I thought this too, until I tried to read a novel on my ipod Touch. Admittedly, I used Kindle software rather than GoodReader, so maybe it makes a difference. But I found that having the pages come in such small chunks made reading very tedious.
Still, I like having ebooks available on my Touch and my Blackberry. Since I always have at least one of them with me, any time I have to wait around somewhere, I have reading material at the ready.
The problem is, during daylight savings time, it actually gets light later in the morning. While this isn't a big problem during the spring and summer (since sunrise is fairly early) during the winter months, it would stay dark quite late in the morning. That's what happened during the experiment in the 1970's, and as I recall, it resulted in a number of children getting hit by cars as they tried to get to school in the dark. I recall a bit of outcry about that.
But the strongest opposition to daylight savings time has traditionally come from farmers; evidently, it really mucks with their/their animals' schedules.
Recently I was waiting at an airport gate in Philadelphia and noticed signs for AT&T wireless access. Eagerly launching my browser, I discovered that access would cost me $10 for a 24/hour period. While this initially seems like a good deal, I only had an hour or so to kill at the gate, not twenty-four, and so it occurred to me that I'd be paying $10 for about an hour of access. Checking their web page for AT&T's other airport locations, I determined that I wouldn't be able to use the access in my next connecting city (where again, I only had about an hour and a half connection anyway). So I thought about how much work I could do in an hour - essentially catching up on some e-mail - and decided it wouldn't be worth the $10.
On the other hand, I've noticed that in European airports, public internet terminals are the norm - but you rarely see those in American airports. The European terminals bill in small time increments; one can typically get online for 20 minutes or so for about 3 euro. They seem to get a lot of use.
Obviously, there are disadvantages to public terminals: the possibility of keyboard sniffers; clunky, no-moving-parts keyboards; the possibility of an unfamiliar language mapping, etc. But - the business model seems to make a reasonably shrewd assumption: that people in airports have small blocks of time available, and that they'll pay a few euro to make use of that time catching up on e-mail. Perhaps carriers offering WI-FI in airports should consider this - while there may be a few people with lousy enough flight connections to make good use of a 24 hour block of access in an airport, they might get a lot more users by also offering, for example, one hour for $3.
i saw it at siggraph last week
on
Walk-thru Fog Screen
·
· Score: 5, Informative
i saw it at siggraph last week in san diego. the wall of fog was not really very thick - though it did seem to be more transparent than and not as bright as it appears in the videos and stills on the site. it was still pretty cool and people seemed duly impressed, but i didn't think it was quite as convincing as a picture plane as it looks on the website.
as for noise - i don't recall it being noisy... it may not have made any noise at all. then again, the siggraph emerging technologies space is pretty noisy itself, so it may have made some sound that i didn't notice.
Another approach to computer art, which recognizes its roots in computer culture as well as in "art" - is software art. Lots of cool stuff over at runme.org... and read_me, an entire festival devoted to software art, is coming up in a couple weeks in Helsinki..
that was one example of a network whose structure could handle host disconnects. also freenet, which has redundancy built into its design. and gnutella, as you point out.
all of these essentially use P2P as their structure, but fidonet and freenet remind us that P2P-the-structure has a far wider range of uses than just downloading mp3's. right now the internet dominates "cause it's there" but even its structure was historically envisioned (by some, anyway) as much more decentralized than it is now. as it moves toward centralization it becomes increasingly unsatisfactory for many purposes, and momentum grows to build and use alternative, decentralized structures.
The article (I assume you are referring to the NYT one) didn't say that *Verio* cited that as a reason for shutting down Thing's network; the article's writer seems to have brought that up on his own. It seems clear that Verio's current actions have been provoked by the recent Dow parody, not an unrelated incident from 1999.
Also, remember there are 2 shutdowns under discussion here: the impending termination of Thing's contract and the initial 16-hour shutdown of the *whole* Thing net after initial complaints about the Dow parody. The 16-hour shutdown doesn't seem to have to do with anything other than the Dow parody... and that was what wolfgangsta was referring to when he said,
What did you say? "Parody is one thing. Actual disruption is something else?" Now, who is disrupting who here? Why is Verio cutting off service to 300 paying customers for 16 hours? What about their rights?
The difference between a denial of service attack against a company that some people find to be politically unacceptable and a company's cutting off a customer that they claim is in material breach of their AUP should be blindingly obvious. You can't really put the two situations on the same level.
What denial of service attack? This is about a parody site criticizing a corporation, not about a denial of service attack. Dow's website was still up - it was parodied, not DOS'ed - but Verio responded by shutting down the Yes Men's parody site - *and* the sites of approximately 299 unrelated Thing clients. (Thing didn't do the parody, the Yes Men did.)
Thanks for the info. Now i've gotten to a Windows machine and downloaded Camera/Shy. Their FAQ seems to include a response to your criticism:
"What can I do to help?"
Plant stegged images on popular Communist approved sites. Plant stegged images
everywhere.
Fake stegged images - they are really stegged, but no content - is the key to blocking
their system. This effectively throws an atlas sized wrench into their machine. They
can't ban the sites hosting the gifs, and they can't track the people down.
"Steganalysis can be performed on gifs and they could be detected."
Because the data is hidden in the most common image format on the Web, they
would have to perform steganalysis on every gif coming through their wire. This is
entirely impractical.
Now, let's presume they do start to implement this on the IDS level. What then? Oh
no! Then, we can merely put in another steganographical algorithm . It is opensource,
and would be trivial to change the steg engine.
This is round one, not ten.
Does this seem to make sense? Of course, "lets get everyone to fill the system with noise" is a difficult premise to rely on...
Could you elaborate on that a little more? I'm not well-versed in steganography, but reading through the description on the Hacktivismo site it sounds interesting, at least. And I'm glad to see it was designed with the non-technical user in mind, since a problem with most encryption schemes is that they're only appropriate for technical users - which creates a privileged Geek Elite who have access to encrypting their communications. However, if as you suggest, it creates more problems than it solves, that would be useful to discuss.
Even without a knowledge of steganography I get a little suspicious reading about Camera/Shy because I don't see how people are supposed to prevent unintended eyes from using the same Camera/Shy browser - does it use a key system? And if so how does that relate to the automatic scanning of images from the Internet? (Do users have to know the publisher and know where encrypted info is being published?) Can't quite follow whether this is for broadcast or narrowcast, and I don't have Windows right now so I can't run it.
In these MPAA/RIAA IP control discussions, it's invariably pointed out that the movie and recording industries have, throughout their histories, fought every new technology that's come along - and each of these technologies has turned out to make even more money for them than before.
How can it be, then, that everyone knows this except the industries themselves?
Obviously, they must know they'll make money from everything from region-code DVD hacking (sells more DVD's) to song swapping (creates more popularity for the music and thus sells more CD's.)
So what is going on here? Why doth they protesteth so?
The answer is, they use Forbidden Fruit as a marketing device. Young people especially - the big prize money as marketing demographics go - love to break rules and challenge authority. So the Industries use some reverse psychology and vehemently protest these technologies and practices. This encourages people to partake of them out of rebellion, which in turn generates more revenue for the Industries. And if they're lucky, the Industries pick up some Tax(ation without representation) money to boot.
In this case, serial port, not parallel.
Used in addition to the mouse (as opposed to a mouse replacement), by reverse engineering the bytes in the serial data stream and using the Director Serial Xtra.
If you want to play around a lot with the OS, then you might want something other than RedHat that forces you to do so.
However, if you're focused on being able to get your apps running, and don't want to spend your time playing with the OS, then you might want to stick with RedHat.
I played around with a few distros when I started out with Linux. But as I was already working plenty of hours at my job as a Unix sysadmin, I really didn't want to play around with the OS much on my home system. Also, I needed a system that I'd be able to try and use a variety of apps on without spending a lot of time on installation. While RPM sure has its flaws, it does work most of the time, and it's nice to be able to try an app by installing an RPM, rather than spending the time compiling it only to find out it wasn't going to do the job for me. (Which happens plenty anyway since there's still plenty that *does* need to be compiled from source.) Many more apps have RPM's available than have.debs, or maybe that's just the esoteric ones I use. Also, as mentioned elsewhere in a slightly different context: the support is great for RedHat just because of its popularity. If I have problems getting a piece of software to work under RedHat and need to ask the author or on a listserv, it's a pretty sure bet that they've dealt with it under RedHat - other
distros maybe not.
As to the argument that you don't really learn the workings if the OS is too "do it yourself:"
again, I came at it as a UNIX admin, so not a perfect analogy, but, I just ignore the GUI tools most of the time and I use the shell as I always did in other unices. True, a newbie might be tempted to stick with the GUI, but I think the situation is not so bad - I used the GUI a bit at first when learning my first UNIX (IRIX) and pretty smoothly weaned away from it. I think this will happen to any moderately motivated user as long as the GUIs continue to be not-so-hot in the UNIX and Linux distros - you quickly realize that there must be a better way, and that better way is the command line. But having gotten your feet wet in the GUI, you at least have some idea of what is going on and aren't as daunted as you might be diving right in on the command line.
(I think this doesn't happen much when people use Windows because the command line shell is pretty bad in Windows as compared to the GUI - in unices it's generally the other way around.)
As far as Mandrake vs. RedHat: I've used Mandrake 6(.0?) and 7.0, and run into problems with both, in terms of parts of it not working out of the box. In 7.0, there were configurations that had to be done to get postfix to work, and they didn't seem to be documented anywhere in the Mandrake release notes - I finally found the info on a newsgroup, but it was kind of disturbing not having working mail til then. Also, wu-ftpd didn't work, so I replaced it with pro-ftpd (sure, I woulda had to at least upgrade it eventually anyway, but... )... in Mandrake 6, lynx didn't work, and something else didn't work which I forget now... so I was always a little nervous about Mandrake - seems if it's recommended as a newbie distro, it would be good if the major software apps worked when installed. CAVEAT: Haven't tried Mandrake 8 yet - hopefully that one's pretty smooth. Also, I have run into some apps that wouldn't compile or wouldn't run under Mandrake that I couldn't figure out why, so again, if knowing your apps will work is critical, I'd still stick with RedHat. It's not perfect, especially RPM, but then again, the shells are still there, you can still compile from source when you need to, and you can be pretty sure you'll get whatever you need working on it. Maybe in the future they'll switch over to apt-get.:-)
If our Russian friend had cracked the protection, demonstrated it to Adobe, and then allowed Adobe to correct it then it might be different. But no, our Russian friend's company sold the software and started making some cash off of it.
But Consumer Reports sells their magazines. And they report their findings publicly; they don't just mail the car manufacturer and hope the problem gets fixed. The public have a right to know when a product being marketed to them is defective.
Even if Skylarov's company weren't selling the software for a profit, they and/or Skylarov could still face civil charges - i.e. be sued - under DMCA, simply for demonstrating the Adobe encryption was faulty.
It seems clear that the law is denying free speech in the form of computer code the protections it provides other forms of speech - presumably because the law hasn't yet acknowledged that computer code is speech. That needs to change, but it's in the corporate lobbies' interest to keep judges and legislators convinced that computer code isn't speech, it's the devil's playground.
HP just released a Linux printer driver for the 932C?
Where can I find it? Doesn't show up on HP's website with the other drivers.
I also like the 932C - have been using it with
some lower res HP printer driver under RedHat 7.0. And apparently I'm a trendsetter in this thread, since I don't work for HP. <g>
I think it's actually a lighting change. The man in the background is always there, but if you look at the blue channel, you'll see a diagonal slash of light that obscures most of his body. It looks like a door or hatch may have been open in that exposure, allowing the sun to shine in, and closed in the red and green exposures. As someone else pointed out, a more definitive change between exposures can be seen in the man on the far right, who has his left hand up as though scratching his face in the red exposure, but it's down in the other two.
I wonder what the timing was between the exposures? Seems interesting that in some cases substantial movement occurs between exposures, but in the same shot most people look very sharp, as though they didn't so much as twitch between the exposures.
First of all, satire or parody is not always protected. This is one of those ideas -- like "possession is nine-tenths of the law" -- that every lay person thinks is a universal rule, but that anyone who bothers to do the research can identify as a more nuanced proposition than usually stated. That Larry Flynt movie has had an inordinate and unfortunate impact on the American public, I'm afraid.
Every time there's a Slashdot story discussing a legal issue, one or more lawyers post and make the point that laypeople misunderstand the law, or often, that laypeople shouldn't be discussing legal issues in a public forum because they'll inevitably get everything wrong. And it's good that lawyers point this out, because the sad truth is that we *do* seem to get most things wrong.
There's the real problem - laypeople are expected to obey the law in a society whose laws we can't hope to understand. Shall we all hire lawyers to accompany us through life to make sure we don't accidentally break the law? I'm not trolling - it's really a serious problem, especially for people on Slashdot, who tend to be involved in Internet endeavors where the chance for accidentally committing IP infringement - and getting "caught" - is high. As you might suspect from my name, "plagiarist," I too have had these problems.
The effect of this is that people with lots of access to lawyers (i.e. corporations) have a very effective hegemony in regards to preventing the rest of us from speaking negatively against them. In other words, many people dare not speak out by parodying a corporation or otherwise speaking critically of them, for fear that a) "Big Brother is Watching," b) "I am Not a Lawyer, so I don't know what's protected and what isn't" and c) "therefore I'd better speak softly - and drop the big stick."
That's what I see as the real problem. Then again, IANAL.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought this too, until I tried to read a novel on my ipod Touch. Admittedly, I used Kindle software rather than GoodReader, so maybe it makes a difference. But I found that having the pages come in such small chunks made reading very tedious.
Still, I like having ebooks available on my Touch and my Blackberry. Since I always have at least one of them with me, any time I have to wait around somewhere, I have reading material at the ready.
But the strongest opposition to daylight savings time has traditionally come from farmers; evidently, it really mucks with their/their animals' schedules.
Some more of this history is discussed here.
Actually, there's some prior art in this very area. elgooG is a "Google Mirror" that claims it's been used in China for a similar purpose. This was discussed here a couple years ago.
Recently I was waiting at an airport gate in Philadelphia and noticed signs for AT&T wireless access. Eagerly launching my browser, I discovered that access would cost me $10 for a 24/hour period. While this initially seems like a good deal, I only had an hour or so to kill at the gate, not twenty-four, and so it occurred to me that I'd be paying $10 for about an hour of access. Checking their web page for AT&T's other airport locations, I determined that I wouldn't be able to use the access in my next connecting city (where again, I only had about an hour and a half connection anyway). So I thought about how much work I could do in an hour - essentially catching up on some e-mail - and decided it wouldn't be worth the $10.
On the other hand, I've noticed that in European airports, public internet terminals are the norm - but you rarely see those in American airports. The European terminals bill in small time increments; one can typically get online for 20 minutes or so for about 3 euro. They seem to get a lot of use.
Obviously, there are disadvantages to public terminals: the possibility of keyboard sniffers; clunky, no-moving-parts keyboards; the possibility of an unfamiliar language mapping, etc. But - the business model seems to make a reasonably shrewd assumption: that people in airports have small blocks of time available, and that they'll pay a few euro to make use of that time catching up on e-mail. Perhaps carriers offering WI-FI in airports should consider this - while there may be a few people with lousy enough flight connections to make good use of a 24 hour block of access in an airport, they might get a lot more users by also offering, for example, one hour for $3.
i saw it at siggraph last week in san diego. the wall of fog was not really very thick - though it did seem to be more transparent than and not as bright as it appears in the videos and stills on the site. it was still pretty cool and people seemed duly impressed, but i didn't think it was quite as convincing as a picture plane as it looks on the website.
as for noise - i don't recall it being noisy... it may not have made any noise at all. then again, the siggraph emerging technologies space is pretty noisy itself, so it may have made some sound that i didn't notice.
Another approach to computer art, which recognizes its roots in computer culture as well as in "art" - is software art. Lots of cool stuff over at runme.org... and read_me, an entire festival devoted to software art, is coming up in a couple weeks in Helsinki..
The link in the parent post is a little out of date. This is the correct link, which has up-to-date concert listings and CD's.
that was one example of a network whose structure could handle host disconnects. also freenet, which has redundancy built into its design. and gnutella, as you point out.
all of these essentially use P2P as their structure, but fidonet and freenet remind us that P2P-the-structure has a far wider range of uses than just downloading mp3's. right now the internet dominates "cause it's there" but even its structure was historically envisioned (by some, anyway) as much more decentralized than it is now. as it moves toward centralization it becomes increasingly unsatisfactory for many purposes, and momentum grows to build and use alternative, decentralized structures.
Also, remember there are 2 shutdowns under discussion here: the impending termination of Thing's contract and the initial 16-hour shutdown of the *whole* Thing net after initial complaints about the Dow parody. The 16-hour shutdown doesn't seem to have to do with anything other than the Dow parody
What denial of service attack? This is about a parody site criticizing a corporation, not about a denial of service attack. Dow's website was still up - it was parodied, not DOS'ed - but Verio responded by shutting down the Yes Men's parody site - *and* the sites of approximately 299 unrelated Thing clients. (Thing didn't do the parody, the Yes Men did.)
Could you elaborate on that a little more? I'm not well-versed in steganography, but reading through the description on the Hacktivismo site it sounds interesting, at least. And I'm glad to see it was designed with the non-technical user in mind, since a problem with most encryption schemes is that they're only appropriate for technical users - which creates a privileged Geek Elite who have access to encrypting their communications. However, if as you suggest, it creates more problems than it solves, that would be useful to discuss.
Even without a knowledge of steganography I get a little suspicious reading about Camera/Shy because I don't see how people are supposed to prevent unintended eyes from using the same Camera/Shy browser - does it use a key system? And if so how does that relate to the automatic scanning of images from the Internet? (Do users have to know the publisher and know where encrypted info is being published?) Can't quite follow whether this is for broadcast or narrowcast, and I don't have Windows right now so I can't run it.
Er, does that imply that the actions of the FBI agents were an act of war against Russia?
How can it be, then, that everyone knows this except the industries themselves?
Obviously, they must know they'll make money from everything from region-code DVD hacking (sells more DVD's) to song swapping (creates more popularity for the music and thus sells more CD's.)
So what is going on here? Why doth they protesteth so?
The answer is, they use Forbidden Fruit as a marketing device. Young people especially - the big prize money as marketing demographics go - love to break rules and challenge authority. So the Industries use some reverse psychology and vehemently protest these technologies and practices. This encourages people to partake of them out of rebellion, which in turn generates more revenue for the Industries. And if they're lucky, the Industries pick up some Tax(ation without representation) money to boot.
Nice, eh?
yeah, and i want a cute-smart-slashdot-editor...
sheesh.. c'mon timothy...
OT? maybe, but we're commenting on the article, and this is my comment on the article.
This is great news! In just a few more years, UNIX will be old enough to be elected president!
i think vena has the NYC anthrax case confused with the florida anthrax cases.
b0timati0n.
--end shameless plug--
In this case, serial port, not parallel. Used in addition to the mouse (as opposed to a mouse replacement), by reverse engineering the bytes in the serial data stream and using the Director Serial Xtra.
However, if you're focused on being able to get your apps running, and don't want to spend your time playing with the OS, then you might want to stick with RedHat.
I played around with a few distros when I started out with Linux. But as I was already working plenty of hours at my job as a Unix sysadmin, I really didn't want to play around with the OS much on my home system. Also, I needed a system that I'd be able to try and use a variety of apps on without spending a lot of time on installation. While RPM sure has its flaws, it does work most of the time, and it's nice to be able to try an app by installing an RPM, rather than spending the time compiling it only to find out it wasn't going to do the job for me. (Which happens plenty anyway since there's still plenty that *does* need to be compiled from source.) Many more apps have RPM's available than have .debs, or maybe that's just the esoteric ones I use. Also, as mentioned elsewhere in a slightly different context: the support is great for RedHat just because of its popularity. If I have problems getting a piece of software to work under RedHat and need to ask the author or on a listserv, it's a pretty sure bet that they've dealt with it under RedHat - other
distros maybe not.
As to the argument that you don't really learn the workings if the OS is too "do it yourself:" again, I came at it as a UNIX admin, so not a perfect analogy, but, I just ignore the GUI tools most of the time and I use the shell as I always did in other unices. True, a newbie might be tempted to stick with the GUI, but I think the situation is not so bad - I used the GUI a bit at first when learning my first UNIX (IRIX) and pretty smoothly weaned away from it. I think this will happen to any moderately motivated user as long as the GUIs continue to be not-so-hot in the UNIX and Linux distros - you quickly realize that there must be a better way, and that better way is the command line. But having gotten your feet wet in the GUI, you at least have some idea of what is going on and aren't as daunted as you might be diving right in on the command line. (I think this doesn't happen much when people use Windows because the command line shell is pretty bad in Windows as compared to the GUI - in unices it's generally the other way around.)
As far as Mandrake vs. RedHat: I've used Mandrake 6(.0?) and 7.0, and run into problems with both, in terms of parts of it not working out of the box. In 7.0, there were configurations that had to be done to get postfix to work, and they didn't seem to be documented anywhere in the Mandrake release notes - I finally found the info on a newsgroup, but it was kind of disturbing not having working mail til then. Also, wu-ftpd didn't work, so I replaced it with pro-ftpd (sure, I woulda had to at least upgrade it eventually anyway, but... ) ... in Mandrake 6, lynx didn't work, and something else didn't work which I forget now... so I was always a little nervous about Mandrake - seems if it's recommended as a newbie distro, it would be good if the major software apps worked when installed. CAVEAT: Haven't tried Mandrake 8 yet - hopefully that one's pretty smooth. Also, I have run into some apps that wouldn't compile or wouldn't run under Mandrake that I couldn't figure out why, so again, if knowing your apps will work is critical, I'd still stick with RedHat. It's not perfect, especially RPM, but then again, the shells are still there, you can still compile from source when you need to, and you can be pretty sure you'll get whatever you need working on it. Maybe in the future they'll switch over to apt-get. :-)
Sircam: Hi! How are you?
Eliza: Does that question interest you?
Sircam: I send you this file in order to have your advice
Eliza: Why are you concerned over my advice?
Sircam: See you later. Thanks
Eliza: Oh, I later?
PINE: [ Part 2, Application/MIXED 233KB. ]
[ Unable to print this part. ]
Eliza: Does talking about this bother you?
PINE: [ Part 3: "Attached Text" ]
Eliza: Tell me more about that.
History repeats...
-plagiarist
But Consumer Reports sells their magazines. And they report their findings publicly; they don't just mail the car manufacturer and hope the problem gets fixed. The public have a right to know when a product being marketed to them is defective.
Even if Skylarov's company weren't selling the software for a profit, they and/or Skylarov could still face civil charges - i.e. be sued - under DMCA, simply for demonstrating the Adobe encryption was faulty.
It seems clear that the law is denying free speech in the form of computer code the protections it provides other forms of speech - presumably because the law hasn't yet acknowledged that computer code is speech. That needs to change, but it's in the corporate lobbies' interest to keep judges and legislators convinced that computer code isn't speech, it's the devil's playground.
I also like the 932C - have been using it with some lower res HP printer driver under RedHat 7.0. And apparently I'm a trendsetter in this thread, since I don't work for HP. <g>
I wonder what the timing was between the exposures? Seems interesting that in some cases substantial movement occurs between exposures, but in the same shot most people look very sharp, as though they didn't so much as twitch between the exposures.
Every time there's a Slashdot story discussing a legal issue, one or more lawyers post and make the point that laypeople misunderstand the law, or often, that laypeople shouldn't be discussing legal issues in a public forum because they'll inevitably get everything wrong. And it's good that lawyers point this out, because the sad truth is that we *do* seem to get most things wrong.
There's the real problem - laypeople are expected to obey the law in a society whose laws we can't hope to understand. Shall we all hire lawyers to accompany us through life to make sure we don't accidentally break the law? I'm not trolling - it's really a serious problem, especially for people on Slashdot, who tend to be involved in Internet endeavors where the chance for accidentally committing IP infringement - and getting "caught" - is high. As you might suspect from my name, "plagiarist," I too have had these problems.
The effect of this is that people with lots of access to lawyers (i.e. corporations) have a very effective hegemony in regards to preventing the rest of us from speaking negatively against them. In other words, many people dare not speak out by parodying a corporation or otherwise speaking critically of them, for fear that a) "Big Brother is Watching," b) "I am Not a Lawyer, so I don't know what's protected and what isn't" and c) "therefore I'd better speak softly - and drop the big stick."
That's what I see as the real problem. Then again, IANAL.