If these car time-sharing systems (which seem pretty much like car rental agencies to me with a little more flexibility) work how they think they work, all you need is a device capable of rewriting magnetic strips on cards. Generally there are brown strips and black strips, with brown ones used by less critical services, like gift cards and library cards, while black strips, which are more secure (in that they are encoded differently) are used by things like credit cards. I'm not sure which one these time-sharing services would use, but I figure it would be something like this. But it seems like it would be trivial to simply rent one of these cars, take it to a garage, open up all the electronics they have inside, and figure out how it works, and perhaps re-flash its software like in that interesting hack-a-bike article you linked to so as to create a backdoor. What would probably easier is to just figure out how the cards work and use a magnetic stripe writer to change the information on your card so it either 1) impersonates someone else's card or 2) adds credit to the card, if this information is stored on the card itself. It was stored in some central computer somewhere, surely the car itself would have to somehow connect to it, and I'm not sure how this would be reliably accomplished. Any info on this would be appreciated....
Re:I know this isn't a book review, but...
on
100 Years of Einstein
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can highly recommend this book as well. By the way, it's actually Brian GREENE, not Green. But yes, definitely, definitely, check this book out. He mostly talks about string theory but there are also a lot of other ideas discussed, like hidden variable theory (particles which are virtually undetectable directly; the only way we know they're there is that the equations that accurately predict particle behaviour/properties require these variables) and all kinds of other weird things related to this (sparticles, etc). I like this book because it sets much of modern physics down in layman's terms, yet it's comprehensive and informative even to those already familiar with the basics.
having taken quantum mechanics courses...
on
100 Years of Einstein
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...I can certainly appreciate Einstein's sheer genius, particularly when it came to relativity. It was Einstein who postulated that, essentially, absolutely everything was relative. You hear all the examples about going around the sun in a spaceship really fast, or the twins paradox, but it doesn't really just stop there. There are all kinds of weird things that happen when you go really fast; for example, your size changes. If I'm driving my car really really fast (and of course, we're talking close to the speed of light), my vehicle actually becomes shorter. Then as I slow down, it stretches out again. At the beginning of the 20th century, no doubt what a lot of Einstein proposed sounded like sheer madness.
In his later years, though, Einstein became increasingly conservative and very resistant to the idea of uncertainty, formulated by Bohr and Heisenberg. Einstein, from a generation of research before these two scientists, was still a determinist; he believed that you could not only discover both the position and velocity (speed and direction) of a particle, but that if you knew all such properties of all particles, you could accurately predict the state of things far in the future. I became disappointed with Einstein when I learned that, in the late 30s and 40s, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to support the ontic and epistemic uncertainty principles, Einstein tried lots of clever thought experiments to prove them wrong, even though they all relied on knowing more than one mutually incompatible property at once. I think Einstein contributed a lot, but he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life.
...how Microsoft can get away with determining the priorities and policies of foreign governments. How often in history does a private enterprise have this much power?
In any case, I applaud Venezuela now for actually paying attention to this kind of thing. Think about how many other issues they have to deal with, yet they still managed to account for stuff like this (cost to government for software). Look at where we are in many other countries, including the US. How many government officials here in America could you actually convince to launch a campaign promoting free software? Not many, if any.
Ah, and just think, on a board with any less smart people, this would be modded down...well, either that or they'd complain that the link doesn't work.
1. The Journaled Hierarchical File System, or HFS+J, is case-insensitive by default.
2. Mac OS X, ironically, uses extensions quite gratutiously. Plus there's legacy resource forks and other metadata. Finally, in truly modern file formats, XML is helping a lot with this.
3. Mac OS X's UI pretty much speaks for itself on this one, I think. I agree with you; less is more.
If he had cemented such a position, this might have been very good, actually. This guy, in 1974, digitally recorded television onto his optical storage media. Now it's 2004, and I still just have a VCR for recording shows. I honestly think development of this technology could have gone even faster had this guy retained control of it instead of Sony and Philips. Almost a decade after this guy proved that it was actually quite simple to store lots of digital video with his optical media, Sony develops CDs purely for audio, and Betamax tapes for video. If this guy had maintained control, DVDs could have entered the market in the late 80s.
Good day, friend! I am Ubuntu Linux from ubuntulinux.org, and I am a licenced GPL project. I cordially request your assistance in transferring a sum of 10 (ten) Ubuntu Linux Install Compact Discs to you. Please accept my utmost promise that this is not a scam! Recently one of my co-workers Debian Linux passed away, but left much valuable code behind. Please reply immediately if you are interested in helping me.
Before we get into a holy war over operating systems, set-top boxes, and other things that most of us probably don't want to argue about tonight, and for those of you who didn't RTFA, it basically looks at the possibilities of decentralising, if you will, certain functions of a PC.
I still believe, however, that the PC itself lacks a certain combination of features that other devices lack. A Tivo or XBox may be simpler to operate, but a PC is expandable and upgradable, simply does much more, and does those things better. A PC is more flexible, and that's what I believe counts. You can word-process or play games, browse the internet, whatever. But if you buy a bunch of 'appliances' to do those things, it really makes life MORE complicated, not less. I yield the floor.
That's like saying "Macs suck, I used an LCII and it was total crap
No, it's NOT like saying that. An LCII is from the early 90s. This Dell was from about eight months ago. It also cost only a few hundred less than my Powerbook.
The only PC laptops that resemble my Powerbook are Sony Vaios, especially ones that don't have internal optical drives, and yet they still cost a fortune.
Eh, yum is nice and all, but I specifically mention that Terra Soft's repository still isn't very big. There isn't even Firefox available.
As soon as yum's selection becomes as large as the debian package database, then I'll be happy. The reason I didn't talk a lot about Apt is that Apt isn't included with YDL. Perhaps Terra Soft should have included it, hm?
Plenty of reasons. My friend's Dell is much thicker, louder, sucks more power, and has a shorter battery life. The only thing it beats my Powerbook in is screen resolution.
The true purpose of this, I strongly suspect, is actually to justify replacing Unix and GNU/Linux workstations with Dells, which is exactly what has been going on lately. No one seems to have thought of how anyone was going to be able to access our general purpose Unix environment from these machines, so they threw this together.
I'm a student at IU, and UITS is not as "fucking sweet" as they sound. In fact, that statement is almost insulting to me.
UITS does bullshit little projects like this all the time, actually, to try and maintain public support. The problem is that they're arrogant and don't meet student and staff needs AT ALL.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Last year, and many years before that, we used an online system called InSite, developed in-house by our comp sci department, to manage grades, webmail, scheduling, everything. It was a little ugly and slightly disorganised, but it was reliable as hell, and I've never heard a single complaint about it.
Then all of a sudden, some asshole bureaucrat at UITS decides we need to spend several million dollars in a contract with PeopleSoft to replace InSite with a new system called, confusingly enough, OneStart. Then everyone realised it didn't do anything academically, so we wasted a bunch more money creating a second system called OnCourse. See where this is going? It's million-dollar software on million-dollar hardware, and guess what, none of it really works that well. And now PeopleSoft is having huge problems of their own. I hope they don't write their own software. Now the Comp Sci department is trying to explain to UITS that they could have re-written and modernised InSite over last summer, for free, using standard software like PHP and SQL running on Solaris. But NO.
UITS also loves doing other stupid things to annoy ordinary users like me. Prime example; this semester they're blowing up pine. I personally love pine. Their justification is that it's 'too expensive to maintain' and that more people use our webmail system. In fact, I get the feeling that most of the stupider people on campus use webmail exclusively, because they've never even heard of IMAP.
Also, our Cisco VPN doesn't work right, and UITS soundly refuses to fix it.
So I called and emailed UITS a dozen times and they never reply, and instead waste their time with little PR projects like this.
The problem with this whole analysis is that it sounds nice on paper, but it doesn't accurately represent a user experience. Think about all the bugs you've ever encountered in Linux. How many of them were actually due to bugs in the kernel? No, virtually all bugs you're going to encounter on a day-to-day basis will be in user space tools, like bundled apps, GUI stuff, and really just everything between you and the kernel. Also, how much of Windows is being looked at, here? Again, many of the bugs in Windows are not in its kernel, but user space...sheesh. It'd probably be more useful to look at the whole system. Unless you're writing a kernel module or a driver or something, when's the last time you directly interacted with any part of the Linux kernel itself?
Seriously though, I hate when people abbreviate Pocket PC as "PPC". Pocket PCs have only been around since 2000. PPC as in PowerPC, the RISC architecture, has been around since 1993. Everyone's always abbreviated it as PPC. And now, all of a sudden, there are topics on web boards like "help with PPC linux," and being a Mac and Linux guy am always eager to help, and it turns out to be some asshole with an Axim.
Slashdot Mirror
If these car time-sharing systems (which seem pretty much like car rental agencies to me with a little more flexibility) work how they think they work, all you need is a device capable of rewriting magnetic strips on cards. Generally there are brown strips and black strips, with brown ones used by less critical services, like gift cards and library cards, while black strips, which are more secure (in that they are encoded differently) are used by things like credit cards. I'm not sure which one these time-sharing services would use, but I figure it would be something like this. But it seems like it would be trivial to simply rent one of these cars, take it to a garage, open up all the electronics they have inside, and figure out how it works, and perhaps re-flash its software like in that interesting hack-a-bike article you linked to so as to create a backdoor. What would probably easier is to just figure out how the cards work and use a magnetic stripe writer to change the information on your card so it either 1) impersonates someone else's card or 2) adds credit to the card, if this information is stored on the card itself. It was stored in some central computer somewhere, surely the car itself would have to somehow connect to it, and I'm not sure how this would be reliably accomplished. Any info on this would be appreciated....
I can highly recommend this book as well. By the way, it's actually Brian GREENE, not Green. But yes, definitely, definitely, check this book out. He mostly talks about string theory but there are also a lot of other ideas discussed, like hidden variable theory (particles which are virtually undetectable directly; the only way we know they're there is that the equations that accurately predict particle behaviour/properties require these variables) and all kinds of other weird things related to this (sparticles, etc). I like this book because it sets much of modern physics down in layman's terms, yet it's comprehensive and informative even to those already familiar with the basics.
...I can certainly appreciate Einstein's sheer genius, particularly when it came to relativity. It was Einstein who postulated that, essentially, absolutely everything was relative. You hear all the examples about going around the sun in a spaceship really fast, or the twins paradox, but it doesn't really just stop there. There are all kinds of weird things that happen when you go really fast; for example, your size changes. If I'm driving my car really really fast (and of course, we're talking close to the speed of light), my vehicle actually becomes shorter. Then as I slow down, it stretches out again. At the beginning of the 20th century, no doubt what a lot of Einstein proposed sounded like sheer madness.
In his later years, though, Einstein became increasingly conservative and very resistant to the idea of uncertainty, formulated by Bohr and Heisenberg. Einstein, from a generation of research before these two scientists, was still a determinist; he believed that you could not only discover both the position and velocity (speed and direction) of a particle, but that if you knew all such properties of all particles, you could accurately predict the state of things far in the future. I became disappointed with Einstein when I learned that, in the late 30s and 40s, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to support the ontic and epistemic uncertainty principles, Einstein tried lots of clever thought experiments to prove them wrong, even though they all relied on knowing more than one mutually incompatible property at once. I think Einstein contributed a lot, but he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life.
...how Microsoft can get away with determining the priorities and policies of foreign governments. How often in history does a private enterprise have this much power?
In any case, I applaud Venezuela now for actually paying attention to this kind of thing. Think about how many other issues they have to deal with, yet they still managed to account for stuff like this (cost to government for software). Look at where we are in many other countries, including the US. How many government officials here in America could you actually convince to launch a campaign promoting free software? Not many, if any.
I think their downtime now is probably costing them MUCH more than $200.
Uh, no.
All of Apple's portable line is still G4-based.
Ah, and just think, on a board with any less smart people, this would be modded down...well, either that or they'd complain that the link doesn't work.
Just apply a sort of orangish tint in Photoshop.
Mac OS X is, I think, what you're looking for.
1. The Journaled Hierarchical File System, or HFS+J, is case-insensitive by default.
2. Mac OS X, ironically, uses extensions quite gratutiously. Plus there's legacy resource forks and other metadata. Finally, in truly modern file formats, XML is helping a lot with this.
3. Mac OS X's UI pretty much speaks for itself on this one, I think. I agree with you; less is more.
If he had cemented such a position, this might have been very good, actually. This guy, in 1974, digitally recorded television onto his optical storage media. Now it's 2004, and I still just have a VCR for recording shows. I honestly think development of this technology could have gone even faster had this guy retained control of it instead of Sony and Philips. Almost a decade after this guy proved that it was actually quite simple to store lots of digital video with his optical media, Sony develops CDs purely for audio, and Betamax tapes for video. If this guy had maintained control, DVDs could have entered the market in the late 80s.
someone please mod this -1 troll.......
Good day, friend! I am Ubuntu Linux from ubuntulinux.org, and I am a licenced GPL project. I cordially request your assistance in transferring a sum of 10 (ten) Ubuntu Linux Install Compact Discs to you. Please accept my utmost promise that this is not a scam! Recently one of my co-workers Debian Linux passed away, but left much valuable code behind. Please reply immediately if you are interested in helping me.
Before we get into a holy war over operating systems, set-top boxes, and other things that most of us probably don't want to argue about tonight, and for those of you who didn't RTFA, it basically looks at the possibilities of decentralising, if you will, certain functions of a PC.
I still believe, however, that the PC itself lacks a certain combination of features that other devices lack. A Tivo or XBox may be simpler to operate, but a PC is expandable and upgradable, simply does much more, and does those things better. A PC is more flexible, and that's what I believe counts. You can word-process or play games, browse the internet, whatever. But if you buy a bunch of 'appliances' to do those things, it really makes life MORE complicated, not less. I yield the floor.
Surely no one actually puts periods in PC, as in "P.C."?
That's like saying "Macs suck, I used an LCII and it was total crap
No, it's NOT like saying that. An LCII is from the early 90s. This Dell was from about eight months ago. It also cost only a few hundred less than my Powerbook.
The only PC laptops that resemble my Powerbook are Sony Vaios, especially ones that don't have internal optical drives, and yet they still cost a fortune.
Eh, yum is nice and all, but I specifically mention that Terra Soft's repository still isn't very big. There isn't even Firefox available. As soon as yum's selection becomes as large as the debian package database, then I'll be happy. The reason I didn't talk a lot about Apt is that Apt isn't included with YDL. Perhaps Terra Soft should have included it, hm?
Plenty of reasons. My friend's Dell is much thicker, louder, sucks more power, and has a shorter battery life. The only thing it beats my Powerbook in is screen resolution.
Seeing as how Dvorak is a computer himself, I would expect him to be rather biased in this matter.
"The previous bandwidth issues should be solved now that I have a new server"
Not for long.
The true purpose of this, I strongly suspect, is actually to justify replacing Unix and GNU/Linux workstations with Dells, which is exactly what has been going on lately. No one seems to have thought of how anyone was going to be able to access our general purpose Unix environment from these machines, so they threw this together.
I'm a student at IU, and UITS is not as "fucking sweet" as they sound. In fact, that statement is almost insulting to me.
UITS does bullshit little projects like this all the time, actually, to try and maintain public support. The problem is that they're arrogant and don't meet student and staff needs AT ALL.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Last year, and many years before that, we used an online system called InSite, developed in-house by our comp sci department, to manage grades, webmail, scheduling, everything. It was a little ugly and slightly disorganised, but it was reliable as hell, and I've never heard a single complaint about it.
Then all of a sudden, some asshole bureaucrat at UITS decides we need to spend several million dollars in a contract with PeopleSoft to replace InSite with a new system called, confusingly enough, OneStart. Then everyone realised it didn't do anything academically, so we wasted a bunch more money creating a second system called OnCourse. See where this is going? It's million-dollar software on million-dollar hardware, and guess what, none of it really works that well. And now PeopleSoft is having huge problems of their own. I hope they don't write their own software. Now the Comp Sci department is trying to explain to UITS that they could have re-written and modernised InSite over last summer, for free, using standard software like PHP and SQL running on Solaris. But NO.
UITS also loves doing other stupid things to annoy ordinary users like me. Prime example; this semester they're blowing up pine. I personally love pine. Their justification is that it's 'too expensive to maintain' and that more people use our webmail system. In fact, I get the feeling that most of the stupider people on campus use webmail exclusively, because they've never even heard of IMAP.
Also, our Cisco VPN doesn't work right, and UITS soundly refuses to fix it.
So I called and emailed UITS a dozen times and they never reply, and instead waste their time with little PR projects like this.
So that'd be BnB*, DnD, and RnR, hm?
*Birds and the bees.
The problem with this whole analysis is that it sounds nice on paper, but it doesn't accurately represent a user experience. Think about all the bugs you've ever encountered in Linux. How many of them were actually due to bugs in the kernel? No, virtually all bugs you're going to encounter on a day-to-day basis will be in user space tools, like bundled apps, GUI stuff, and really just everything between you and the kernel. Also, how much of Windows is being looked at, here? Again, many of the bugs in Windows are not in its kernel, but user space...sheesh. It'd probably be more useful to look at the whole system. Unless you're writing a kernel module or a driver or something, when's the last time you directly interacted with any part of the Linux kernel itself?
Yeah, it'd be nice to run it on my Powerbook...
Seriously though, I hate when people abbreviate Pocket PC as "PPC". Pocket PCs have only been around since 2000. PPC as in PowerPC, the RISC architecture, has been around since 1993. Everyone's always abbreviated it as PPC. And now, all of a sudden, there are topics on web boards like "help with PPC linux," and being a Mac and Linux guy am always eager to help, and it turns out to be some asshole with an Axim.
I for one welcome our apocalyptic overlords.
Where's Bruce Willis?