This is nice and timely! I've been thinking about this myself lately, and I've wondered something different: In todays highly litigatious society, are you opening yourself up for alot of hassle in filing a patent? No question that getting your origonal idea locked in before anybody else is a good thing, but what happens when somebody challanges you, or you have to challange somebody else? It may be a remote possiblity, but are 'the little guys' assuming lots of personal risk in basically defying the world to capitalize on their idea? You find a lawyer with a flat rate to file your patent, then what? Where are you going to get the tens of thousands it would likely cost to defend your patent in court? Did the flat rate cover him actually reading the patent to determine if it's overbroad or worse, not broad enough? There seems to be alot to think about with a patent, especially if you don't have in house counsel at your disposal. This is a pretty glib way to think about it, putting patents in the category of those nice things that protect big business but are out of reach of the little guys.
If the answer to the above questions is a resounding "w3rd!!", then have we got the program for you! Introducing "L4$t Pr0st!!". Inform a likely relieved populace of your unfortunate demise in style. Written in perl, "L4$t Pr0st" integrates easily with your favorite "F1r$t Pr0st" sniper script. Along with a standardized (but customizable) message, "L4$t Pr0st" can leave a personalized message to your adoring public, readable by them until you are modded down past viewable level. Let them know what you REALLY think...make them pje4r you...transmit URLs to your favorite gaping anus webpage; With "L4$t Pr0st" the possibilities are endless, even if your mortal coil is not!
"Make your final First Post your Last Post, with L4$t Pr0st!"
Warning: "L4$t Pr0st Ltd." and it's parent company "Mbogo Plumbing and Software", its affiliates, subsidiaries, and shareholders hereby disavow all liability for any adverse affects in the afterlife caused by loss of Karma due to use of L4$t Pr0st, including but not limited to assignment to a lower than expected circle of Hell, in perpetutity and throughout the Universe.
Hm...I have this one. Here is a page with info and the requirements (and, interestingly, a link to this same article): Atomic Energy.
At first I thought this wouldn't actually fulfill any of the requirements, but another look (it's been awhile) shows that you CAN do a model of a reactor and label all of the parts. The article about him didn't mention anything about labels, and some MB counselors can be real sticklers about the wording of the requirements. Betcha he didn't get any credit for it, or had to go back and label his parts! On the other hand...it didn't say "non-functional model using soup cans, timbles, and elbow macaroni", either. Guess it would have been alright, providing he had his parts and their functions clearly labeled.
He added something to a highway sign. Something that appears on thousands of highways signs in the country. What point is he trying to make here? The article made numerous references to an almost heroic face-egging of the elite pork-barrelists in their ivory towers, but why? Kind of funny how the transit authority agreed with him...kind of cheapens the whole thing. Maybe they understand it.
Does the fact that he was very careful in making this sign make it art? Can I lovingly craft a standard school issue room number placard and label an unlabled room in the name of art? The faceless school gestapo will never notice, and my sign may be seen by dozens of unwary students shuffling to and from class in that way they tend to. I'll be a hero. Take THAT, facilities and maintanance!
From the article: "The only restriction is that people cannot take the DAKOTA software, change it, and then sell it," Eldred says. "They can, however, design products with DAKOTA and sell their products."
Isn't that contrary to the terms of the GPL? As long as the source is provided, and the resultant code is released under the GPL, isn't modification and resale legal? Just something that caught my eye in the article.
Indeed....campus here is all fiber to the desktop (and everywhere else...except this lab, for whatever reason), with little media converters they give out each fall. They didn't seem to be that big a deal...after all, they were willing to hand them out to every freshman and liberal-artist with a social security number and student ID. They couldn't have been terribly expensive (especially when you buy them in the thousands...), since the fine to replace one wasn't high enough to be impressive over the 1.5 years since I've lived on campus and needed one. The government's ISP could buy them in huge volume for three pittances plus tax and rent them to the users, with the cost spread over time.
Did anybody else conjure up images of batch processed punch card runs when reading over some of these problems? I don't know if it's the IBM backing of the event or what, but I got images of geeks sitting at punch card writers feeding an old Model 704 numerical representations of oil-filled polygons in card form and waiting for it to spit out an answer. The questions are interesting enough, and I'm even taking a crack at a few on my own time, but I can't shake the images!
In a news confrence today top US Air Force brass announced the cancellation of Project Stealth Space Rock o' Death, when the initial test of the ten year, $100 billion project failed.
"We are very dissapointed with the recent failure", an unnamed scientist told reporters today at a press confrence held at an Arlington, Virginia-area Denny's, "the damn thing just missed...it was kind of a one-shot deal, you know? We're all pretty bummed around the office."
The Stealth Asteroid was to capitalize on the success of the Stealth Bomber. "After the Gulf War, we were trying to figure out what other stealth things we could build. We were kicking stuff around the table, and somebody, I think Steve said stealth asteroid. I don't know if he was kidding or what, but we went ahead with it." The Stealth Asteroid was to be a weapon similar in theory to the Stealth Bomber, but different in a number of key areas. "First of all...it's not a plane. That's a big difference right there. Second, it would show up on the enemy radar at some point. Kind of a moot point, I guess...what would they do? Shoot at it? Maybe open an umbrella like in the cartoons. They'd be pretty boned......suckers."
While nothing is being admitted, it was widely believed that the first test of this new weapons platform would also be its first use in combat, especially against targets in reinforced bunkers, buildings, yurts, or anywhere within a 15-mile radius of the impact zone.
In other news, the Pentagon has announced the beginning of "Project Stealth Solar Super-flare".
And these are just US criteria...other nations have their own. These are becomming very important, if typical job requirements on security-jobs list are any indication. Need a BS, a clearance, and 5 years practical experiance in everything from LAN wiring, vulerability finding and exploit production, penetration testing, firewalls and IDS, to the evaluation and application of these federal criteria, and everything in between. And that will get you an entry level position!
...it's the business students, and the political students (and to a lesser extent, the art students), that will determine the future of Microsoft.
CS people here (myself included) learn Java and Ada95 as first and second languages, primarily on Solaris and Mandrake Linux boxes, then go on to study (and write) bits of the linux kernel in OS class, build bits of compilers in Linux for compiler class, etc. The business and management weenies (The Engineering Management and Systems Engineering get a bit more hard-core program, but they're still kind of weenies) learn Office 2000, Visual Basic [so they can be more in tune with the requirements of software development, or something], etc. On one hand, fine...let them play with VB and make pretty Flash webpages and laugh at the antics of the animated paperclip all they want. On the other hand...guess whos offices will be using Microsoft products because that's what they learned in college? We engineering types may see Windows as a piece of software that allows computers to play video games when they're not booted into the actual operating system (Non-windows...anything else will suffice, really) for real work, but for the business students, Windows is practically a way of life. Remember who's buying the software for the office....it's not the engineers, and with the way the job market is, you'll work where you can, whether or not the company boxes are running a game system [Windows, remember?]. As long as universites teach their squishy arts people Microsoft, the Beast of Redmond will be quite healthy.
Alright...there was at least ONE ramen recipe in there...but that guy has two hundred and five! If only ramen noodles weren't so scarce and expensive. Wait...nevermind. Notably absent now that I'm checking is "Prison Ramen", which IIRC was cooked in a bag of Cheet-O's for lack of an actual pot. In fact, I seem to remember there being more than 205 recipes last I was there (maybe got rid of more or less duplicate recipes), but that should hold you for awhile.
When I read the title, I had visions of actual homebrew *supercomputers*...something along the lines of Euclid from Pi. Break out the soldering irons and damn the torpedoes! Yes, Beowulf technology is great. Genetic algorithms and channel bonding and QNX are nice touches, but Beowulf clusters are fairly common, even for ordinary people...an article about NEW uses for the things would have been nice, other than that, just shut up and build one! Soon to be taking my own advice...even have an app in the works for it. Still a nice project with a half-decent writeup, but it's been done.
How about it, folks? Homebrew big iron? Where would one even begin? Food for thought, at least.
I can say this because I still have windows. If it weren't for a piece of my apartment building, I could see the State Department complex. It's still there, and dead silent...has been all day, save for the evacuation. Trust me, if anything went down at the State Department, I would have known in a hurry.
Trust me...there was no car bomb at the State Department. When I heard that on whatever local news station I was watching at the time, I took a look out my window, and the State Department, one block diagonally from me, is still there. If a bomb went off at the State Department, I'd be the first to know.
with table after table of ripoff, no-name parts (but all the tables have the SAME ripoff, no name parts), lack of air conditioning, and smelly people all-a-lookin' fer one of dem kom-pew-turs not the environment you're looking for? Big dissapointment, and more than a little shady. I don't want to be the show's organizer once the New Carrolton fire marshall decides he needs a "Only The Best" brand CD burner, a "Learn French Now" CD, and some $30 RAM that fails after a few weeks.
I dropped by a hamfest somewhere in Maryland the weekend before last on the way up to CT, and it looked like there would have been alot there if it weren't for the rain. The mostly outdoor participants had more or less packed up and left by the time I got there, but the inside show wasn't all bad: a few MarketPro refugee sellers, and this one guy way in the back with alot of cool stuff. Not many people with actual radio gear for a ham fest, but worthwhile none the less. I'd say keep an eye out on the AARL web site or magazine.
I know this isn't a proper rack in the traditional sense, but as soon as I get my new box, it and my current box will be living in a plastic file cabinet I got at Staples for $30. I haven't done all (any) of the measurements, but each drawer seems more than big enough for a board and a power supply. The plan was this:
One board in each of the two smaller top shelves
Power supplies (if they won't fit in the top), disk array, hub, KVM switch in the larger bottom drawer.
Adequate cooling, etc
I don't have all the details worked out, but it seems like a good solution for a deskside setup (or hide it in a closet). It's plastic (light), on wheels, modular (I'm sure more drawers can be bought through the catalog or from the supplier), and the price is right. Thing even looks pretty cool, as far as file cabinets go.
Might be something to think about, might not work at all for you, but that's my plan.
....the "Hacker Hailstorm" in "Canadian Bacon", which happened to be on Comedy Central on Monday, after "PCU". Basically, the Hailstorm is this device made by some evil corperation called "Hacker", and gives remote control over the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. For convenience, it was installed in the Canadian National Tower (obviously). To make a long story short, I think that Microsoft's control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal is anti-competitive, and limits the opportunities of rabid grad students, the Michigan Militia, the MPAA (Obviously), and various other start up, dot-com style paramilitary organizations, to say nothing about the U.S. Government itself, to activly and viably participate in the multi-fold destruction of the human race.
Slashdot Mirror
This is nice and timely! I've been thinking about this myself lately, and I've wondered something different: In todays highly litigatious society, are you opening yourself up for alot of hassle in filing a patent? No question that getting your origonal idea locked in before anybody else is a good thing, but what happens when somebody challanges you, or you have to challange somebody else? It may be a remote possiblity, but are 'the little guys' assuming lots of personal risk in basically defying the world to capitalize on their idea? You find a lawyer with a flat rate to file your patent, then what? Where are you going to get the tens of thousands it would likely cost to defend your patent in court? Did the flat rate cover him actually reading the patent to determine if it's overbroad or worse, not broad enough? There seems to be alot to think about with a patent, especially if you don't have in house counsel at your disposal. This is a pretty glib way to think about it, putting patents in the category of those nice things that protect big business but are out of reach of the little guys.
No, they're all big into Ada95. Based on Pascal, so not too far off, though it does have OO capabilities.
Forget that! I'll take the top-secret recipe for the immortality elixer with me to my grave!
Are you a troll?
Have you died?
If the answer to the above questions is a resounding "w3rd!!", then have we got the program for you! Introducing "L4$t Pr0st!!". Inform a likely relieved populace of your unfortunate demise in style. Written in perl, "L4$t Pr0st" integrates easily with your favorite "F1r$t Pr0st" sniper script. Along with a standardized (but customizable) message, "L4$t Pr0st" can leave a personalized message to your adoring public, readable by them until you are modded down past viewable level. Let them know what you REALLY think...make them pje4r you...transmit URLs to your favorite gaping anus webpage; With "L4$t Pr0st" the possibilities are endless, even if your mortal coil is not!
"Make your final First Post your Last Post, with L4$t Pr0st!"
Warning: "L4$t Pr0st Ltd." and it's parent company "Mbogo Plumbing and Software", its affiliates, subsidiaries, and shareholders hereby disavow all liability for any adverse affects in the afterlife caused by loss of Karma due to use of L4$t Pr0st, including but not limited to assignment to a lower than expected circle of Hell, in perpetutity and throughout the Universe.
Hm...I have this one. Here is a page with info and the requirements (and, interestingly, a link to this same article): Atomic Energy.
At first I thought this wouldn't actually fulfill any of the requirements, but another look (it's been awhile) shows that you CAN do a model of a reactor and label all of the parts. The article about him didn't mention anything about labels, and some MB counselors can be real sticklers about the wording of the requirements. Betcha he didn't get any credit for it, or had to go back and label his parts! On the other hand...it didn't say "non-functional model using soup cans, timbles, and elbow macaroni", either. Guess it would have been alright, providing he had his parts and their functions clearly labeled.
He added something to a highway sign. Something that appears on thousands of highways signs in the country. What point is he trying to make here? The article made numerous references to an almost heroic face-egging of the elite pork-barrelists in their ivory towers, but why? Kind of funny how the transit authority agreed with him...kind of cheapens the whole thing. Maybe they understand it.
Does the fact that he was very careful in making this sign make it art? Can I lovingly craft a standard school issue room number placard and label an unlabled room in the name of art? The faceless school gestapo will never notice, and my sign may be seen by dozens of unwary students shuffling to and from class in that way they tend to. I'll be a hero. Take THAT, facilities and maintanance!
>>Watch out for the cheap rip-off with a similiar design released soon (before this one is???).
Sounds good to me...I'd like one of these, and there's no way this thing is priced with affordability in mind. Bring on the cheap ripoffs!
From the article: "The only restriction is that people cannot take the DAKOTA software, change it, and then sell it," Eldred says. "They can, however, design products with DAKOTA and sell their products."
Isn't that contrary to the terms of the GPL? As long as the source is provided, and the resultant code is released under the GPL, isn't modification and resale legal? Just something that caught my eye in the article.
Indeed....campus here is all fiber to the desktop (and everywhere else...except this lab, for whatever reason), with little media converters they give out each fall. They didn't seem to be that big a deal...after all, they were willing to hand them out to every freshman and liberal-artist with a social security number and student ID.
They couldn't have been terribly expensive (especially when you buy them in the thousands...), since the fine to replace one wasn't high enough to be impressive over the 1.5 years since I've lived on campus and needed one.
The government's ISP could buy them in huge volume for three pittances plus tax and rent them to the users, with the cost spread over time.
Did anybody else conjure up images of batch processed punch card runs when reading over some of these problems? I don't know if it's the IBM backing of the event or what, but I got images of geeks sitting at punch card writers feeding an old Model 704 numerical representations of oil-filled polygons in card form and waiting for it to spit out an answer. The questions are interesting enough, and I'm even taking a crack at a few on my own time, but I can't shake the images!
Am I going insane?
*looks around*
At the moment, yes.
/me ducks!
...Air Force Cancels Project"
In a news confrence today top US Air Force brass announced the cancellation of Project Stealth Space Rock o' Death, when the initial test of the ten year, $100 billion project failed.
"We are very dissapointed with the recent failure", an unnamed scientist told reporters today at a press confrence held at an Arlington, Virginia-area Denny's, "the damn thing just missed...it was kind of a one-shot deal, you know? We're all pretty bummed around the office."
The Stealth Asteroid was to capitalize on the success of the Stealth Bomber. "After the Gulf War, we were trying to figure out what other stealth things we could build. We were kicking stuff around the table, and somebody, I think Steve said stealth asteroid. I don't know if he was kidding or what, but we went ahead with it." The Stealth Asteroid was to be a weapon similar in theory to the Stealth Bomber, but different in a number of key areas. "First of all...it's not a plane. That's a big difference right there. Second, it would show up on the enemy radar at some point. Kind of a moot point, I guess...what would they do? Shoot at it? Maybe open an umbrella like in the cartoons. They'd be pretty boned......suckers."
While nothing is being admitted, it was widely believed that the first test of this new weapons platform would also be its first use in combat, especially against targets in reinforced bunkers, buildings, yurts, or anywhere within a 15-mile radius of the impact zone.
In other news, the Pentagon has announced the beginning of "Project Stealth Solar Super-flare".
*NITSCAP .doc file]
*DITSCAP
*Common Criteria
*FIPS 102 Not to mention all the other FIPS criteria, esp. regarding crypto and PKI.
*NIAP (Information Systems Certification Procedures and Assessment Scheme)
*A Plethora Of Schema and Policy
*Ye Olde Rainbow Series
*MIT GASSP [warning,
And these are just US criteria...other nations have their own. These are becomming very important, if typical job requirements on security-jobs list are any indication. Need a BS, a clearance, and 5 years practical experiance in everything from LAN wiring, vulerability finding and exploit production, penetration testing, firewalls and IDS, to the evaluation and application of these federal criteria, and everything in between. And that will get you an entry level position!
...it's the business students, and the political students (and to a lesser extent, the art students), that will determine the future of Microsoft.
CS people here (myself included) learn Java and Ada95 as first and second languages, primarily on Solaris and Mandrake Linux boxes, then go on to study (and write) bits of the linux kernel in OS class, build bits of compilers in Linux for compiler class, etc. The business and management weenies (The Engineering Management and Systems Engineering get a bit more hard-core program, but they're still kind of weenies) learn Office 2000, Visual Basic [so they can be more in tune with the requirements of software development, or something], etc. On one hand, fine...let them play with VB and make pretty Flash webpages and laugh at the antics of the animated paperclip all they want. On the other hand...guess whos offices will be using Microsoft products because that's what they learned in college? We engineering types may see Windows as a piece of software that allows computers to play video games when they're not booted into the actual operating system (Non-windows...anything else will suffice, really) for real work, but for the business students, Windows is practically a way of life. Remember who's buying the software for the office....it's not the engineers, and with the way the job market is, you'll work where you can, whether or not the company boxes are running a game system [Windows, remember?]. As long as universites teach their squishy arts people Microsoft, the Beast of Redmond will be quite healthy.
Here...go nuts:
Ramen Recipe Database
Alright...there was at least ONE ramen recipe in there...but that guy has two hundred and five! If only ramen noodles weren't so scarce and expensive. Wait...nevermind. Notably absent now that I'm checking is "Prison Ramen", which IIRC was cooked in a bag of Cheet-O's for lack of an actual pot. In fact, I seem to remember there being more than 205 recipes last I was there (maybe got rid of more or less duplicate recipes), but that should hold you for awhile.
Actually, the fridge would keep the beer from *freezing*, assuming it were insulated well enough from the external cold.
When I read the title, I had visions of actual homebrew *supercomputers*...something along the lines of Euclid from Pi. Break out the soldering irons and damn the torpedoes! Yes, Beowulf technology is great. Genetic algorithms and channel bonding and QNX are nice touches, but Beowulf clusters are fairly common, even for ordinary people...an article about NEW uses for the things would have been nice, other than that, just shut up and build one! Soon to be taking my own advice...even have an app in the works for it. Still a nice project with a half-decent writeup, but it's been done.
How about it, folks? Homebrew big iron? Where would one even begin? Food for thought, at least.
I can say this because I still have windows. If it weren't for a piece of my apartment building, I could see the State Department complex. It's still there, and dead silent...has been all day, save for the evacuation. Trust me, if anything went down at the State Department, I would have known in a hurry.
Trust me...there was no car bomb at the State Department. When I heard that on whatever local news station I was watching at the time, I took a look out my window, and the State Department, one block diagonally from me, is still there. If a bomb went off at the State Department, I'd be the first to know.
with table after table of ripoff, no-name parts (but all the tables have the SAME ripoff, no name parts), lack of air conditioning, and smelly people all-a-lookin' fer one of dem kom-pew-turs not the environment you're looking for? Big dissapointment, and more than a little shady. I don't want to be the show's organizer once the New Carrolton fire marshall decides he needs a "Only The Best" brand CD burner, a "Learn French Now" CD, and some $30 RAM that fails after a few weeks.
I dropped by a hamfest somewhere in Maryland the weekend before last on the way up to CT, and it looked like there would have been alot there if it weren't for the rain. The mostly outdoor participants had more or less packed up and left by the time I got there, but the inside show wasn't all bad: a few MarketPro refugee sellers, and this one guy way in the back with alot of cool stuff. Not many people with actual radio gear for a ham fest, but worthwhile none the less. I'd say keep an eye out on the AARL web site or magazine.
Trying to sell refridgerators to Eskimos?
The plan was this:
One board in each of the two smaller top shelves
Power supplies (if they won't fit in the top), disk array, hub, KVM switch in the larger bottom drawer.
Adequate cooling, etc
I don't have all the details worked out, but it seems like a good solution for a deskside setup (or hide it in a closet). It's plastic (light), on wheels, modular (I'm sure more drawers can be bought through the catalog or from the supplier), and the price is right. Thing even looks pretty cool, as far as file cabinets go.
Might be something to think about, might not work at all for you, but that's my plan.
It's not the pluses and minuses you have to worry about....it's the ones and zeroes. Those little buggers will get you every time.
....the "Hacker Hailstorm" in "Canadian Bacon", which happened to be on Comedy Central on Monday, after "PCU". Basically, the Hailstorm is this device made by some evil corperation called "Hacker", and gives remote control over the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. For convenience, it was installed in the Canadian National Tower (obviously). To make a long story short, I think that Microsoft's control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal is anti-competitive, and limits the opportunities of rabid grad students, the Michigan Militia, the MPAA (Obviously), and various other start up, dot-com style paramilitary organizations, to say nothing about the U.S. Government itself, to activly and viably participate in the multi-fold destruction of the human race.
...the software is written and the site is run by some high school kid, as far as I can tell from reading the news items.