... the first generic operating system for
microcomputers' is now open source.
And in the dark winter of the great white north of Finland, a hacker's mind is stirring. Will this signal the birth of a wave of open source CP/Mania? God, I hope not.
I hacked the 4004 when I was a student, back around 1977. My work-study mentor had a contract with Monsanto, working on the machines that made the very first production plastic Coke bottles. These bottles were heavy duty, like little dark green wiffle-ball bats. The bottles were taken off the market pretty quickly, because of some problem with the plastic they were made from. I still have one.
Anyway, a conveyor belt dropped bottles from a wheel going around (a horizontal disc) onto straight rows of pins, also moving. Required some trigonometry and timing, especially when starting the machines up. It was controlled by a 4004, the code lived in 7 256-byte uv eprom dip chips.
We had an assembler written in Fortran, it ran on either a Honeywell 1648 or a Dec PDP-10 (both notable machines in ARPANET/Internet history). When I got there, they used to type the hex assembler output into the prom burner by hand! Burning the 7 proms took 18 hours of person time, and was error-prone. I wrote some code to do the eprom download automatically, with a paper tape or something, cut the process down to an hour and a half, made some folks pretty happy.
Hardware companies have had this problem for more than 30 years: CPUs are a commodity. You gather together a bunch of hot computer scientists (I mean scientists) with great theory and design skills but not lots of market vision. They want to implement the latest cool thing, and they forget that what makes a CPU better is mostly a matter of squishing the little wires closer together. Computer science hasn't progressed much in the past 40 years, it's chip fab materials science that's made the leap.
This happened to DEC. Apollo. Symbolics. MIPS. Thinking Machines. (Just a sample, the full list is lots longer.) If you're a very smart fellow with focus on CS theory instead of market practice, it can happen to you too.
You can certainly calibrate the image capture device using test images, as has been noted.
You can analyze your problem to decide how accurate you need your tools to be.
Another point to be wary of is lossy compression, many folks who use cams and scanners are used to grabbing (lossy) jpegs. Depending on what information you are trying to capture, jpeg might add artifacts (noise/errors) to your data that you don't want, and it may add more artifacts each time you transform the data, like making a copy of a copy of a cassette tape.
Make sure you can operate on lossless data, and only use lossy compression formats for archival storage after you have manipulated your data (assuming you need the compression rates that lossy algorithms provide).
A user in the USA can send mail with crypto, but other ISP traffic (irc, http, nntp, etc) might get ssh tunnelled to your ISP and then end up in the clear in the USA. I suppose it would end up being more private to ssh tunnel to a foreign ISP.
The article states: Olsen said Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP - news) supplied the computers and printers Ford purchased for the Model E program. He said he was unable to comment on the program's cost.
Gee whiz, you'd think these guys don't have an envelope with a back on it. 166,000 people each got a computer. In early 2000, 500MHz Celeron, 4G disk, printer, modem, cdrom, speakers, monitor, rudimentary software. A thousand bucks a pop in quantity?
They were charging $5 a month for net service, probably broke even on that. So $166 million
for the 166k folks that they equipped. By now, such a machine can be had for less than $500, so to cover everyone it might have come to $250M in all. Sssh, it's a secret.
Read the article and factor out the "quirky" part. He looks and smells grubby, both are irrelevant to his productivity.
He got some "quirky" references from former employers.
I have never really understood the references thing, how big a loser does a hacker have to be to not be able to find someone on earth to vouch for him?
I have have worked with quirky/grubby folks who are God's gift to hacking, angels fallen from heaven. RMS is quirky, I wouldn't mind
having him hack on anything I needed done, warts and all.
And I don't dress like a GQ model since I spend all
my time typing and staring at a screen and crawling under tables pulling cables and arm-wrestling robots.
Of course, quirky is a subjective matter. For some people, quirky means a beard, for others, it means sacrificing children to Moloch.
Hiring a good hacker is a a bit of a crap shoot, but whether he seems quirky just isn't relevant.
If HP is laying off hackers in NJ, it's not because of their technical value, it's because NJ is Siberia as far as HP is concerned. HP's decision makers are out west. If there is a pile of work to do (and revenue to be made), the suits would rather have it done in their own profit center. And when money is tight, they cut loose the remote location that doesn't have the political clout to defend itself. Having hacked UNIX since the 1970's, I've certainly seen this happen before - I've had it happen to me before.
The paper describes a system for gathering and analyzing steganography data. The researchers are smart enough to know that their methods don't find all methods of hiding text, but their framework can be used to apply whatever analytical tools you like to the images it collects.
The point isn't "there is no steganography on the web." The point is "here is a system to look for steganography."
In typical mass media fashion, both New Scientist and Slashdot go for the flashy story rather than the more interesting point of the research.
The RT part of RTLinux is a microkernel that runs Linux as a subordinate task. The RTLinux folks do also provide this microkernel layer under NetBSD, this is plain to see on their web site. So it depends what you mean by "focus." If you mean why don't they support a BSD, they do. If you mean why don't they pay more attention to BSD than to Linux, I don't know why you'd as that, and the answer probably involves customer/market demand.
There was an article about this in
New Scientist
recently, archived by our friends at Google. This article stresses the fact that they are "spy-proof" (they don't leak much RF).
There are a handful of citations about the
patents
involved in this innovation at the
uspto
and at
ibm.com.
Beeteson has written a book called
Visualizing Magnetic Fields.
It got some favorable reviews at amazon.com. Hey, wait a minute, those cheery reviews are by his co-patent-holders, Drs Knox and Lowe. Dude. Might be a page turner, you never know.
Yes, I agree with this. Accounting would be much more expensive than the service being provided. Not to mention the privacy risks of such accounting.
Another point is the economic difference between information and material goods. If Ford wants to build a million copies of its car, it has to spend about a million times more than for one car (more or less, after various overhead).
At this point, I enter commie pinko mode, though I don't typically see myself that way...
With software and information, making copies is close to free. This encourages people to take a communist (as in sharing) view, where each person pitches a contribution (intellectual, labor, economic, whatever) into the pot, and then we all share the fruit of the project.
The Internet (and its predecessors) were built on this sharing principal, and its adherents are defying the capitalists of the world who are still fixated on the brick and mortar view of production, capitalists who want to take the efficiencies of the information economy and apply them to their traditional system of greed.
Yeah, there's probably a reason that they're called "berkeley sockets."
They're called Berkeley sockets to distinguish them from BBN's socket code, because Bill Joy, then of Berkeley,
rewrote TCP/IP about 20 years ago, based on BBN's earlier implementation
Anyway, why is it that my monitor (20in at 1024x768, so the dpi is less than 75) looks almost as good as
that old LJIII output?
Because a pixel on your monitor can represent
millions of gradations of color, whereas a dot
on your LJIII can only be one of four colors. Gradations of color provide perceived resolution too.
This is the "keep all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket" approach.
The article mentioned co-location only in passing, but I think that's a wiser focus.
Geographic mirroring
can protect systems from hostile forces and other surprises, more sensibly than a bunker can.
CTB's error hit hardest in New York City, the nation's largest school system. Apart from
the children, the most prominent victim may have been the city's schools chancellor,
Rudy Crew. The error showed - incorrectly - that reading scores citywide had stagnated
after rising for two years, raising questions about Dr. Crew's leadership. Within months,
he was out of a job.
Before the mistake was discovered, Dr. Crew had been a leading advocate for using
standardized tests to hold students and educators accountable.
What we've found
when following up with some prospects which we didn't win is
that the development shop they went with has them on ASP/NT
servers, with security holes up the wazoo...
They are not your clients until you win a bid.
It is hard for me to distinguish "following up" from simply "probing their network for holes."
This is the same question as: "Should I probe people's networks and then offer to fix their security holes?" The business about lost bids is irrelevant.
You're asking whether you should let stupid people know that they are leaving their SUV parked with the keys in the ignition and the engine running and the kids sitting in the back. Well, it's probably a righteous idea to try to help them, but if you're not careful, like if it looks like you're jumping in the car and driving off, you could get into some trouble.
Think of a safe and discreet way of letting them know, and I think it would be ok. For instance, probe for some benign problem and offer to help them out with a simple security audit, telling them that "the sorts of systems they use" are quite prone to problems, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
"Real multithreading" is really no panacea. See the notes from John Ousterhout's talk, Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes).
And in the dark winter of the great white north of Finland, a hacker's mind is stirring. Will this signal the birth of a wave of open source CP/Mania? God, I hope not.
Anyway, a conveyor belt dropped bottles from a wheel going around (a horizontal disc) onto straight rows of pins, also moving. Required some trigonometry and timing, especially when starting the machines up. It was controlled by a 4004, the code lived in 7 256-byte uv eprom dip chips.
We had an assembler written in Fortran, it ran on either a Honeywell 1648 or a Dec PDP-10 (both notable machines in ARPANET/Internet history). When I got there, they used to type the hex assembler output into the prom burner by hand! Burning the 7 proms took 18 hours of person time, and was error-prone. I wrote some code to do the eprom download automatically, with a paper tape or something, cut the process down to an hour and a half, made some folks pretty happy.
This happened to DEC. Apollo. Symbolics. MIPS. Thinking Machines. (Just a sample, the full list is lots longer.) If you're a very smart fellow with focus on CS theory instead of market practice, it can happen to you too.
Another point to be wary of is lossy compression, many folks who use cams and scanners are used to grabbing (lossy) jpegs. Depending on what information you are trying to capture, jpeg might add artifacts (noise/errors) to your data that you don't want, and it may add more artifacts each time you transform the data, like making a copy of a copy of a cassette tape. Make sure you can operate on lossless data, and only use lossy compression formats for archival storage after you have manipulated your data (assuming you need the compression rates that lossy algorithms provide).
A user in the USA can send mail with crypto, but other ISP traffic (irc, http, nntp, etc) might get ssh tunnelled to your ISP and then end up in the clear in the USA. I suppose it would end up being more private to ssh tunnel to a foreign ISP.
These pages are currently /.'ed, but they sell 5 CD-ROMs of these videos for
$60 each to individuals in the USA, more for multi-user and non-USA.
Gee whiz, you'd think these guys don't have an envelope with a back on it. 166,000 people each got a computer. In early 2000, 500MHz Celeron, 4G disk, printer, modem, cdrom, speakers, monitor, rudimentary software. A thousand bucks a pop in quantity? They were charging $5 a month for net service, probably broke even on that. So $166 million for the 166k folks that they equipped. By now, such a machine can be had for less than $500, so to cover everyone it might have come to $250M in all. Sssh, it's a secret.
I have have worked with quirky/grubby folks who are God's gift to hacking, angels fallen from heaven. RMS is quirky, I wouldn't mind having him hack on anything I needed done, warts and all. And I don't dress like a GQ model since I spend all my time typing and staring at a screen and crawling under tables pulling cables and arm-wrestling robots.
Of course, quirky is a subjective matter. For some people, quirky means a beard, for others, it means sacrificing children to Moloch. Hiring a good hacker is a a bit of a crap shoot, but whether he seems quirky just isn't relevant.
And if you want your bass to go boom, you over-inflate them.
When I read this headline, I thought, Scarfo is a pretty sensible name for a keystroke logger.
If HP is laying off hackers in NJ, it's not because of their technical value, it's because NJ is Siberia as far as HP is concerned. HP's decision makers are out west. If there is a pile of work to do (and revenue to be made), the suits would rather have it done in their own profit center. And when money is tight, they cut loose the remote location that doesn't have the political clout to defend itself. Having hacked UNIX since the 1970's, I've certainly seen this happen before - I've had it happen to me before.
The point isn't "there is no steganography on the web." The point is "here is a system to look for steganography."
In typical mass media fashion, both New Scientist and Slashdot go for the flashy story rather than the more interesting point of the research.
The RT part of RTLinux is a microkernel that runs Linux as a subordinate task. The RTLinux folks do also provide this microkernel layer under NetBSD, this is plain to see on their web site. So it depends what you mean by "focus." If you mean why don't they support a BSD, they do. If you mean why don't they pay more attention to BSD than to Linux, I don't know why you'd as that, and the answer probably involves customer/market demand.
There are a handful of citations about the patents involved in this innovation at the uspto and at ibm.com.
Beeteson has written a book called Visualizing Magnetic Fields. It got some favorable reviews at amazon.com. Hey, wait a minute, those cheery reviews are by his co-patent-holders, Drs Knox and Lowe. Dude. Might be a page turner, you never know.
check out the rest of the good advice at pccarnage.net.
Another point is the economic difference between information and material goods. If Ford wants to build a million copies of its car, it has to spend about a million times more than for one car (more or less, after various overhead).
At this point, I enter commie pinko mode, though I don't typically see myself that way...
With software and information, making copies is close to free. This encourages people to take a communist (as in sharing) view, where each person pitches a contribution (intellectual, labor, economic, whatever) into the pot, and then we all share the fruit of the project.
The Internet (and its predecessors) were built on this sharing principal, and its adherents are defying the capitalists of the world who are still fixated on the brick and mortar view of production, capitalists who want to take the efficiencies of the information economy and apply them to their traditional system of greed.
Because a pixel on your monitor can represent millions of gradations of color, whereas a dot on your LJIII can only be one of four colors. Gradations of color provide perceived resolution too.
This is the "keep all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket" approach. The article mentioned co-location only in passing, but I think that's a wiser focus. Geographic mirroring can protect systems from hostile forces and other surprises, more sensibly than a bunker can.
here's the link to the ra file
One company that does these ads also did the matrixy Eyevision for the Super Bowl and the virtual first down lines too.
This is the same question as: "Should I probe people's networks and then offer to fix their security holes?" The business about lost bids is irrelevant.
You're asking whether you should let stupid people know that they are leaving their SUV parked with the keys in the ignition and the engine running and the kids sitting in the back. Well, it's probably a righteous idea to try to help them, but if you're not careful, like if it looks like you're jumping in the car and driving off, you could get into some trouble.
Think of a safe and discreet way of letting them know, and I think it would be ok. For instance, probe for some benign problem and offer to help them out with a simple security audit, telling them that "the sorts of systems they use" are quite prone to problems, etc.