I still have a 32" CRT TV, and one of the main things that's keeping me from getting a flat screen of some kind is WTF am I going to do with this beast?
Get the flatscreen anyway but hold onto your CRT for any vintage console gaming you do. Modern LCD/Plasma TVs, even with a "game mode", add one frame of latency to all analog inputs; CRTs obviously do not.
But crackers are able to figure out unknown algorithms when they create key generators. Why would this be any different? In one case a unique key of some kind is created by a CPU attached to your USB port. In another it is created by a secret software program that only the developer or publisher has. Either way the cracker is left guessing what the algorithm is. Anyway, all of this ignores the possibility that the cracker could just remove the dongle checks entirely from the binary.
Your understanding of dongle-protected software is incorrect. The software has several sections of code that are encrypted, stored inside the dongle, or combinations of both. Each copy of the software you get must be paired with its hardware dongle or else it can't run. Not *won't* run, *can't*. Modern methods also ensure that not all pieces of the software are loaded into memory at the same time, making it very difficult (but not impossible) to dump segements of memory in an effort to reconstruct a single unencrypted binary that will work.
A decade ago there was still some software that used dongles as a simple hardware check; these dongles usually attached to the parallel port. Modern USB dongles are a lot more secure. They are also a lot more expensive, so the OP will have to weigh that against their profits.
I guess you don't use them for outbound email since FDC Servers has a terrible reputation for hosting spammers and having a completely non-responsive abuse department. There are more than a few members of anti-spam lists that advocate a block on sight policy for SMTP as far as FDC are concerned, and I know some that kill them for web as well due to hosted malware.
I did not know this before signing up, and received a network block previously assigned to a spammer. It was "fun" getting myself off of all the anti-spam/DNSBL/RIBL/etc. etc. lists. It took about a week and was not very painful. The only holdout is AT&T/SBC -- once you're on their list, you don't get off of it. AT&T's abuse department is/dev/null, all requests go into a black hole.
I have been very happy with FDC -- I joined because I wanted bandwidth that I didn't have to worry about overage charges for, and they have been true to their word on that aspect.
It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.
Which reminds me: What's so bad about frames again? Is it so incredibly wacky to have static border/background/scripts downloaded only once per visit?
There is probably a very good reason when going up against "the bad guys" you only trust thermite, and going up against internal investigators and auditors, "trust us, writing zeros is good enough"
It depends on the drive technology. If you were in the service in the 1970s/1980s, where hard drive tech was MFM or RLL or similar, then yes, thermite was the correct option. For 2011-era SATA drives, zeros are almost good enough, and overwriting with a random data stream is most definitely good enough (the amount of time and equipment needed to try to recover a modern drive that has been overwritten with a random data stream is so prohibitive that it is usually easier and cheaper to just threaten someone with harm to coerce information out of them).
Based on how I understand the Wikipedia article, I believe SpinRite is just a stronger version of the CHKDSK "surface scan". It reads each sector a few times (or a lot of times if the sector starts to return uncorrectable errors) and writes it back.
This is true, but Spinrite's actual benefit for MFM and RLL drives was to write the data back after a low-level format of the track. This was the real benefit, since different controllers laid out data differently and the only reliable combination was a low-level format with the controller you actually plan to use the drive with .
Spinrite didn't do anything that the controller's own setup routines couldn't do; it just had a nicer interface.
That seems like an oversimplification since the DEFLATE algorithm includes a huffman encoding step, and it is within the specs for the compressor to simply never emit back-references. It would be a horrible bug in the implementation of zlib to have worse compression performance than a basic huffman encoding.
(DEFLATE doesn't use Huffman, it uses Shannon-Fano as it's entropy encoding step.) While zlib can be configured to not emit back-references and just entropy-encode the input, PNG does not use this mode. I suspect it was because they were trying to stay as far away from the Unisys patent as possible (meaning, "image -> entropy" (GIF) and "image -> filter -> entropy" (PNG) might have seemed too similar/infringing).
zlib can not only compress worse than just entropy; if unchecked, it could actually output "compressed" data that is larger than the original. This happens when you give it uncompressable data and it tries to match patterns anyway. Of course it has a check for this; if the output is larger than the input, it just stores the input uncompressed. 7-ZIP LZMA doesn't have this, so that's why 7-ZIP's output can sometimes be larger than the input. (They fixed that in LZMA2.)
...doesn't anyone think it might be time to revisit fractal image compression and maybe look at ways of improving iterated function systems and their associated algorithms?
I didn't realize it was even possible to make such a big improvement in lossless image compression.
You falsely assume that PNG was state-of-the-art in lossless compression. PNG took a great idea (filter the image and take advantage of the 2-D correlation present in most real-world images) and coupled with it a terrible idea (zlib for the back-end compression of the filter output). You're supposed to do order-0 compression (ie. statistical, like Huffman coding) on the filter residuals, not pattern-match searching (zlib). zlib is a great piece of software, but like all tools, there are things it is very well-suited for and others it is not well-suited for. This was a misstep by the PNG team.
The choice the PNG people made was fueled by the Unisys GIF/LZW patent of the time, and at that time IBM also had a patent on range coders. So I guess it's understandable why they didn't use those order-0 methods on the filter residuals. But it was a huge mistake to knee-jerk away from ALL statistical methods and choose zlib as the back-end. They could have used basic Huffman; not sure why they didn't.
Unless he's planning to build in hardware decoding support for H.264, VLC won't be anyone's main player because it will burn up CPU like nobody's business. It's good news for old/esoteric formats though (MPEG-1?.mod/.s3m/.xm/.it modules?), which don't need a lot of CPU to decode.
Netflix's streaming conversion process is quite dumb; they don't bother to check if something can or should be de-telecined, so if the source material is physically 30i, they blend both fields together into 30p and call it a day. It's infuriating.
Does 4K at 24 fps look more real than 2K at 48 fps? I'm looking forward to The Hobbit shot and projected like that.
I'm not. 48fps and higher looks like videotape. Nothing cheapens up what you're watching like full-field video.
I'm not against video; I insist on 60 images per second when I watch a sporting event. But a fantasy movie in a theater should be 24fps.
And the lesson I learned is never to bring your USB microphone with you in your carry-on. It turns out that TSA employees get a little nervous when the x-ray machine picks up what looks like a metal cylinder with lots of electronics stuffed inside.
The microphone in question was a Blue Yeti, and the only reason I still have it in working condition is because I had it packed in its original box+styrofoam (they googled it and saw it was a legit microphone).
I've always mowed my lawn in a spiral that starts at the outer edge and works in a spiral towards the center. It's irregularly shaped, but there is little overlap.
I see the article proposes a solution which cuts (pun intended) about 1-2% of the time off of a spiral. When I'm cutting my lawn, I want to get it done, not do complex math during the process. A contracting spiral is obvious and effortless.
I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete. I'm not implying that there isn't more information that can be added, but as far as the sum of human knowledge goes, I'd guess that they have gotten past that "magic" 95% marker for easily acquired knowledge.
Until the cancer of "not notable" is gone, it can never be "complete" (not 95%, not even 50%).
I've seen articles on an entire range of software get deleted, while the page for Luke Skywalker goes on forever.
Blu-ray is a 4x improvement over DVD to the point and (to me) a gigantic quality improvement; why on earth would you protest Sony by not buying Blu-rays? You can buy Blu-ray players from other companies, you know. 2 years ago, Samsung was making $100 players with Netflix streaming built into them. No Sony involved.
The very first, Columbia, when I was a child at a friend's house.
The very last, today's launch.
Same here. Glad to know someone else valued the events as historically as I did.
Crisis on Infinite Earths not effective enough?
on
DC Reboots Universe
·
· Score: 1
I thought the Crisis on Infinite Earths series in the 1980s was supposed to solve all this crap. I guess we need a "Crisis on Crisis on Infinite Earths" now?
Slashdot Mirror
I still have a 32" CRT TV, and one of the main things that's keeping me from getting a flat screen of some kind is WTF am I going to do with this beast?
Get the flatscreen anyway but hold onto your CRT for any vintage console gaming you do. Modern LCD/Plasma TVs, even with a "game mode", add one frame of latency to all analog inputs; CRTs obviously do not.
But crackers are able to figure out unknown algorithms when they create key generators. Why would this be any different? In one case a unique key of some kind is created by a CPU attached to your USB port. In another it is created by a secret software program that only the developer or publisher has. Either way the cracker is left guessing what the algorithm is. Anyway, all of this ignores the possibility that the cracker could just remove the dongle checks entirely from the binary.
Your understanding of dongle-protected software is incorrect. The software has several sections of code that are encrypted, stored inside the dongle, or combinations of both. Each copy of the software you get must be paired with its hardware dongle or else it can't run. Not *won't* run, *can't*. Modern methods also ensure that not all pieces of the software are loaded into memory at the same time, making it very difficult (but not impossible) to dump segements of memory in an effort to reconstruct a single unencrypted binary that will work. A decade ago there was still some software that used dongles as a simple hardware check; these dongles usually attached to the parallel port. Modern USB dongles are a lot more secure. They are also a lot more expensive, so the OP will have to weigh that against their profits.
My heartfelt condolences to her family. She was so young and so gifted, with such a future ahead of her. :(
Don't mourn her loss; celebrate what she did accomplish, and who she inspired.
I guess you don't use them for outbound email since FDC Servers has a terrible reputation for hosting spammers and having a completely non-responsive abuse department. There are more than a few members of anti-spam lists that advocate a block on sight policy for SMTP as far as FDC are concerned, and I know some that kill them for web as well due to hosted malware.
I did not know this before signing up, and received a network block previously assigned to a spammer. It was "fun" getting myself off of all the anti-spam/DNSBL/RIBL/etc. etc. lists. It took about a week and was not very painful. The only holdout is AT&T/SBC -- once you're on their list, you don't get off of it. AT&T's abuse department is /dev/null, all requests go into a black hole.
I have been very happy with FDC -- I joined because I wanted bandwidth that I didn't have to worry about overage charges for, and they have been true to their word on that aspect.
It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.
Which reminds me: What's so bad about frames again? Is it so incredibly wacky to have static border/background/scripts downloaded only once per visit?
There is probably a very good reason when going up against "the bad guys" you only trust thermite, and going up against internal investigators and auditors, "trust us, writing zeros is good enough"
It depends on the drive technology. If you were in the service in the 1970s/1980s, where hard drive tech was MFM or RLL or similar, then yes, thermite was the correct option. For 2011-era SATA drives, zeros are almost good enough, and overwriting with a random data stream is most definitely good enough (the amount of time and equipment needed to try to recover a modern drive that has been overwritten with a random data stream is so prohibitive that it is usually easier and cheaper to just threaten someone with harm to coerce information out of them).
For home use, the much better option is to use the second drive for frequent backups, ideally automated (so you can't forget to do it).
This is the only sentence in your reply that is correct. Everything else you wrote is technically incorrect or misleading.
Based on how I understand the Wikipedia article, I believe SpinRite is just a stronger version of the CHKDSK "surface scan". It reads each sector a few times (or a lot of times if the sector starts to return uncorrectable errors) and writes it back.
This is true, but Spinrite's actual benefit for MFM and RLL drives was to write the data back after a low-level format of the track. This was the real benefit, since different controllers laid out data differently and the only reliable combination was a low-level format with the controller you actually plan to use the drive with . Spinrite didn't do anything that the controller's own setup routines couldn't do; it just had a nicer interface.
I was just thinking the same thing. Have these guys never heard of an off-site syslog server?
That seems like an oversimplification since the DEFLATE algorithm includes a huffman encoding step, and it is within the specs for the compressor to simply never emit back-references. It would be a horrible bug in the implementation of zlib to have worse compression performance than a basic huffman encoding.
(DEFLATE doesn't use Huffman, it uses Shannon-Fano as it's entropy encoding step.) While zlib can be configured to not emit back-references and just entropy-encode the input, PNG does not use this mode. I suspect it was because they were trying to stay as far away from the Unisys patent as possible (meaning, "image -> entropy" (GIF) and "image -> filter -> entropy" (PNG) might have seemed too similar/infringing).
zlib can not only compress worse than just entropy; if unchecked, it could actually output "compressed" data that is larger than the original. This happens when you give it uncompressable data and it tries to match patterns anyway. Of course it has a check for this; if the output is larger than the input, it just stores the input uncompressed. 7-ZIP LZMA doesn't have this, so that's why 7-ZIP's output can sometimes be larger than the input. (They fixed that in LZMA2.)
...doesn't anyone think it might be time to revisit fractal image compression and maybe look at ways of improving iterated function systems and their associated algorithms?
Considering that the best results were obtained using college grads as the compression engine, probably not.
I didn't realize it was even possible to make such a big improvement in lossless image compression.
You falsely assume that PNG was state-of-the-art in lossless compression. PNG took a great idea (filter the image and take advantage of the 2-D correlation present in most real-world images) and coupled with it a terrible idea (zlib for the back-end compression of the filter output). You're supposed to do order-0 compression (ie. statistical, like Huffman coding) on the filter residuals, not pattern-match searching (zlib). zlib is a great piece of software, but like all tools, there are things it is very well-suited for and others it is not well-suited for. This was a misstep by the PNG team.
The choice the PNG people made was fueled by the Unisys GIF/LZW patent of the time, and at that time IBM also had a patent on range coders. So I guess it's understandable why they didn't use those order-0 methods on the filter residuals. But it was a huge mistake to knee-jerk away from ALL statistical methods and choose zlib as the back-end. They could have used basic Huffman; not sure why they didn't.
Unless he's planning to build in hardware decoding support for H.264, VLC won't be anyone's main player because it will burn up CPU like nobody's business. It's good news for old/esoteric formats though (MPEG-1? .mod/.s3m/.xm/.it modules?), which don't need a lot of CPU to decode.
Netflix's streaming conversion process is quite dumb; they don't bother to check if something can or should be de-telecined, so if the source material is physically 30i, they blend both fields together into 30p and call it a day. It's infuriating.
Does 4K at 24 fps look more real than 2K at 48 fps? I'm looking forward to The Hobbit shot and projected like that.
I'm not. 48fps and higher looks like videotape. Nothing cheapens up what you're watching like full-field video. I'm not against video; I insist on 60 images per second when I watch a sporting event. But a fantasy movie in a theater should be 24fps.
Arrgh...this is what I get for posting quickly on a tablet... The spelling and grammar on that post was atrocious.
No, that's what you get for not proofreading your post before you submit it, tablet or not.
No, the reviewer was British and wondering when they'd be available in the UK.
And the lesson I learned is never to bring your USB microphone with you in your carry-on. It turns out that TSA employees get a little nervous when the x-ray machine picks up what looks like a metal cylinder with lots of electronics stuffed inside.
The microphone in question was a Blue Yeti, and the only reason I still have it in working condition is because I had it packed in its original box+styrofoam (they googled it and saw it was a legit microphone).
I've always mowed my lawn in a spiral that starts at the outer edge and works in a spiral towards the center. It's irregularly shaped, but there is little overlap.
I see the article proposes a solution which cuts (pun intended) about 1-2% of the time off of a spiral. When I'm cutting my lawn, I want to get it done, not do complex math during the process. A contracting spiral is obvious and effortless.
I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete. I'm not implying that there isn't more information that can be added, but as far as the sum of human knowledge goes, I'd guess that they have gotten past that "magic" 95% marker for easily acquired knowledge.
Until the cancer of "not notable" is gone, it can never be "complete" (not 95%, not even 50%).
I've seen articles on an entire range of software get deleted, while the page for Luke Skywalker goes on forever.
Tell me, what game makes the original developer money after 70 years?
Monopoly?
we don't buy blu-ray
Then you're ignorant, because Sony != Blu-ray. Sony is only one of many corporations that make up the AACS LA.
Blu-ray is a 4x improvement over DVD to the point and (to me) a gigantic quality improvement; why on earth would you protest Sony by not buying Blu-rays? You can buy Blu-ray players from other companies, you know. 2 years ago, Samsung was making $100 players with Netflix streaming built into them. No Sony involved.
I've watched two shuttle launches live:
The very first, Columbia, when I was a child at a friend's house. The very last, today's launch.
Same here. Glad to know someone else valued the events as historically as I did.
I thought the Crisis on Infinite Earths series in the 1980s was supposed to solve all this crap. I guess we need a "Crisis on Crisis on Infinite Earths" now?
It's too late for that. The egos in both organizations are entrenched now, merging would be very difficult.
This is the same problem, unfortunately, as the ffmpeg vs. libav fork problem (which recently has led to odd lawsuit threats).