at that maximum security prison riot/breakout in the Phillipines were referred to as "detainees". The practice seems to be spreading, and I for one think it's double-plus ungood.
Yeah, and remember Keith Courage? That game was awesome too. I haven't thought about my old TurboGrafx-16 in years and years. It got eclipsed by the NSES and Genesis pretty quickly, though, I don't think I had it for all that long before I sold it to a friend.
The problem with that is:
In reality, it's those 20+ sports channels that are subsidizing channels like Food Network, History Channel, Sci-Fi, A&E, and anything else the typical American common denominator (who loves thing like Ashlee Simpson, NSF, NBA, and Bachlorette/Survivor 9: The Quickening).
If you choose the a-la-carte way, any channel that isn't very popular with the vast majority of the American public (with whom I share little in the way of entertainment taste) will go off the air.
NCSA - Go Illini!
I had Netflix service in Tulsa, OK for the period of March-May of 2004, and I got great turnaround time. Send in a movie on Mon, get the next one on Wed (almost always). Now I live 30 miles from a distro center on the East Coast and it's the same.
Kind of off-topic, but what the heck...
I have a friend who worked as support staff at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and he said the scientific staff had an "Ice Before Christ" party, where they used ice from some core samples that were dated to several thousand years ago to make margaritas and use in their cocktails and such. Kinda neat, if a little silly.
Even if our oil/carbon deposit dependence isn't causing global warming, the world's reserves are still going to run out in the near/intermediate future. We'd better get to work on alternative methods while we still have the energy to do so, otherwise we'll be scrambling at the last minute while the world spirals into a huge energy crisis.
It's actually the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act, H.R. 3162, S. 1510, Public Law 107-56)"
So it's more like the USAbPATRtIaOTA.
I'm sure it was chosen for exactly the reason you think it was: marketing. After all, do you think the "Healthy Forests Restoration Act" provides us with healthy forests? No, it increases the amount of logging on federal land to "reduce the risk of forest fires". Sheesh!
Yeah, I think "GOLD PLATED CONNECTORS!!" on optical audio cables is all I have to say about Monster Cable. [shudder]
If you happen to have a female-female ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) cable, use it for you SVHS connection on your TV! or vice versa
well, I don't to DAA/C&A stuff for a living, but I picked up the cert in grad school getting a Comp Sci MS in InfoSec...anyway
You're mostly right....The Windows 2000 EAL4 certification is totally worthless, because they used a CAPP (Controlled Access Protection Profile) for the evaluation process, meaning that it's quite secure in totally non-hostile environment. This is about as far from what a typical server hooked up to the internet (running actual Services) will encounter as possible, so it's BS.
However, EAL4 is really the highest any commercial system can get. It becomes astronomically expensive and complicated to mathematically prove non-interference between users/composite systems as you go higher in EALs, and I think 4 is the highest that's ever been granted, IIRC.
Dude, we've always been at war with Eurasia! Searching the web for old articles confirm this is true! =)
Well, consider me stupid. I'm really suprised by that move, historically Apple's been very good about letting people do their own memory upgrades (which on the original Bondi Blue iMac was quite a challenge for Joe Consumer).
Nope.
Whenever you're talking about kilo, mega, giga, etc, in terms of anything having to do with a computer (bits, bytes, words, double words, whatever), you're talking about POWERS OF 2! Always! Anyone who does otherwise is incorrect or misinformed. A megabit is 2^20 bits. People who do it otherwise are like those sleazy bankers that insist there are only 360 days in the "fiscal" calendar.
Dude, you can install your own memory in ANY Apple computer and not void your warranty. If you break something, it's not covered, but you are free to install your own memory or HD or other "user-servicable" part, it's just not "recommended" by Apple. Believe me, it's true.
January 11, 2005
BitTorrent, eXeem, Meta-Torrent, Podcasting: "What? So What?"Email This EntryPrint This Entry
Posted by Marc Eisenstadt
SUMMARY: The index that facilitates the sharing of files on a large scale is also the Achilles heel of peer-to-peer file-sharing, because it is vulnerable to litigation and closure. So what happens if the index is itself distributed? I try to get my head around the latest in peer-to-peer file sharing, and explain a bit about what I've learned, including the fact that BitTorrent's power rests in its 'swarm' distribution model, but not necessarily in your end-user download speed. What has this got to do with podcasting? (Answer: invisible P2P plumbing helps the podcasting wheel go round).
[Warning: lengthy article follows].
First, some history
(skip ahead to the next section if you're already bored with the Napster, Gnutella, KaZaa, and BitTorrent saga).
Napster opened our eyes to the power of distributed file sharing on a massive scale. But it was closed down by lawsuits to stop it from listing copyrighted works for which the owners would naturally have preferred to collect royalties (there are thousands of commentaries on the pros and cons of such royalties, but that's not the focus of this posting). Successive generations of tools such as Gnutella, KaZaa, and now BitTorrent have created their own buzz, their own massive followings, their own headaches, and their own solutions to others' headaches. Here's my rundown of the 'big ideas' (and the people behind them):
Napster (Shawn Fanning): This was the Mother of big-time peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfers, i.e. my computer directly to yours, with a central server to maintain lists of who had what in order to initiate the transactions. It had a pretty decent user interface, plus the rapid growth, novelty, excitement and publicity that ensured plenty of good content. Those central server lists, leading to mass free trading of copyrighted material, also led it to be shut down.
Gnutella (Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, creators of WinAmp): This was an open-source protocol that linked autonomous 'nodes' (users of the network) to other nodes, thereby eliminating the need for a central server list. Searching reliability varies, however, because it is subject to outages according to the connection/disconnection of individual users along the way.
KaZaa (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who later created Skype): This technology built on a proprietary protocol called 'FastTrack', conceptually an extension to Gnutella, that deployed distributed 'supernode' search indices whose IP addresses were built in to the software, and which avoided the problems of (i) Napster's centralized lists and (ii) Gnutella's over-distributed nodes suffering outages and weakening the search. The prevalence of built-in 'adware' and the distribution of 'junk files' that masqueraded as originals were two of the weaknesses of the (still) wildly popular KaZaa.
BitTorrent (Bram Cohen): This was the next 'creative leap' in the P2P world, based on the following insight: distributing large files in fragments among large numbers of users, and requiring every downloader to be a partial uploader (of these fragments), enables the 'best of breed' of swarming behaviour -- as a file becomes more popular, so it becomes easier to download, rather than harder (as is the case with traditional file distribution)! A good overview explanation and a helpful analogy are provided in this excerpt from Brian Dessent's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide:
BitTorrent is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker band
Does this mean that if I call one of these credit bureaus and put a fraud report on my credit file (even though I'm not a GMA student or anything), I can get a free credit report? And that they call me before they increase my rates? Sounds like a plan...
Dude, I saw it on "the ocho"! Man, dodgeball is crappy. Yeah, yeah, offtopic, i know.
I got sucked into programming when I was about 9 years old by reading some crazy book series (I can't remember the name, I got them at a HamFest with my Dad in 1989 or so) that was like those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books (if you fight the dragon, turn to page 120. If you try to run away, turn to page 67), except that it had BASIC programs in it that use used to solve little mysteries.
So you'd type in this BASIC program verbatim and run it, and it would print out some little ASCII map of a room or dungeon or something so you'd know where to go in the book. It was great fun, and I'd already been playing video games for years on my Atari 5200 and Mac Classic (ah, Dark Castle, those were the days), but this lead me into programming.
By the time I was 11 or 12, I was writing all sorts of stuff using HyperCard (simple encrypter/decrypters, password protected diary....err, journal (with intrusion detection! It would write to a file if my little brother tried to get into it with the wrong password), something that would print out my age in seconds/minutes/hours/days/etc every second)). Hypercard was awesome because you could do a LOT with it (honest!), and it was sort of OO in that you could have buttons that performed actions on other buttons, changed the state of things (as a matter of fact, it's just like Access 2003, except 13 years beforehand. Stupid Access).
Oh yeah, and I remember being in 5th grade and doing the old "10 PRINT "Bob is Gay!" 20 GOTO 10" routine on the old Apple ][e machines they had at school, and then walk away. That was classic.
Office on OS X (at least Word, which I use a lot) sucks up tons of RAM (like 200MB+) and eats about 20% of my 1.25GHz MDD G4 desktop's processor AT IDLE. I mean, it's just sitting there, what the hell is it doing using 20% of my processor? This case is with JUST Word open, blank document. Sux0r.
Over not-that-long a period of time (like 2 years of "normal" use, IIRC), the brightness of a Plasma TV is reduced by HALF.
Fantastic point. Many cell towers are totally reliant on GPS to determine their location. It allows for generic software to be deployed to many, many cell towers. I would hope that since their location never changes they would cache this data (you'd be an idiot not to), but it IS a major part of how these things determine where they (and in turn others) are.
Dude, go pick up an extra 128MB or 256MB , it's cheap and even the oldest Bondi Blue iMacs can take up to 512MB (I think). You'll see a HUGE performance boost even with an extra 128MB, for about $20.
Try here
It's funny you should mention Secret of Mana, I also think it has some of the best RPG music around, even better than some of the FF games.
On another note, as music gets more and more orchestrated (meaning "real music", not SNES midi stuff), it's much harder to remember/get stuck in your head. I still remember almost all the music From FFII(US, the one with Cecil) and games like Mega Man 2, games I played like 12 years ago, but I can't for the life of me remember music from FFIX or X off-hand.
Hearing that old SNES music in orchestra form would be much more rewarding.
It would be amusing if the War of the Worlds TV trailer (which is refusing to play on my machine), was engineered to look like a news broadcast, and managed to cause panic like the radio series.
Nope, they're not that clever. And judging by a recent Spielberg/Cruise movie, this one will not be that great.