If you designed a system that you personally can break into, then you didn't put enough thought into the security design.
I personally think it's my responsibility to AT LEAST make sure that I couldn't break into the systems that I build without having knowledge of the passwords or whatever. If I think of a way that I could get in without it, I fix it or contact the person currently responsible for the code and let them know about it and how I think it should be fixed.
But if you want to, say, build space station parts, the moon is a great place to do it. It's cheaper to launch stuff from the moon and get them into low earth orbit (or any other earth orbit) than it is to launch them from the earth and take them to the same orbit. Cheaper "tons of fuel to do it" -wise, anyway. If you want to continue out and explore the rest of the solar system, a lunar base is a great start. If you get established there, you can start building stuff there. Probably not precision components (at first) but you can make your own solar panels, and so you've got all the power you want, and you can build from there.
ZDNet must just have a quota of scare articles to pub every week. Screwed up BGP configs used to raise havoc once in a while. I don't know if they still do but it used to happen several times a year. This has been known since the inception of BGP, the guard against it has always been "well, keep control of your routers, and know what you're doing before you touch the config."
A friend did some fairly extensive tests using nice headphones (Sennheiser). His results were that for the same amount of space that a 320 kbps MP3 takes, he could make an OGG file that he couldn't tell from the original CD in blind listening tests. A 320 kbps MP3 is EASILY differentiated from the original. At lower levels (192/256) MP3s are good for cars or jogging/exercising where noise levels are high anyway.
I'm happy the Neuros is getting this feature; I've been excited about the player, and this is one more reason to be happy about it!
The thing is, standard 'property' and 'ownership' thinking breaks down completely with things that can be copied indefinitely, since it is based on preventing the owner from losing 'it', and not on preventing others from getting 'it'. Copyright is a contrived right designed to make producing copyable items into a workable business model, so that more will be produced and eventually be available to the public.
How about the artist's ability to make money for the product of his labor? It's intangible but it's still a valuable commodity, one which is salable. If his products are freely available, there's no incentive to give him money. In that sense, something has been taken from him. It's not the art itself but the ability to charge for the art.
I think we need to get beyond the rationalization "If I can't pick it up and put it in a box, it's not real so I can't have "stolen" it." You have taken something of value; something that someone made SO THAT THEY COULD CHARGE MONEY FOR IT. In many/most cases, without the incentive to make money, the art wouldn't have been created. You've stolen the artist's ability to make money on their art.
The "I'm just stealing from the recording company/RIAA!" is a copout too. The artist made the choice to use that marketing vehicle. Just because you think they made a poor choice doesn't mean you get to steal the stuff.
The IRS is moving to XML for electronic filing, though the business products (990, 1120, 1041, etc) are moving first. There's such a huge infrastructure already in place, and so much software written for 1040 using the old filing system that it's going to take a few years. I expect most stuff to be moved to XML by 2008 or 2010.
Waah, waah, waah. They're telling you how they're solving THEIR problems. Essentially this reply says "We did this knowingly, it solves no problem for you but only for us. We're going to keep screwing you but we hope that eventually you'll learn to like it."
If companies do not have the money to pay workers to do the jobs that need to be done, then the workers should walk. If the situation does not improve or the company come up with the money to pay better, then the company goes out of business. This is how it's supposed to work and there's NOTHING WRONG with this.
However, from the rest of your comment I think you don't mean that they don't have the money, but that they choose not to pay it to workers.
What do you mean, "no worker say"? I can quit whenever I want. If the company doesn't care about the money they have invested in me for training, etc, and feels that I'm replacable, then I am replacable and I didn't deserve more money.
As an employee, I'm worth exactly what it would cost to hire someone else to do the same thing that I do. If there are people out there that can do my job for less than I'm making, then I'm overpaid. Unions are a way of subverting the natural economics of employment.
When *companies* band together to demand that people pay more for their products, it's called a "cartel" and it's illegal (in the U.S.). But for some reason, when individuals do it, it's a great thing???
It's already gone. Install Mandrake or SuSE, you won't see the command line unless you click the shell icon.
Personally I don't even install a GUI on my Linux boxes, so I'm not one to talk about making things more friendly.
Re:Oldest working code...
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There are millions of lines of code running in financial institutions from possibly as early as the late 50's for which the source is lost. That's why there are emulators. I've heard that some places have emulators running emulators running emulators running their original compiled code.
Much of it may be replaced by now but when i was taking my CS classes back in the 80's I was told this was true.
Re:Who Is the Greatest Programmer?
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Walla, the program now works!... Computers are not "smart" like humans, thus they require very specific instructions in order to do anything.
Yes, humans are able to know what you mean even when you type totally the wrong word, like "Walla".
If you made the mistake of buying into a Sony proprietary format, you're not going to get anything that Sony doesn't build for you.
I stayed away from digital camcorders until MiniDV got cheap. I just picked up a Canon ZR40 for $409.
Yes, I have a lot of old Hi8 tapes. I'm just going to encode them to DVD and live with not being able to play the originals again. Better than buying into a proprietary format.
You mean, the first DivX player other than the Archos MP3 player. The new version has a color LCD screen and video out, and can play DivX to a TV. The Archos is in major retailers now; a guy at work has one though I haven't played with it yet.
This is totally obvious. Anyone who knows how a master key system works can do this and probably already has. I did it myself in college; it took a copy of my dorm key and a chainsaw sharpening file, both picked up from the hardware store for about $2, and about 90 minutes of fooling around, and I had a master key to the dorm.
The dorm management did discover it eventually. I didn't use it for anything but a little urban exploration, but I think I let a few too many people back into their rooms after their roommates locked them out and the RA wasn't around, and it became common knowledge that I had the key.
They asked how I found out how to make master keys, but didn't seem to be too convinced when I just said "Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Just think for a minute and anyone could figure it out." Probably the wrong thing to say to someone who was probably a humanities major.
My knowledge came exclusively from the Junior Worldbook Encyclopedia entry on how locks work, plus about 2 minutes of thinking about it.
Yeah, but it's a piece of crap. A friend has one of these, and it will lose signal in places where other GPSs, including my eTrex, will still be working fine. Also it's not waterproof, even if it says it is. Also it will run on batteries, but it uses AAA's and the battery life is HORRIBLY short. You can buy an eTrex for $99 and have a pretty nice standalone, and get the serial cable if you want to use it in conjunction with a computer/pda as well. With the data cable it does push the price up a bit but personally I just need standalone GPS most of the time, so I get to carry something that's smaller than my PDA, instead of having to carry my PDA *and* another piece *and* the wiring between the two when walking in the woods, etc.
I'm betting this will keep most folks from getting much useful from my hd's. Of course, I've never given away a hard drive that I hadn't already put into another machine and reinstalled a new OS on anyway....
...because 2 weeks ago, I finally gave up and made my purchased Kiki VHS into a DVD. Heavy tweaked filtering, it looks pretty good, 40 hour encode... Yeah, after that I'd expect the whole effort to be made moot.
I have an Epson inkjet printer, which has chipped cartridges. I have a little white box which I press up against the chip, and it changes it back to "full". I wonder if this would also be considered "circumventing a media protection technology"?
I used to think it was lying to say a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, but then I realized that Giga was 10^9 long before digital computers existed. The computer industry (incorrectly) used the prefix Giga to mean 2^30. Giga properly and historically does mean 10^9 though. When Doc Smith was gaping about 1.21 Gigawatts, he wasn't talking 1.21 * 2^30, he meant 1,210,000,000 watts.
This all depends on how far back you go. If you compare to the MFM ST506 drives of the late 80's, today's drives are really very reliable. If you compare to the Seagate 1/2 height MFM's of that era, they're god-like reliable; some models of those damn things had a half life of about 60 days. We had a case of 20MB drives from Seagate (case = 20 drives); yes, half of them were dead within 60 days, some within 2 or 3 days.
Even the more reliable ones, such as Micropolis or Miniscribe, weren't as good as today's Maxtor drives, certainly not as good as today's Seagates. (Seagate has, happily, turned around and started making generally good drives).
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If you designed a system that you personally can break into, then you didn't put enough thought into the security design.
I personally think it's my responsibility to AT LEAST make sure that I couldn't break into the systems that I build without having knowledge of the passwords or whatever. If I think of a way that I could get in without it, I fix it or contact the person currently responsible for the code and let them know about it and how I think it should be fixed.
But if you want to, say, build space station parts, the moon is a great place to do it. It's cheaper to launch stuff from the moon and get them into low earth orbit (or any other earth orbit) than it is to launch them from the earth and take them to the same orbit. Cheaper "tons of fuel to do it" -wise, anyway.
If you want to continue out and explore the rest of the solar system, a lunar base is a great start. If you get established there, you can start building stuff there. Probably not precision components (at first) but you can make your own solar panels, and so you've got all the power you want, and you can build from there.
ZDNet must just have a quota of scare articles to pub every week.
Screwed up BGP configs used to raise havoc once in a while. I don't know if they still do but it used to happen several times a year. This has been known since the inception of BGP, the guard against it has always been "well, keep control of your routers, and know what you're doing before you touch the config."
A friend did some fairly extensive tests using nice headphones (Sennheiser). His results were that for the same amount of space that a 320 kbps MP3 takes, he could make an OGG file that he couldn't tell from the original CD in blind listening tests. A 320 kbps MP3 is EASILY differentiated from the original. At lower levels (192/256) MP3s are good for cars or jogging/exercising where noise levels are high anyway.
I'm happy the Neuros is getting this feature; I've been excited about the player, and this is one more reason to be happy about it!
The thing is, standard 'property' and 'ownership' thinking breaks down completely with things that can be copied indefinitely, since it is based on preventing the owner from losing 'it', and not on preventing others from getting 'it'. Copyright is a contrived right designed to make producing copyable items into a workable business model, so that more will be produced and eventually be available to the public.
How about the artist's ability to make money for the product of his labor? It's intangible but it's still a valuable commodity, one which is salable. If his products are freely available, there's no incentive to give him money. In that sense, something has been taken from him. It's not the art itself but the ability to charge for the art.
I think we need to get beyond the rationalization "If I can't pick it up and put it in a box, it's not real so I can't have "stolen" it." You have taken something of value; something that someone made SO THAT THEY COULD CHARGE MONEY FOR IT. In many/most cases, without the incentive to make money, the art wouldn't have been created. You've stolen the artist's ability to make money on their art.
The "I'm just stealing from the recording company/RIAA!" is a copout too. The artist made the choice to use that marketing vehicle. Just because you think they made a poor choice doesn't mean you get to steal the stuff.
The IRS is moving to XML for electronic filing, though the business products (990, 1120, 1041, etc) are moving first. There's such a huge infrastructure already in place, and so much software written for 1040 using the old filing system that it's going to take a few years. I expect most stuff to be moved to XML by 2008 or 2010.
Waah, waah, waah. They're telling you how they're solving THEIR problems. Essentially this reply says "We did this knowingly, it solves no problem for you but only for us. We're going to keep screwing you but we hope that eventually you'll learn to like it."
If companies do not have the money to pay workers to do the jobs that need to be done, then the workers should walk. If the situation does not improve or the company come up with the money to pay better, then the company goes out of business. This is how it's supposed to work and there's NOTHING WRONG with this.
However, from the rest of your comment I think you don't mean that they don't have the money, but that they choose not to pay it to workers.
What do you mean, "no worker say"? I can quit whenever I want. If the company doesn't care about the money they have invested in me for training, etc, and feels that I'm replacable, then I am replacable and I didn't deserve more money.
As an employee, I'm worth exactly what it would cost to hire someone else to do the same thing that I do. If there are people out there that can do my job for less than I'm making, then I'm overpaid. Unions are a way of subverting the natural economics of employment.
When *companies* band together to demand that people pay more for their products, it's called a "cartel" and it's illegal (in the U.S.). But for some reason, when individuals do it, it's a great thing???
I liked the last series, and I thought it was better than the Lynch movie, FWIW. I'll have to go back and watch it again now.
It's already gone. Install Mandrake or SuSE, you won't see the command line unless you click the shell icon.
Personally I don't even install a GUI on my Linux boxes, so I'm not one to talk about making things more friendly.
There are millions of lines of code running in financial institutions from possibly as early as the late 50's for which the source is lost. That's why there are emulators. I've heard that some places have emulators running emulators running emulators running their original compiled code.
Much of it may be replaced by now but when i was taking my CS classes back in the 80's I was told this was true.
Walla, the program now works! ...
Computers are not "smart" like humans, thus they require very specific instructions in order to do anything.
Yes, humans are able to know what you mean even when you type totally the wrong word, like "Walla".
Unless you use an 80 minute Panasonic MiniDV tape in LP mode, which gives you 120 minutes.
If you made the mistake of buying into a Sony proprietary format, you're not going to get anything that Sony doesn't build for you.
I stayed away from digital camcorders until MiniDV got cheap. I just picked up a Canon ZR40 for $409.
Yes, I have a lot of old Hi8 tapes. I'm just going to encode them to DVD and live with not being able to play the originals again. Better than buying into a proprietary format.
You mean, the first DivX player other than the Archos MP3 player. The new version has a color LCD screen and video out, and can play DivX to a TV. The Archos is in major retailers now; a guy at work has one though I haven't played with it yet.
This is totally obvious. Anyone who knows how a master key system works can do this and probably already has. I did it myself in college; it took a copy of my dorm key and a chainsaw sharpening file, both picked up from the hardware store for about $2, and about 90 minutes of fooling around, and I had a master key to the dorm.
The dorm management did discover it eventually. I didn't use it for anything but a little urban exploration, but I think I let a few too many people back into their rooms after their roommates locked them out and the RA wasn't around, and it became common knowledge that I had the key.
They asked how I found out how to make master keys, but didn't seem to be too convinced when I just said "Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Just think for a minute and anyone could figure it out." Probably the wrong thing to say to someone who was probably a humanities major.
My knowledge came exclusively from the Junior Worldbook Encyclopedia entry on how locks work, plus about 2 minutes of thinking about it.
Yeah, but it's a piece of crap. A friend has one of these, and it will lose signal in places where other GPSs, including my eTrex, will still be working fine. Also it's not waterproof, even if it says it is.
Also it will run on batteries, but it uses AAA's and the battery life is HORRIBLY short.
You can buy an eTrex for $99 and have a pretty nice standalone, and get the serial cable if you want to use it in conjunction with a computer/pda as well. With the data cable it does push the price up a bit but personally I just need standalone GPS most of the time, so I get to carry something that's smaller than my PDA, instead of having to carry my PDA *and* another piece *and* the wiring between the two when walking in the woods, etc.
I'm betting this will keep most folks from getting much useful from my hd's. Of course, I've never given away a hard drive that I hadn't already put into another machine and reinstalled a new OS on anyway....
...because 2 weeks ago, I finally gave up and made my purchased Kiki VHS into a DVD. Heavy tweaked filtering, it looks pretty good, 40 hour encode... Yeah, after that I'd expect the whole effort to be made moot.
That's the kind of stuff you'd get out of Newton's handwriting recognition system; a bunch of words but no sense.
Scott Adams did a take on this:
Ratbert: "You can write on my belly with this stylus, and using state-of-the-rat technology, I'll convert your scribblings to English!"
Ratbert, eyes closed, lying on back, with Dilbert writing on his belly: "Weave me a cone, you cupid bat!"
I have an Epson inkjet printer, which has chipped cartridges. I have a little white box which I press up against the chip, and it changes it back to "full".
I wonder if this would also be considered "circumventing a media protection technology"?
Yeah, I think I was thinking of Lost in Space, which is about where I am today.
The pain, the pain!
I used to think it was lying to say a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, but then I realized that Giga was 10^9 long before digital computers existed. The computer industry (incorrectly) used the prefix Giga to mean 2^30. Giga properly and historically does mean 10^9 though. When Doc Smith was gaping about 1.21 Gigawatts, he wasn't talking 1.21 * 2^30, he meant 1,210,000,000 watts.
This all depends on how far back you go. If you compare to the MFM ST506 drives of the late 80's, today's drives are really very reliable. If you compare to the Seagate 1/2 height MFM's of that era, they're god-like reliable; some models of those damn things had a half life of about 60 days. We had a case of 20MB drives from Seagate (case = 20 drives); yes, half of them were dead within 60 days, some within 2 or 3 days.
Even the more reliable ones, such as Micropolis or Miniscribe, weren't as good as today's Maxtor drives, certainly not as good as today's Seagates. (Seagate has, happily, turned around and started making generally good drives).
Have you actually visited *any* placed elsewhere in the world? Never mind the roller coasters they have there?
Doesn't have to. It's been rated best coaster park in the world several times by international afficianado groups and magazines.