One of the intriguing Nichlai (sp?) Tesla did in his lab was to place an inductive ring just below the cieling like crown molding. Then he had electric motors powered by inductive coupling. Instead of "plugging" in the device to the wall socket, all he has to do was to raise a ring the ceiling. To "unplug", lower the ring by a few inches. Will try to find some references and post it soon.
Well I flout many conventions that dont make sense. I dont write speed as mph 65 or report the memory usage as MB 220, nor do I write temperature degrees F 85. Why should I make an exception for $? It is, after all, a unit like anything else. Same way many style manuals prescribe placing the sentence ending period before the closing parenthesis (like this.) They claim it looks better. To me it looks silly and wrong. As a code hacker I prefer to write (like this). And I have also done nested parenthesis too.
When I write to a machine, I follow the syntax rules precisely. When I write to humans, I expect fault tolerant parsing.
I buy a [HD-]DVD. I want to play it on my $OS-OF-CHOICE box, as well as my set-top box. However the [HD-]DVD consortium refuses to license a $OS-OF-CHOICE player.
OK so far.
Therefore, I need to crack their DRM to make use of my legally purchased [HD-]DVD.
It does not follow. The choice you have is to buy something ang agree to their restrictions, Or dont buy it at all. You just cant assume yourself rights not granted to you. You sound like that idiot judge
who thinks he has the god given right to a dry cleaner within four blocks of his home.
I had some beef with Intuit. They stopped supporting QIF format in 2005. So I stuck to 2004 Delux. Then in 2007 April they switched some service provider who interfaced with the financial institutions and I was forced to upgrade to 2007. I have railed against corporations being vendor locked into MSFT, and I found myself locked into Quicken. To add insult to injury, the upgrade was actually a downgrade because I lost the ability to import QIF files. And further insult was that I was also holding a Quicken Mastercard. This stupid turd of a card does not have any rewards program, no cash back, no miles, no reward points, not even stupid software updates. I was so miffed I wrote a letter to the Quicken CEO. All I wanted was a free copy of Quicken 2007Deluxe.
Promptly I got a phone call from his assistant. Unlike Apple they did not fix anything. She offered a 20$ off 2007Deluxe, which is basically the standard discount everywhere from Costco to web downloads. I think they just sold the right to use Quicken name to some bank for a one time fee and Quicken does not care whether I keep the card or not. The bank is really dumb to lose me as a customer. I had charged more than 100,000$ over the years in that card. They should be willing to spend 0.5% or 500$ to keep me as a customer. They just lost me over a stupid 30$ software update I demanded.
I also heard a story about the CEO of Virgin Atlantic (charles bronson?? or was he an actor, God I have bad memory for names) traveling with the public or playing the role of a flight attendent/steward and listen to customers. One Indian guy had ordered vegetarian meals and it was not available. Charles was playing steward on that flight. He made an unscheduled landing at a nearby airport and rented a limo to take the passenger to an expensive Indian joint and flew him first class to complete the journey.
There were 5 little x\es in the LHS. One on the RHS. Cancelling it I am getting a solution
x=1/(2^6 5 19 12,043 216,493 836,256,503,069,278,983,442,067)^(1/4)
What do I do with the solution?
Do I get a prize?
New tags to search for, like Mother's maiden name, social security number, schools attended and the name of the first pet, of the first car. A Google spokesman said, "You dont have to click on the phishes any more, we provide all they need ourselves!"
Take a look at the research fields, many scientists work in academics with publishing papers and getting a name for themselves is considered to be a great reward and the tenure and job security an important almost equal second reward. But there is no dearth of researchers working for profit making enterprises and they freely exchange ideas. The corporate world even funds research by the academics.
In software too there are lots of people contributing who see nothing more than a tiny credit notice buried deep in the binary or in the header comments as rewards enough. Many of these contributors are actually academic researchers. Almost in every office/cubicle you would see books like Numerical Recipes. Wish the open source contributors would be seen and respected as academic researchers. Like the academics, these developers work on projects they like and fiercely independent.
Corporations whose main core business is not really computers and technology would be wise to invest in creating independent institutions that can create standard compliant implementations.
In a late breaking news both the Republican and Democratic parties have expressed their support for the "gameable" version where votes could be manipulated by injecting money into the equation. In a joint statement, they said, "As long as we can use money to manipulate vote, any vote, we are in favor of it. Though we appear to be bickering and fighting a lot, we do coopeate to make sure our duopoly survives and endures. Unlike diggit, we can outlaw any attempt to fix the gaming of the system."
Old Bill's Livery and Horse Trading post announced that they have decided to strengthen the windows of the stable because horses were being stolen with surprising regularity. When the reporters queried the wisdom of strengthening the windows while the door is wide open and unlocked, Old Bill's assistant Steve threw the straw bales he was sitting on at the reporters.
I see many postings about India should feed its starving masses first. First of all India has not had a famine since the 1964 Bihar famine.
Because the poor are numerous they are seen everywhere. Heart wrenching scenes of squalor abounds everywhere overwhelming the other part of Indian population. Half of India is on susbsitence level and two-thirds of India does not have any disposable income to speak of. That still leaves some 330 million people with disposable income, who form the middle class. That is bigger than total population of USA 300 million.
So let us not go overboard and think all Indians are dirt poor living in slums.
We do have GOTO now, except it is done much more nicely. What are exceptions, I ask. I am in a procedure some 25 levels deep from main() and I encounter an unrecoverable error. Back in Fortran77 I would have written GOTO 9999 to report an error and quit. Now I throw a string "What? Triangle vertex is a null pointer?" and catch it at some level and handle the error. Far superior to a hard coded target address to jump to. Functionally similar to GOTO. I would go so far as to venture, in every case where GOTO made sense in 1970s, we have better structures and concepts now.
Isn't that a feature, not a bug? The malformed date tag is a spam indicator. So it is good Thunderbird will put it at the top of the list, out of sight. Just mark the folder read. If you have legitimate correspondent using legal software has wrong dates, it is because his/her machine is riddled with viruses. So dont want to read their mail either. For a long time Outlook express used to mess up the subject tag and in Thunderbird (older versions) the subject line was missing, and thus filed in spam folder. A few of my collegues bitched, but I held firm. The problem is in Outlook or they way they have configured Outlook. All mails from yahoo, gmail, hotmail were coming through correctly. I will not work around the bugs of Outlook just because it is ubiquitous. I refused to edit my filter rules or whitelist them. I dont know what/when/who fixed it. Now a days Outlook is sending mails correctly. I think so. I have not looked at the spam folder for a long time. May be they just gave up on me and stopped bitching.
The plants are green because of intelligent painting. The Intelligent Painter, (you know who, but who shall remain nameless due to legal reasons, wink, wink) said I give you green plants for food.. This unwarranted attack on religion by science is totally unwarranted. Here we are, with a perfectly good explanation of why plants are green. And out of nowhere these scientists come and explain it all in a logical and credible manner. Our God of the Gaps, oops sorry The Intelligent Painter is now diminished by that much. If this attack continues, we will have no choice but to invoke the "Protection of Endangered Species Act" and demand certain "gaps in knowledge" to be preserved for ever as the sanctuary for Intelligent Painter.
Indians have this digital mode of admiration. If Dhoni hits a century the install him as a minor God. India crashes out of world cup, they go demolish that poor guy's home. When things are going well with ISRO, fanbois pile on and attack any one daring to cast aspersions on their apple of the eye. If the next rocket blows up in the launch pad you guys will high tail. The time to ask tough questions is when things are going well. That is the time, hangers on and side kicks strut in the reflected glory. The time to show support is when things go wrong. Someday you will realize that. Someday you will learn the difference between praising the effort and worshipping success.
The strap-ons are cheap. Six strap-ons together costs less than the first stage of a PSLV. ISRO would have gotten a bigger bang for the buck, by adding the strap ons and putting 1500Kg in the orbit. Cost goes up by some 25%, payload goes up by 300%. Why didn't they?
The PSLV I remember was a 1500Kg class vehicle and the summary said it is on the low end. The article clarifies that in this mission they launched it without the six strap-on boosters that nominally forms the zero stage. Here they have launched 530 Kg in to 550Km orbit. Not bad. But the base vehicle is not the low end of the market. What ISRO has demonstrated is its flexibility in using PSLV to launch 1500Kg sattelites or PSLV-lite to launch 500Kg sattelites.
It is a good job, but launching rockets is not rocket science. One dark possibility is that they are having problems with the six strap on booster configuration and are trying to salvage a reduced capacity vehicle from the detritus of a failed project. I remember the crash of ASLV (a fore runner of PSLV, two strap on booster on their basic SLV-3). My prof was in the post martem committee and was ranting on and on about how dumb their simulation of booster rocket was. "Thrust is 100% for 45 seconds and 0% after that? Why didn't the stupid hacks code up the table of thrust vs time from the static firing?" or something along those lines.
In China the communist party wants to woo another generation with the story of how the revolution was made.
Why cant they hire the guy who wrote "How StarWars was made" to write another book "How the Revolution was made".? If there is one thing Chinese communists really like it would be Force, I guess.
The patent is too broad too obvious. Ideally it should not stand in court. Jope MSFT fights these trolls and invalidates the patent Or it can pull an RIM and pay a large sum and thus give this patent credibility it does not deserve. With the money from MSFT this company can wreck havoc in the small underfunded and unfunded Open Source projects.
From www.gravityzoo.com:
The GravityZoo Framework employs patent pending technology to achieve its goals. It can be divided
into three major components, all fulfilling a special and important task:
They are not blaming MIT, nor am I but my quick description might leave that impression.
That MIT developed it is relevant because, some admins might be running a home grown versions or ruggadized versions sold by other specialist vendors. Infact every hole clearly says which module is affected to help you decide whether or not you need to update your system. Wish MSFT also would clearly say what is not affected by the hole.
Also the vulnerability notes very clearly spell out what is affected. I am not a mac user. Still I could make sense of what is broken, whether or not I am running a vulnerable service, whehter or not I need this update.
Compare this to the dense hole descriptions by MSFT. Almost everything affects everything. Even if the bug in Windows is such that "If you dont user IE you are not vulnerable" they cant/wont say it. Wont say it because it will drive FireFox usage up. Cant say it because IE can be invoked by any part of any code. Similarly when a hole in Windows is found, no one seems to know what/who would be affected. Another reason why they dont describe it better is allegedly their fear that the hackers will use it to attack yet unupdated systems. But most hackers use reverse-engineering tools like BlackIce and deconstruct the patch and know precisely how to attack unpatched systems. On the other hand people who might be persuaded to patch their systems faster if the hole description was more specific and pertinent wait because they cant determine whether they are affected. Add to it MSFT's practice of downplaying the bug severity, no wonder MSFT updates are becoming more of a problem than solution.
Cant figure the mod. We have seen numerous governments announce big deals about Open Source and standards and then quietly use the press coverage to squeeze a better price from MSFT. This could be one such ploy. Agree with it or disagree with it. Like the implications or hate the implications. But off topic? Come on, mods, think straight.
10 of the 25 are local privilege escalations. A few more require physical access to the machine like loading a malformed disk. Some require authenticated access to the machine. (disk access, clear text password exchange, ftp user privilege escalation, untaring a malformed tar file, opening a malformed help file, etc).
The remote attacks seem to be coming out of the Kerebros admin daemon distributed by MIT 3 holes. One hole each in libinfo, portmap, ichat.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the intriguing Nichlai (sp?) Tesla did in his lab was to place an inductive ring just below the cieling like crown molding. Then he had electric motors powered by inductive coupling. Instead of "plugging" in the device to the wall socket, all he has to do was to raise a ring the ceiling. To "unplug", lower the ring by a few inches. Will try to find some references and post it soon.
When I write to a machine, I follow the syntax rules precisely. When I write to humans, I expect fault tolerant parsing.
OK so far.
Therefore, I need to crack their DRM to make use of my legally purchased [HD-]DVD.
It does not follow. The choice you have is to buy something ang agree to their restrictions, Or dont buy it at all. You just cant assume yourself rights not granted to you. You sound like that idiot judge who thinks he has the god given right to a dry cleaner within four blocks of his home.
Promptly I got a phone call from his assistant. Unlike Apple they did not fix anything. She offered a 20$ off 2007Deluxe, which is basically the standard discount everywhere from Costco to web downloads. I think they just sold the right to use Quicken name to some bank for a one time fee and Quicken does not care whether I keep the card or not. The bank is really dumb to lose me as a customer. I had charged more than 100,000$ over the years in that card. They should be willing to spend 0.5% or 500$ to keep me as a customer. They just lost me over a stupid 30$ software update I demanded.
I also heard a story about the CEO of Virgin Atlantic (charles bronson?? or was he an actor, God I have bad memory for names) traveling with the public or playing the role of a flight attendent/steward and listen to customers. One Indian guy had ordered vegetarian meals and it was not available. Charles was playing steward on that flight. He made an unscheduled landing at a nearby airport and rented a limo to take the passenger to an expensive Indian joint and flew him first class to complete the journey.
There were 5 little x\es in the LHS. One on the RHS. Cancelling it I am getting a solution x=1/(2^6 5 19 12,043 216,493 836,256,503,069,278,983,442,067)^(1/4) What do I do with the solution? Do I get a prize?
New tags to search for, like Mother's maiden name, social security number, schools attended and the name of the first pet, of the first car. A Google spokesman said, "You dont have to click on the phishes any more, we provide all they need ourselves!"
In software too there are lots of people contributing who see nothing more than a tiny credit notice buried deep in the binary or in the header comments as rewards enough. Many of these contributors are actually academic researchers. Almost in every office/cubicle you would see books like Numerical Recipes. Wish the open source contributors would be seen and respected as academic researchers. Like the academics, these developers work on projects they like and fiercely independent.
Corporations whose main core business is not really computers and technology would be wise to invest in creating independent institutions that can create standard compliant implementations.
In a late breaking news both the Republican and Democratic parties have expressed their support for the "gameable" version where votes could be manipulated by injecting money into the equation. In a joint statement, they said, "As long as we can use money to manipulate vote, any vote, we are in favor of it. Though we appear to be bickering and fighting a lot, we do coopeate to make sure our duopoly survives and endures. Unlike diggit, we can outlaw any attempt to fix the gaming of the system."
Old Bill's Livery and Horse Trading post announced that they have decided to strengthen the windows of the stable because horses were being stolen with surprising regularity. When the reporters queried the wisdom of strengthening the windows while the door is wide open and unlocked, Old Bill's assistant Steve threw the straw bales he was sitting on at the reporters.
Because the poor are numerous they are seen everywhere. Heart wrenching scenes of squalor abounds everywhere overwhelming the other part of Indian population. Half of India is on susbsitence level and two-thirds of India does not have any disposable income to speak of. That still leaves some 330 million people with disposable income, who form the middle class. That is bigger than total population of USA 300 million.
So let us not go overboard and think all Indians are dirt poor living in slums.
We do have GOTO now, except it is done much more nicely. What are exceptions, I ask. I am in a procedure some 25 levels deep from main() and I encounter an unrecoverable error. Back in Fortran77 I would have written GOTO 9999 to report an error and quit. Now I throw a string "What? Triangle vertex is a null pointer?" and catch it at some level and handle the error. Far superior to a hard coded target address to jump to. Functionally similar to GOTO. I would go so far as to venture, in every case where GOTO made sense in 1970s, we have better structures and concepts now.
They submit "$module is too slow" bugs. I do nothing for 18 months and then resolve it saying, "it is fast enough now".
Isn't that a feature, not a bug? The malformed date tag is a spam indicator. So it is good Thunderbird will put it at the top of the list, out of sight. Just mark the folder read. If you have legitimate correspondent using legal software has wrong dates, it is because his/her machine is riddled with viruses. So dont want to read their mail either. For a long time Outlook express used to mess up the subject tag and in Thunderbird (older versions) the subject line was missing, and thus filed in spam folder. A few of my collegues bitched, but I held firm. The problem is in Outlook or they way they have configured Outlook. All mails from yahoo, gmail, hotmail were coming through correctly. I will not work around the bugs of Outlook just because it is ubiquitous. I refused to edit my filter rules or whitelist them. I dont know what/when/who fixed it. Now a days Outlook is sending mails correctly. I think so. I have not looked at the spam folder for a long time. May be they just gave up on me and stopped bitching.
The plants are green because of intelligent painting. The Intelligent Painter, (you know who, but who shall remain nameless due to legal reasons, wink, wink) said I give you green plants for food.. This unwarranted attack on religion by science is totally unwarranted. Here we are, with a perfectly good explanation of why plants are green. And out of nowhere these scientists come and explain it all in a logical and credible manner. Our God of the Gaps, oops sorry The Intelligent Painter is now diminished by that much. If this attack continues, we will have no choice but to invoke the "Protection of Endangered Species Act" and demand certain "gaps in knowledge" to be preserved for ever as the sanctuary for Intelligent Painter.
[ducks and runs away to dodge rotten tomatoes nay rotten apples being thrown]
You may have the last word.
It is a good job, but launching rockets is not rocket science. One dark possibility is that they are having problems with the six strap on booster configuration and are trying to salvage a reduced capacity vehicle from the detritus of a failed project. I remember the crash of ASLV (a fore runner of PSLV, two strap on booster on their basic SLV-3). My prof was in the post martem committee and was ranting on and on about how dumb their simulation of booster rocket was. "Thrust is 100% for 45 seconds and 0% after that? Why didn't the stupid hacks code up the table of thrust vs time from the static firing?" or something along those lines.
In China the communist party wants to woo another generation with the story of how the revolution was made. Why cant they hire the guy who wrote "How StarWars was made" to write another book "How the Revolution was made".? If there is one thing Chinese communists really like it would be Force, I guess.
The patent is too broad too obvious. Ideally it should not stand in court. Jope MSFT fights these trolls and invalidates the patent Or it can pull an RIM and pay a large sum and thus give this patent credibility it does not deserve. With the money from MSFT this company can wreck havoc in the small underfunded and unfunded Open Source projects.
From www.gravityzoo.com: The GravityZoo Framework employs patent pending technology to achieve its goals. It can be divided into three major components, all fulfilling a special and important task:
That MIT developed it is relevant because, some admins might be running a home grown versions or ruggadized versions sold by other specialist vendors. Infact every hole clearly says which module is affected to help you decide whether or not you need to update your system. Wish MSFT also would clearly say what is not affected by the hole.
Compare this to the dense hole descriptions by MSFT. Almost everything affects everything. Even if the bug in Windows is such that "If you dont user IE you are not vulnerable" they cant/wont say it. Wont say it because it will drive FireFox usage up. Cant say it because IE can be invoked by any part of any code. Similarly when a hole in Windows is found, no one seems to know what/who would be affected. Another reason why they dont describe it better is allegedly their fear that the hackers will use it to attack yet unupdated systems. But most hackers use reverse-engineering tools like BlackIce and deconstruct the patch and know precisely how to attack unpatched systems. On the other hand people who might be persuaded to patch their systems faster if the hole description was more specific and pertinent wait because they cant determine whether they are affected. Add to it MSFT's practice of downplaying the bug severity, no wonder MSFT updates are becoming more of a problem than solution.
Cant figure the mod. We have seen numerous governments announce big deals about Open Source and standards and then quietly use the press coverage to squeeze a better price from MSFT. This could be one such ploy. Agree with it or disagree with it. Like the implications or hate the implications. But off topic? Come on, mods, think straight.
The remote attacks seem to be coming out of the Kerebros admin daemon distributed by MIT 3 holes. One hole each in libinfo, portmap, ichat.