It astounds me that there are so many accessories. What next? iPod remote control in your shoes? I see how explaining why you are tapdancing down the street may be amusing, though.
As if the little white headphones were not obvious enough to thieves. Now I have a giant umbrella saying "I have an iPod, steal me".
I can't imagine anyone wanting to but this. It's not good for walking indoors with, and even in the UK it doesn't rain enough to justify it's use. There are situation this is not going to work. I can see peoples eyes being poked out by someone trying to skip a track while on the tube.
"a friend of my mothers dog's daughthers neighbour at Microsoft once demonstrated a modded PSP to Bill Gates and showed off all of the interesting things that enabled."
I guess that by "newbie" I mean me. I have 10 years Linux experience, and have just recently started to learn windows. I also find it illogical, and completely irrational.
My Package dependancy issues are something I didn't explain properly. My gripe is not that packages have dependancies, it's that they break too easily, and it's not a trivial matter to build a package for you preferred distro. Also the sheer number of dependant packages with the most simple application is min boggling. Adding one package in your preferred package manager may install another 140 packages.
Before I attract more flaming, I am not against Linux, at all. I think it's a much better system generally, and I am a supporter and contributer of Open Source. I just think there are lots of things in Linux that are impossible for the average windows user to instantly comprehend. It's so fundamentally different in how it works, it takes a long time to get used to. My flatmate still has issues doing anything but the most basic things in Linux, despite 5 years of usage. Some people "get it" because they want to, and those that don't "get it", generally don't want to.
Your argument that Linux is superior in most respects, I am inclined to agree. There are still many things that annoy me on a daily basis, and I wish someone would fix, or it could be done better (before you ask... I fix as much as I have time for). Config files is just one of my gripes. I am not saying that a central "registry" is a good option, because it's clearly not. What would be a better option is for the config files to be kept in the same place (i.e unchanged), but an auto symlink is generated with a whole load of meta data showing what application it is, and what version. A central SVN or SQL database could track the changes. Nothing has to change for something as simple as this to work. It sits above the current default config. I believe there are projects working along these lines, only time will tell if that works.
Although Linspire may have a reasonable goal... to run windows programs on a windows interface, I don't think this is the way to go.
The idea of getting a Windows user to operate a horribly bastardised version of GNU/Linux is a bad idea. There will be a never ending stream of problems relating to windows being a hacked together piece of crap, with never ending interop problems. Windows users like system integration, from my experience with freespire, this is lacking.
Bad Emulation of a bad operating system is not the way to go.
We need to make a good Linux distribution, without the crazy package dependancies, and bi-daily system updates. only when someone creates a user experience that is not a horrible mix between the worst elements of GNU/Linux and Windows, will we ever progress in creating a real operating system.
the whole *NIX thing is not good for the newbie, and in it's current state of affairs, never will be. Despite Linsire giving you nice config tools, it's still necessary to manually edit config files. When we come up with a solution for the whole config file problem (so many in so many places) will we ever move forward.
As a side note, a much better approach would to to virtualise a custom windows. Possibly just the kernel and underlying win32 API, and then X host it out. It does mean that the user would need a valid windows license, but they come with all computers now. This would at least give you a real windows environment. Wine just doesn't cut the mustard.
Agreed that this is probably not the best way to go about things.
It would be much better for the articles to be changed in a background copy, and then upon some sort of verification, or validation of data, it gets switched to main. It would certainly stop the see-sawing of article submission reliably between fsckers and wiki admins.
That said, if we are going to build a collection of the entire of human knowledge, we are going to have a few rough edges on the data. It's an almost insurmountable task to verify each piece of data entered into wikipedia. Some data can not be verified because of current views, or differing conclusions based on research. If were to ask 30 people to go and count all elephants, I would see 30 different method of counting elephants. Some would use statistical methods to build a "pretty close count" while others would get more accurate results.
There is also the problem of verifying unquantifiable data. How many Ants are there in the world?
There are some things that are impossible. People will have to put up with the fact the the information on community based sites are going to be fuzzy at best.
Wikipedia will always be in some sort of "truth flux" where the information you see may, or may not contain some truth. The point is, Wikipedia is a great starting point to get information, but linking to a wiki article in a paper as fact will get you laughed off.
I applaud the notion of a centralised source of human knowledge, even if that comes with it's own drawbacks.
I wonder when the last time was that any company got Microsoft to fix *any* bug they found in a released version of software?
Last week in fact. We discovered (completely by accident) that Outlook Mobile Access had a certificate generation bug. Within a couple of days a M$ rep had called up us, and made available a patch for the issue.
It's amazing what a bit of corporate ear bending can do.
If only they did that for the 000's of other more critical bugs out there.
If it's nearly impossible to make a useable ROM to boot your own p0wned code without having decompiled one at great time and expense, whats the point?
The socket serves to be one less small obstacle in an almost insurmountable task
It does disturb me. Although I am in the UK, and we don't have electronic voting, the time will come.
I take your point about people already having access to these machines, but even that fall into the same logic problem.
If you are going to be creating a crack team of elite hackers to make new firmware, there is nothing you can do to stop them from being tampered with. The best method would be a big lead box with no entry exit points, with the motherboard set into resin.
Give someone motivated enough to want to do that an easy way to gain access to the motherboard at all (key locked case) and you are just asking for trouble.
Don't get me wrong, the whole electronic voting thing, especially without a paper audit really scares me, and is too open to tampering. With something as large as a national vote, it's better the devil you know, good ol paper for me.
okay, So it's possible *in theory* to put a new ROM in there to make it run illegal code, just not really plausible
Even if diebold took out all of the headers to put a different ROM in there, and make damn sure you couldn't connect to it externally, there are still many attack vectors.
* From the article:
Diebold has ensured that it is extremely difficult to confirm what code is in a TSx (or TS) at any one time but it is at least theoretically possible to do so.
So... you can connect an external eeprom that runs your own code within a few minutes. Fromt he above statement, the diebold protocol is pretty hard to crack, and writing your own firmware or such a board is verging on impossible.
Even if it were possible to write your own firmware, you would have the ability to flash the onboard eeprom just as quickly, or even do A quick solder job on the onboard chip, replacing it with your own. I know this is a little harder, and more likely to get get caught out with, but given the possibility of writing a working firmware, it's in a similar scope of difficulty.
Considering you can desolder a 16 pin EEPROM within seconds, or just as easily hijack it's communication interface (probably just I2C) it's not unreasonable that there are going to be lots of flaws in this system. If one were determined enough, you could hack the machines to high heaven, with the further possibility of no forensic traces.
There are other fundamental problems with this argument too, like what happens with the data logging internally whilst running off the eeprom. You would have very accurate firmware to get anything like a good result.
Also I would imagine these machines have internal software auditing to make sure that an reboot/reload of application code is registered. Cryto signatures etc.
There will be no way to make these things so secure that "Open Voting Foundation" will be entirely happy. They would be out of jobs that way.
Insurance companies will, and always have screwed people.
There is a pure evil greed within said companies that drives them to become judge and jury. Unfortunately the verdict is favourable to the company.
There has always been a drive within the companies to find any way to stop that payout. I had my car stolen 3 times, and the third time they wouldn't put the locks back in as "the previous repair was not up to (company name)'s standard, and therefore not up to insurable level.". The funny part is they repaired it each time.
As the contracts by these companies are as long as my arm, and cover anything including "we don't want to pay out" clause, there is no real legal recourse against them.
More and more companies will use the supposed "infallible product, and therefore not possible" argument, which not only is a very very bad thing (tm), but also something we are going to have to get used to.
These people presume guilty before innocent
"What part of "testing" didn't the subjects understand before they volunteered?"
on the contrary, I would imagine these people knew exactly what they were doing when they went for the trials. I think "fantastically dangerous" is a little short sighted considering the volume of human trials that happen around the globe. Many of these trials are for simple drugs, or variants/redosages of existing drugs. I digress.
The main motivation for people to so clinical trials is not primarily for the betterment of medicine, it's a more selfish motive... money.
there are many people who live on, or just below the breadline that would consider such trials as a means to an end.
I even considered it myself at one point to get through university... eventually I took 3 jobs (yes, simultaneously). It was a tough decision to take, and if I fit the demographic of the clinical trial that was available to me at the time, I would have taken it. It would have easily paid for 3 semesters tuition.
don't be so quick to judge. The need to eat is a powerful motivation.
Why make this sound like a bad thing? For a developer and retailer of enterprise class software, this is the most appropriate action to take. They need to make sure that the software is competently ready, not just in the eyes of Novell, but in their own eyes. Considering the complexity of such virtualisation software, they will have the issues of training and support for their own staff, never mind documentation.
Considering this technology will make a debut in it's next gen release, it's not really all that much time to wait.
It's plainly obvious what they are doing... prepare themselves in it's near entirety for the mass of users with xen related issues. This will show how professional they really are, and not just willing to jump on the bandwagon.
No mention of where the Linux drivers are going with the merger of ATI and AMD.
Maybe they will get their act together and give us working drivers for the 200 express card.
I realise the importance of such studies, but isn't hypnosis itself a questionable science?
The current studies done on the subject of hypnosis are inconsistant, and provide no real answers to it's existence.
Two highly dodgy sources from google show how much dispute about the subject there really is.
This is a fantastic mod, and I can see it could have some uses.
There might even be enough space to display slashdot RSS... that is if my shared IP didn't keep getting banned.
I can see it being used as a Mail check screen.
Being the tech savvy people we are, I think it's safe to say we use the keyboard over the mouse if at all possible.
The only real concern I have is that the screen is on the back. Now if you could put one on each side, that would be cool. You would be able to see at least one of the screens then.
An even better design would be to make a completely transparent mouse (glass would be cool), and use some sort of 3d projection system to display an image in the shell. You could display a 3d hovering clock in the mouse that way.
Agreed, but there is so little distinction between the 'converged' devices these days that There is no real difference.
Take my TomTom. It has MP3, video you name it. In fact to to navigate/re-route takes an immense amount of finger poking.
Now lets look at the stereo. My car came with a fancy all singing stereo. Now i'm not you ADD type who can't leave things alone, but thing thing is lit up like a christmas tree. There are so many buttons and dials it's nigh on impossible to figure out how to skip the track, never mind concentrating on the road while there is a mobile disco going on in the dash.
Now I'm not defending driving whilst looking and poking a screen, that is clear lunacy. I do advocate safe driving, and it's the responsibility of the user to make sure they do things sensibly.
If all goes wrong, it would be apropriate to use the old mantra "Blame the user not the tools"
B
I take it you disapprove of GPS navigation aids, or for that matter, a radio that might equally well distract you.
Given that to use a phone in a car you have to have a holder or hands free kit (at least in the UK), doesn't this make it very similar to a GPS?
Slashdot Mirror
When will the iPod accessory madness end?
It astounds me that there are so many accessories. What next? iPod remote control in your shoes? I see how explaining why you are tapdancing down the street may be amusing, though.
As if the little white headphones were not obvious enough to thieves. Now I have a giant umbrella saying "I have an iPod, steal me".
I can't imagine anyone wanting to but this. It's not good for walking indoors with, and even in the UK it doesn't rain enough to justify it's use. There are situation this is not going to work. I can see peoples eyes being poked out by someone trying to skip a track while on the tube.
"a friend of my mothers dog's daughthers neighbour at Microsoft once demonstrated a modded PSP to Bill Gates and showed off all of the interesting things that enabled."
Yeah right.
You make some good counterpoints.
I guess that by "newbie" I mean me. I have 10 years Linux experience, and have just recently started to learn windows. I also find it illogical, and completely irrational. My Package dependancy issues are something I didn't explain properly. My gripe is not that packages have dependancies, it's that they break too easily, and it's not a trivial matter to build a package for you preferred distro. Also the sheer number of dependant packages with the most simple application is min boggling. Adding one package in your preferred package manager may install another 140 packages.
Before I attract more flaming, I am not against Linux, at all. I think it's a much better system generally, and I am a supporter and contributer of Open Source. I just think there are lots of things in Linux that are impossible for the average windows user to instantly comprehend. It's so fundamentally different in how it works, it takes a long time to get used to. My flatmate still has issues doing anything but the most basic things in Linux, despite 5 years of usage. Some people "get it" because they want to, and those that don't "get it", generally don't want to.
Your argument that Linux is superior in most respects, I am inclined to agree. There are still many things that annoy me on a daily basis, and I wish someone would fix, or it could be done better (before you ask... I fix as much as I have time for). Config files is just one of my gripes. I am not saying that a central "registry" is a good option, because it's clearly not. What would be a better option is for the config files to be kept in the same place (i.e unchanged), but an auto symlink is generated with a whole load of meta data showing what application it is, and what version. A central SVN or SQL database could track the changes. Nothing has to change for something as simple as this to work. It sits above the current default config. I believe there are projects working along these lines, only time will tell if that works.
Although Linspire may have a reasonable goal... to run windows programs on a windows interface, I don't think this is the way to go.
The idea of getting a Windows user to operate a horribly bastardised version of GNU/Linux is a bad idea. There will be a never ending stream of problems relating to windows being a hacked together piece of crap, with never ending interop problems. Windows users like system integration, from my experience with freespire, this is lacking.
Bad Emulation of a bad operating system is not the way to go.
We need to make a good Linux distribution, without the crazy package dependancies, and bi-daily system updates. only when someone creates a user experience that is not a horrible mix between the worst elements of GNU/Linux and Windows, will we ever progress in creating a real operating system.
the whole *NIX thing is not good for the newbie, and in it's current state of affairs, never will be. Despite Linsire giving you nice config tools, it's still necessary to manually edit config files. When we come up with a solution for the whole config file problem (so many in so many places) will we ever move forward.
As a side note, a much better approach would to to virtualise a custom windows. Possibly just the kernel and underlying win32 API, and then X host it out. It does mean that the user would need a valid windows license, but they come with all computers now. This would at least give you a real windows environment. Wine just doesn't cut the mustard.
Agreed that this is probably not the best way to go about things.
It would be much better for the articles to be changed in a background copy, and then upon some sort of verification, or validation of data, it gets switched to main. It would certainly stop the see-sawing of article submission reliably between fsckers and wiki admins.
That said, if we are going to build a collection of the entire of human knowledge, we are going to have a few rough edges on the data. It's an almost insurmountable task to verify each piece of data entered into wikipedia. Some data can not be verified because of current views, or differing conclusions based on research. If were to ask 30 people to go and count all elephants, I would see 30 different method of counting elephants. Some would use statistical methods to build a "pretty close count" while others would get more accurate results.
There is also the problem of verifying unquantifiable data. How many Ants are there in the world?
There are some things that are impossible. People will have to put up with the fact the the information on community based sites are going to be fuzzy at best. Wikipedia will always be in some sort of "truth flux" where the information you see may, or may not contain some truth. The point is, Wikipedia is a great starting point to get information, but linking to a wiki article in a paper as fact will get you laughed off.
I applaud the notion of a centralised source of human knowledge, even if that comes with it's own drawbacks.
It's amazing what a bit of corporate ear bending can do.
If only they did that for the 000's of other more critical bugs out there.
this were all spring loaded into a backpack, that once activated exploded you into flight.
You would make an awesome supervillain if you had one of the spring loaded versions. You could even disguise it as an evil hump under a cape.
If it's nearly impossible to make a useable ROM to boot your own p0wned code without having decompiled one at great time and expense, whats the point?
The socket serves to be one less small obstacle in an almost insurmountable task
BTW, I agree that they should go.
It does disturb me. Although I am in the UK, and we don't have electronic voting, the time will come.
I take your point about people already having access to these machines, but even that fall into the same logic problem.
If you are going to be creating a crack team of elite hackers to make new firmware, there is nothing you can do to stop them from being tampered with. The best method would be a big lead box with no entry exit points, with the motherboard set into resin.
Give someone motivated enough to want to do that an easy way to gain access to the motherboard at all (key locked case) and you are just asking for trouble.
Don't get me wrong, the whole electronic voting thing, especially without a paper audit really scares me, and is too open to tampering. With something as large as a national vote, it's better the devil you know, good ol paper for me.
Touché.
Obviously that was the digital replica of me that posted the wrong information, it is a mirror image afterall.
Even if diebold took out all of the headers to put a different ROM in there, and make damn sure you couldn't connect to it externally, there are still many attack vectors.
* From the article:
So... you can connect an external eeprom that runs your own code within a few minutes. Fromt he above statement, the diebold protocol is pretty hard to crack, and writing your own firmware or such a board is verging on impossible.
Even if it were possible to write your own firmware, you would have the ability to flash the onboard eeprom just as quickly, or even do A quick solder job on the onboard chip, replacing it with your own. I know this is a little harder, and more likely to get get caught out with, but given the possibility of writing a working firmware, it's in a similar scope of difficulty.
Considering you can desolder a 16 pin EEPROM within seconds, or just as easily hijack it's communication interface (probably just I2C) it's not unreasonable that there are going to be lots of flaws in this system. If one were determined enough, you could hack the machines to high heaven, with the further possibility of no forensic traces.
There are other fundamental problems with this argument too, like what happens with the data logging internally whilst running off the eeprom. You would have very accurate firmware to get anything like a good result.
Also I would imagine these machines have internal software auditing to make sure that an reboot/reload of application code is registered. Cryto signatures etc.
There will be no way to make these things so secure that "Open Voting Foundation" will be entirely happy. They would be out of jobs that way.
Insurance companies will, and always have screwed people.
There is a pure evil greed within said companies that drives them to become judge and jury. Unfortunately the verdict is favourable to the company.
There has always been a drive within the companies to find any way to stop that payout. I had my car stolen 3 times, and the third time they wouldn't put the locks back in as "the previous repair was not up to (company name)'s standard, and therefore not up to insurable level.". The funny part is they repaired it each time.
As the contracts by these companies are as long as my arm, and cover anything including "we don't want to pay out" clause, there is no real legal recourse against them.
More and more companies will use the supposed "infallible product, and therefore not possible" argument, which not only is a very very bad thing (tm), but also something we are going to have to get used to.
These people presume guilty before innocent
bottom line, you are screwed.
on the contrary, I would imagine these people knew exactly what they were doing when they went for the trials. I think "fantastically dangerous" is a little short sighted considering the volume of human trials that happen around the globe. Many of these trials are for simple drugs, or variants/redosages of existing drugs. I digress.
The main motivation for people to so clinical trials is not primarily for the betterment of medicine, it's a more selfish motive... money.
there are many people who live on, or just below the breadline that would consider such trials as a means to an end.
I even considered it myself at one point to get through university... eventually I took 3 jobs (yes, simultaneously). It was a tough decision to take, and if I fit the demographic of the clinical trial that was available to me at the time, I would have taken it. It would have easily paid for 3 semesters tuition.
don't be so quick to judge. The need to eat is a powerful motivation.
Why make this sound like a bad thing? For a developer and retailer of enterprise class software, this is the most appropriate action to take. They need to make sure that the software is competently ready, not just in the eyes of Novell, but in their own eyes. Considering the complexity of such virtualisation software, they will have the issues of training and support for their own staff, never mind documentation.
Considering this technology will make a debut in it's next gen release, it's not really all that much time to wait.
It's plainly obvious what they are doing... prepare themselves in it's near entirety for the mass of users with xen related issues. This will show how professional they really are, and not just willing to jump on the bandwagon.
New tech == new problems
Nothing to see here, move along.
Like the scene at the end of running man where they map the image of Arnie strangling the bad guy.
Not so far fetched after all.
No mention of where the Linux drivers are going with the merger of ATI and AMD. Maybe they will get their act together and give us working drivers for the 200 express card.
I realise the importance of such studies, but isn't hypnosis itself a questionable science?
The current studies done on the subject of hypnosis are inconsistant, and provide no real answers to it's existence.
Two highly dodgy sources from google show how much dispute about the subject there really is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis
http://www.psychoheresy-aware.org/hypnos93.html
Therefore I find the study questionable as to it's scientific merit.
I could be wrong. Please tell me if I am.
B
This is a fantastic mod, and I can see it could have some uses.
There might even be enough space to display slashdot RSS... that is if my shared IP didn't keep getting banned.
I can see it being used as a Mail check screen.
Being the tech savvy people we are, I think it's safe to say we use the keyboard over the mouse if at all possible.
The only real concern I have is that the screen is on the back. Now if you could put one on each side, that would be cool. You would be able to see at least one of the screens then.
An even better design would be to make a completely transparent mouse (glass would be cool), and use some sort of 3d projection system to display an image in the shell. You could display a 3d hovering clock in the mouse that way.
Agreed, but there is so little distinction between the 'converged' devices these days that There is no real difference. Take my TomTom. It has MP3, video you name it. In fact to to navigate/re-route takes an immense amount of finger poking. Now lets look at the stereo. My car came with a fancy all singing stereo. Now i'm not you ADD type who can't leave things alone, but thing thing is lit up like a christmas tree. There are so many buttons and dials it's nigh on impossible to figure out how to skip the track, never mind concentrating on the road while there is a mobile disco going on in the dash. Now I'm not defending driving whilst looking and poking a screen, that is clear lunacy. I do advocate safe driving, and it's the responsibility of the user to make sure they do things sensibly. If all goes wrong, it would be apropriate to use the old mantra "Blame the user not the tools" B
I take it you disapprove of GPS navigation aids, or for that matter, a radio that might equally well distract you. Given that to use a phone in a car you have to have a holder or hands free kit (at least in the UK), doesn't this make it very similar to a GPS?
I should really log in before I post :/