I'm taking it by the "ick" you are assuming that Linux would be a better operating system choice for these devices. But why? This device has no keyboard, so what inroads has linux made into voice activated user interfaces? What window manager/desktop environment allows you to launch programs with voice commands? Which email program under linux can I use to retrieve and send email purely by voice? What browser is it that navigates by speech? What standards are there for writing voice activated apps under linux?
Maybe you were thining of OS/2 as a choice, which is pretty good with the whole integration of voice everywhere. But there aren't as may apps as on Windows and the Windows voice support is pretty good.
This is an area of linux that needs quite a bit of work if it can be used on wearable computers. I am doubtful the hardest core linux person would be truly happy running it on one of these.
When the mouse was introduced it brought with it a whole set of user interfaces that made sence for that device. Now what we need is a user interface that takes advantage of this input. In the article it talked about pushing an icon around. Great, I can do that with a mouse. What we need are new innovations that we cannot do with our current tools.
I think this story goes well with the recent Ask Slashdot about 3D environments. Out current tools aren't up to snuff as input, maybe this device will help.
Another use may be adjusting tool parameters in a paint program while you are brushing. Pen table give hardness of depression, but you could adjust the roughness of a texture, or the angle or size of the brush.
It would be great to hook up vim or emacs to this for macros while programming. Switching a hand to the mouse while typing is annoying, and switching edit modes/doing Ctrl commands can be almost as much of a pain. But you could do a thought pattern to engage a for loop macro, type in the various parts, and the end of each doing the thought pattern for next-part. Perhaps it would make sense to design a new programming language that it oriented toward this input (just as there should be a programming language desgined for PDAs input).
These are are some serious things to think about if this technology becomes accessible to the public. Just as modern user interfaces need mice (insert benefits of command lines flame war here), it may be that future ones need these as input.
I used to be a large Amiga fan, starting out with my 500 and then getting a 3000. I loved DPaint VI and my various ray tracing programs.
But then Doom came out. And it didn't come out on the Amiga. Plus the built in graphics chip on my 3000 was pretty lame compared to the SVGA cards on the market. That pretty much did it for me. Faster core processor was nicer for ray tracing (although I don't do as much anymore), the higher resolutions are a necessity for me, and the lack of Doom was a real problem. The technology was great in the past but a PC with a 3D card has a lot more tricks under the hood.
I am curious about the internet devices the article talks about. After playing around with some Sunrays, I can see these taking off big time (although not the Sunray incarnation of it. Sun servers and switched networks are too expensive). Since the Amiga had linux ported to it, these IDs might be able to run linux. A $200 linux machine would be a big consumer draw.
The problem I have with this solution is that you may start coming close to a wall, so you are fooled into walking parallel to it, then you suddenly strafe when attacked, bashing into the wall.
The UNROLL macro you show there is a loop unroll like "Duff's Device". I'll explain why you'd want to do this while I talk about Duff's incarnation (because it's related but more interesting:).
Duff's Device was a contruct created by Tom Duff as a way of manually unrolling a for loop in a highly optimal way. The story goes that he was writing a multimedia application and noticed through profiling that he was spending a lot of time in his tight loops. In these loops he was doing a simple operation (copying from a buffer to a port).
The problem was that for each copy, he would do a compare. so he came up with this code (Tom Duff is a professional and is it not recommended you try this at home): send(to, from, count) register short *to, *from; register count; { register n=(count+7)/8; switch(count%8){ case 0:do{*to = *from++; case 7:*to = *from++; case 6:*to = *from++; case 5:*to = *from++; case 4:*to = *from++; case 3:*to = *from++; case 2:*to = *from++; case 1:*to = *from++; }while(--n>0); } } Yes it compiles. 7 compares are removed.
Modern optimizers have learned from Mr. Duff and will unroll loops for you (if you choose speed over size), so you no longer have to subject people to this kind of heinousness. It is notable though that the TIFF code does an op1 to every 8 times, so this construct may not be removable from the code where op1 isn't NOP.
For Tom Duff's commentary on Duff's Device, Go here
I am very confused by a lot of the postings here. They seem to imply, incredulously, that because they hand copied the notes that that make them theirs. Does that mean I can go out, buy a book, hand copy the whole thing, and then sell copies of that book?
The same things goes for the comments regarding students paying. I paid for the book, so should just be able to make copies? How does that follow.
It's very important to realize that the site isn't asking for students to write their own essays or take on lecture material. They are asking for their notes. In my stay at university, the bulk of notes were "lecture notes," those that were copied verbatum off the board. In this case there is no difference than me copying verbatum from a book. I am allowed to do so for my own purposes only, with exception to Fair Use.
I really don't understand why people here think that a student should profit and the company should profit of of the work that the professor has put into creatig that material. How can we denounce warez kiddies and commercial piracy and think this is okay?
If you learn some material, think about it, and put it into a book, then good for you. If you just copy off a board and then sell that, then how can you call that right?
I personally agree with the professors: they are the ones who put the time into making a study plan, and formulating the knowledge in those notes. The students just showed up to class to copy them for their own reference.
When I was going to university, I used to take my class notes on my PalmPilot. It wasn't uncommon for people to ask for a copy of my notes, which I gave. Eventually I figured that I would just put them up on my web page so that people who didn't know me could just get a copy whenever. I went to the prof to ask his permission because I thought it the notes were his copyright.
It turned out I was actually wrong. My prof had borrowed the lecture notes from another professor under the conditions that no electronic copies of them would be made for massive distribution. So the notes actually belonged to another professor, and if I had just stuck them up on the web, my prof may have gotten in some trouble. I certainly didn't want this since I rather liked my prof (among the best 3 I've had).
The moral of the story is that by making copies and posting them on services like this, you can get other people in to trouble that they really don't deserve. By doing so for financial gain, especially for something that you really did no real work for, makes the offense even greater. I hope that students won't screw their professors over for this site and/or I hope that the site folds for publishing materials they don't have the copyright to.
Qualcomm has a press release about it that provides a little more background than ths little blurb. According o the press release, HDR does support mobile access.
I used to run the OmniRemote software by Pacific NeoTek. This tool allows you to record a signal from a device (or a set of signals) and replay them back. So you would point your TV remote at the IR port, hit record on OmniRemote, press "channel up", stop recording and label the "button" you recorded into "Ch+".
The problem was that the built in IR port was too weak. It couldn't control anything more than 2 feet away. So it was just a cute toy that has no practical value.
There are hardware add ons that give you a longer range (or an IR port if you don't have one), but I haven't tried them. There is the OmniRemote Module also by NeoTek for $20 (a lot less than the $300 above, even if you have to buy a used Palm), and TaleBeam for $30 (sorry, $29.95). Apparently there is no software for the TaleBeam yet.
I agree with the original poster, that the educationaly system here in the U.S. favors the wealthy. I personally believe that the system goes on to contribute to keeping the classes separate.
People often refer to scholarships as "leveling the ground" since poor people with acedemic potential can go to college. However, let's take two average people differing only in how rich the family is, not exactly wonderful GPAs or SAT scores, but not bad either. In this case the family that can afford it can send their child to college, the one that can't doesn't get a scholarship and so their child can't go to college.
Overall this means that given two people of the same acedemic level, the wealthy person is favored. Overall, the educational system favors the exceptional acedemics and the financially sound mediocraty. What happens in actuallity is that poorer smarter/more determined/(insert reason for having higher GPA/SAT) people cannnot go on to college over a richer, less highly scored person.
Your friend's protect is a legal issue. As has been said before, find a lawyer, but make sure they know what is going on. A quick browse on VFinance.com gives this list of law firms that have experience (you can even search by region) in working for entrepeneurs that are looking for VC. There are so many laws and loopholes now that a lawyer without experience can overlook something.
Users must have a host computer or a Web site running on Microsoft Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0 to use the PocketSign program. In addition, the palm-top device must use the Palm OS 3.0 operating system and have a Palm HotSync Cradle or HotSync cable connection.
While the program works with at least four different lines of palm-top organizers, it does not support the Pilot and PalmPilot organizers.
So it doesn't work on the PalmPilot but it needs PalmOS 3.0? I really don't get it.
On another topic, I hope they release some of the specifications for how they prevent someone from copying the signature from the certificate and then just using it to sign another one. All of these details might be in the pa tent they've filed, but I think the patent is generic.
MySQL may be okay for really simple applications (like a guestbook) but it is lacking features that a robust dB application needs. There is no support for Foreign Keys nor does it look like there will be any in the future. Foreign keys are needed to ensure data integrity and they just aren't there. You basically get a lot of the same problems as in weakly types languages with really no gain (unlike the gain you get from weakly typed languages). There are no stor ed procedures or triggers. While I'll agree that SP code can be done in the dB client (the ASP), you have to make sure you call trigger code before every operation and check the result and it really isn't the same as having actual triggers.
However, these two things are kind of forgivable, but mySql doesn't have support for transactions! So if an operation fails in the middle, you can't roll it back. They claim they will have something like transactions without rollback soon. While that helps with some concurrancy issues, the roll backs are really needed when entering data into a normalized dB.
Maybe, you can use MySQL for the back end to EJBs for object persistance. The EJBs ould give you the data integrity and the event model that you would use for triggers (you'd trigger code in the EJB anyway since it is suppsed to encasuplate business logic), but I'm not sure if you can do EJBs on a dB without tranactions.
So, if you are going to have a novel web technology, I would suggest against using MySQL, although if you Web application is novel because of content or something and you want to save some money, it might be okay to forget about the robustness at first.
This is a ten minute job in *NIX. Win32 forces you to use a convoluted event-driven architecture that absolutely makes no sense, and is a royal pain in the ass
Actually, I have, and having done Winsock API coding, I can say that Winsock is Berkley sockets compliant and so you can use select instead of the event driven model. Why did I use the event driven model? Because I still remember using Trumpet Winsock for 3.1 and enabling a feature on it that prints out every winsock call. I did this to learn how to program Winsock. What did I see? Netscape (one of the 1.x versions) in what appeared to be a tight loop selecting the whole time. As a fan of interrupt v. polling, I decided to use the event model.
The event model is also not that arcane to people who do Window API programming. Or PalmOS programming, since it's the same model. I hear Mac operating systems are like that too.
I agree there are cleaner models (Java JDK 1.1+ for instance), but it really isn't as horrible as all that.
The first constrain on the system is that of a "peanut CPU". "The consequences of [this contraint] is that, while strong symmetric cryptography is feasible, modular arithmetic is difficule and so is strong asymmetric cryptography." Because of this, these devices cannot use IPv6. In general, the specification clearly shows why conventional solutions to these problems do not apply to these classes of devices.
For those of you who don't know, SPI does promotion and education of free software systems. They are a good organization and have been affiliated with Debian for a while. Their web page is at http://www.spi-inc.org/.
Isn't this just MicroSoft Bob with voice instead of text bubbles? Will it sell this time? Can we disable these little buddies (I can't figure out how to disable the clip in Word. I've been told it can't be done).
Speaking of buddies, my wife runs a program that has a talking parrot that read webpages out lout while she does stuff and tells her about other webpages that she may be interested in based on what pages she's been to (it also has some "my portal" type service). I wonder if Bill is thinking of buying the technology from them or just crushing them.
I can see ads like this one cutting into Linux acceptance. Basically this is an ad for a Linux product saying that the free stuff ain't worth it. The average non-Linux user is going to get from it that inorder to have a stable graphics system on Linux, you have to pay. In the minds of many, they will goon to think that you have to pay for anything good on linux and will become disillusioned with Linux advocates. They will refer to the ad as "proof" that you have to pay to run Linux.
I certainly hope that we all take this as a lesson of what not to do.
Ever since I was a child I've wanted to go into space. I remember reading an article in Wired a few years ago about a company that was planning on offering civilian space cruises. Essentially it was a week for $80K and is supposed to be operational in 2012. Since then I've heard more and more about privatizing the space industry (mostly for turing the launching of satellites over to the private sector) and the possibility that I will be able to do this.
If this technology works, then a launch into space will only cost $75 plus the repairs involved in the trip. It seems like this will bring this dream even closer.
That isn't even to mention the increased feaibility of building larger, more habitable space stations. At this cost, sending the materials up will be much cheaper.
Finally, another great thing this may open is the easy disposal of radioactive waste. With this technology, we may be able to send our waste to Jupiter.
All and all, I think this is tax money well spent.
I really don't know how to take this. I work for a software company that among other things, does online software for clinics. I can tell you that this kind of thing is actually in use. It has medical records, lists of services used (OB, Dietician, etc). Pretty much everything you don't really want online, especially on port 80.
So, from my perspective, this information is already out there for some clinics. All this annoucement means is that they are going to come up with some authentication stuff to (hopefully) make it more secure than it is already.
But then there is another problem: the fact that this is not widespread. It is probably true that most people's records are not online. And it is probably true that few people know about our services and where to go to get the goods. It seems that the future is big websites, with everyone's records online, advertising on eBay, and practicaly begging for breakins. There is a lot of money to be made in blackmail.
But let's face it, the medical industry want this info online. They are begging for it to be online. They want it flying around in XML bewteen hospitals so that an ER doctor can intantly know that the guy whose rolling in is on such and such medication and has this blood type and thse know reactivity problems and these biohazard warnings. And with good reason: this information can and will save lives.
So it is good that a major player is backing the security side of things. Let's just hope that everything is up for public review for holes, etc, and that enough people work to make this thing secure.
Perhaps they can set up a dummy system that has fake information on it and give rewards for cracking it (and telling them the crack). I have faith that there are more people who want to help than people who want to profit.
Maybe I'm just fooling myself into feeling better about it.
My bad. They aren't getting passwords from OperaMail, that's just where the trojans are coming from.
Actually, now that I think about it though, you could write a trojan that gets passwords from the IE5 "remember my password feature". Ugh. Just don't run untrusted programs.
While I agree that the software the AOL uses should be a secure about private information like passwords, ultimately OperaMail has to be able to decrypt the password so it can authenticate with the server. If OperaMail can do this, then a trojan can do it. There was nothing in the item that indictated to me that OperaMail is really at fault here.
Email that may be using a trojan horse-like virus -- the effects of which aren't immediately detected -- arrives at the inbox of an unsuspecting AOL user. One user reported that the attached program bore the name "buddylist.exe." If the user opens the attached file -- an action AOL claims to repeatedly warn users against -- it launches a small program that obtains the user's password off the hard disk and sends it back to the hacker's OperaMail address.
It is really not a good idea to run files that are sent to you, even if those files are sent by what you think is a friend. There have been a few viruses/trojan horses that use the method of looking through the address book of its host and sending itself out as it its from the host user. Because of thise, you just cannot rust executable content that you get in your mailbox/ICQ. In ICQ, you should at least ask the person who is sending it "What is this?". The interactive conversation about the software that is being sent will help verify if it is a real program. Similar verification can be done by mail, although it is more of a pain.
The real solution to all of this, I suppose, is to type your password in everytime you start your emailer, and not use any "remember my password" features. If a program you run remembers your password, then another program run by you can find that password.
This article would have been better if, instead of trying to cut down AOL/OperaMail for something that isn't really its fault, it educated users on the dangers of running foreign programs whether or not they are named "buddylist.exe"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm taking it by the "ick" you are assuming that Linux would be a better operating system choice for these devices. But why? This device has no keyboard, so what inroads has linux made into voice activated user interfaces? What window manager/desktop environment allows you to launch programs with voice commands? Which email program under linux can I use to retrieve and send email purely by voice? What browser is it that navigates by speech? What standards are there for writing voice activated apps under linux?
Maybe you were thining of OS/2 as a choice, which is pretty good with the whole integration of voice everywhere. But there aren't as may apps as on Windows and the Windows voice support is pretty good.
This is an area of linux that needs quite a bit of work if it can be used on wearable computers. I am doubtful the hardest core linux person would be truly happy running it on one of these.
When the mouse was introduced it brought with it a whole set of user interfaces that made sence for that device. Now what we need is a user interface that takes advantage of this input. In the article it talked about pushing an icon around. Great, I can do that with a mouse. What we need are new innovations that we cannot do with our current tools.
I think this story goes well with the recent Ask Slashdot about 3D environments. Out current tools aren't up to snuff as input, maybe this device will help.
Another use may be adjusting tool parameters in a paint program while you are brushing. Pen table give hardness of depression, but you could adjust the roughness of a texture, or the angle or size of the brush.
It would be great to hook up vim or emacs to this for macros while programming. Switching a hand to the mouse while typing is annoying, and switching edit modes/doing Ctrl commands can be almost as much of a pain. But you could do a thought pattern to engage a for loop macro, type in the various parts, and the end of each doing the thought pattern for next-part. Perhaps it would make sense to design a new programming language that it oriented toward this input (just as there should be a programming language desgined for PDAs input).
These are are some serious things to think about if this technology becomes accessible to the public. Just as modern user interfaces need mice (insert benefits of command lines flame war here), it may be that future ones need these as input.
I used to be a large Amiga fan, starting out with my 500 and then getting a 3000. I loved DPaint VI and my various ray tracing programs.
But then Doom came out. And it didn't come out on the Amiga. Plus the built in graphics chip on my 3000 was pretty lame compared to the SVGA cards on the market. That pretty much did it for me. Faster core processor was nicer for ray tracing (although I don't do as much anymore), the higher resolutions are a necessity for me, and the lack of Doom was a real problem. The technology was great in the past but a PC with a 3D card has a lot more tricks under the hood.
I am curious about the internet devices the article talks about. After playing around with some Sunrays, I can see these taking off big time (although not the Sunray incarnation of it. Sun servers and switched networks are too expensive). Since the Amiga had linux ported to it, these IDs might be able to run linux. A $200 linux machine would be a big consumer draw.
The problem I have with this solution is that you may start coming close to a wall, so you are fooled into walking parallel to it, then you suddenly strafe when attacked, bashing into the wall.
The UNROLL macro you show there is a loop unroll like "Duff's Device". I'll explain why you'd want to do this while I talk about Duff's incarnation (because it's related but more interesting :).
Duff's Device was a contruct created by Tom Duff as a way of manually unrolling a for loop in a highly optimal way. The story goes that he was writing a multimedia application and noticed through profiling that he was spending a lot of time in his tight loops. In these loops he was doing a simple operation (copying from a buffer to a port).
The problem was that for each copy, he would do a compare. so he came up with this code (Tom Duff is a professional and is it not recommended you try this at home):
send(to, from, count)
register short *to, *from;
register count;
{
register n=(count+7)/8;
switch(count%8){
case 0:do{*to = *from++;
case 7:*to = *from++;
case 6:*to = *from++;
case 5:*to = *from++;
case 4:*to = *from++;
case 3:*to = *from++;
case 2:*to = *from++;
case 1:*to = *from++;
}while(--n>0);
}
}
Yes it compiles. 7 compares are removed.
Modern optimizers have learned from Mr. Duff and will unroll loops for you (if you choose speed over size), so you no longer have to subject people to this kind of heinousness. It is notable though that the TIFF code does an op1 to every 8 times, so this construct may not be removable from the code where op1 isn't NOP.
For Tom Duff's commentary on Duff's Device, Go here
I am very confused by a lot of the postings here. They seem to imply, incredulously, that because they hand copied the notes that that make them theirs. Does that mean I can go out, buy a book, hand copy the whole thing, and then sell copies of that book?
The same things goes for the comments regarding students paying. I paid for the book, so should just be able to make copies? How does that follow.
It's very important to realize that the site isn't asking for students to write their own essays or take on lecture material. They are asking for their notes. In my stay at university, the bulk of notes were "lecture notes," those that were copied verbatum off the board. In this case there is no difference than me copying verbatum from a book. I am allowed to do so for my own purposes only, with exception to Fair Use.
I really don't understand why people here think that a student should profit and the company should profit of of the work that the professor has put into creatig that material. How can we denounce warez kiddies and commercial piracy and think this is okay?
If you learn some material, think about it, and put it into a book, then good for you. If you just copy off a board and then sell that, then how can you call that right?
I personally agree with the professors: they are the ones who put the time into making a study plan, and formulating the knowledge in those notes. The students just showed up to class to copy them for their own reference.
When I was going to university, I used to take my class notes on my PalmPilot. It wasn't uncommon for people to ask for a copy of my notes, which I gave. Eventually I figured that I would just put them up on my web page so that people who didn't know me could just get a copy whenever. I went to the prof to ask his permission because I thought it the notes were his copyright.
It turned out I was actually wrong. My prof had borrowed the lecture notes from another professor under the conditions that no electronic copies of them would be made for massive distribution. So the notes actually belonged to another professor, and if I had just stuck them up on the web, my prof may have gotten in some trouble. I certainly didn't want this since I rather liked my prof (among the best 3 I've had).
The moral of the story is that by making copies and posting them on services like this, you can get other people in to trouble that they really don't deserve. By doing so for financial gain, especially for something that you really did no real work for, makes the offense even greater. I hope that students won't screw their professors over for this site and/or I hope that the site folds for publishing materials they don't have the copyright to.
Qualcomm has a press release about it that provides a little more background than ths little blurb. According o the press release, HDR does support mobile access.
I used to run the OmniRemote software by Pacific NeoTek. This tool allows you to record a signal from a device (or a set of signals) and replay them back. So you would point your TV remote at the IR port, hit record on OmniRemote, press "channel up", stop recording and label the "button" you recorded into "Ch+".
The problem was that the built in IR port was too weak. It couldn't control anything more than 2 feet away. So it was just a cute toy that has no practical value.
There are hardware add ons that give you a longer range (or an IR port if you don't have one), but I haven't tried them. There is the OmniRemote Module also by NeoTek for $20 (a lot less than the $300 above, even if you have to buy a used Palm), and TaleBeam for $30 (sorry, $29.95). Apparently there is no software for the TaleBeam yet.
I'm short on cash and really want a DVD player. I'm afraid that will drive me to do something I would regret later.
My pseudo-English translator parsed it as reciprocal-ity. That is, having the characteristics of two things that correspond or answer to each other.
I agree with the original poster, that the educationaly system here in the U.S. favors the wealthy. I personally believe that the system goes on to contribute to keeping the classes separate.
People often refer to scholarships as "leveling the ground" since poor people with acedemic potential can go to college. However, let's take two average people differing only in how rich the family is, not exactly wonderful GPAs or SAT scores, but not bad either. In this case the family that can afford it can send their child to college, the one that can't doesn't get a scholarship and so their child can't go to college.
Overall this means that given two people of the same acedemic level, the wealthy person is favored. Overall, the educational system favors the exceptional acedemics and the financially sound mediocraty. What happens in actuallity is that poorer smarter/more determined/(insert reason for having higher GPA/SAT) people cannnot go on to college over a richer, less highly scored person.
Just another cost of living in capitalism.
Your friend's protect is a legal issue. As has been said before, find a lawyer, but make sure they know what is going on. A quick browse on VFinance.com gives this list of law firms that have experience (you can even search by region) in working for entrepeneurs that are looking for VC. There are so many laws and loopholes now that a lawyer without experience can overlook something.
Was anyone else confused by these two paragraphs?
Users must have a host computer or a Web site running on Microsoft Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0 to use the PocketSign program. In addition, the palm-top device must use the Palm OS 3.0 operating system and have a Palm HotSync Cradle or HotSync cable connection.
While the program works with at least four different lines of palm-top organizers, it does not support the Pilot and PalmPilot organizers.
So it doesn't work on the PalmPilot but it needs PalmOS 3.0? I really don't get it.
On another topic, I hope they release some of the specifications for how they prevent someone from copying the signature from the certificate and then just using it to sign another one. All of these details might be in the pa tent they've filed, but I think the patent is generic.
MySQL may be okay for really simple applications (like a guestbook) but it is lacking features that a robust dB application needs. There is no support for Foreign Keys nor does it look like there will be any in the future. Foreign keys are needed to ensure data integrity and they just aren't there. You basically get a lot of the same problems as in weakly types languages with really no gain (unlike the gain you get from weakly typed languages). There are no stor ed procedures or triggers. While I'll agree that SP code can be done in the dB client (the ASP), you have to make sure you call trigger code before every operation and check the result and it really isn't the same as having actual triggers.
However, these two things are kind of forgivable, but mySql doesn't have support for transactions! So if an operation fails in the middle, you can't roll it back. They claim they will have something like transactions without rollback soon. While that helps with some concurrancy issues, the roll backs are really needed when entering data into a normalized dB.
Maybe, you can use MySQL for the back end to EJBs for object persistance. The EJBs ould give you the data integrity and the event model that you would use for triggers (you'd trigger code in the EJB anyway since it is suppsed to encasuplate business logic), but I'm not sure if you can do EJBs on a dB without tranactions.
So, if you are going to have a novel web technology, I would suggest against using MySQL, although if you Web application is novel because of content or something and you want to save some money, it might be okay to forget about the robustness at first.
This is a ten minute job in *NIX. Win32 forces you to use a convoluted event-driven architecture that absolutely makes no sense, and is a royal pain in the ass
Actually, I have, and having done Winsock API coding, I can say that Winsock is Berkley sockets compliant and so you can use select instead of the event driven model. Why did I use the event driven model? Because I still remember using Trumpet Winsock for 3.1 and enabling a feature on it that prints out every winsock call. I did this to learn how to program Winsock. What did I see? Netscape (one of the 1.x versions) in what appeared to be a tight loop selecting the whole time. As a fan of interrupt v. polling, I decided to use the event model.
The event model is also not that arcane to people who do Window API programming. Or PalmOS programming, since it's the same model. I hear Mac operating systems are like that too.
I agree there are cleaner models (Java JDK 1.1+ for instance), but it really isn't as horrible as all that.
Just when I thought I'd seen my last Guru Meditation!
Hey! Now I can look thought the source and find out what those hyper long strings of alphanums where in the GM error. This is a good thing.
The first constrain on the system is that of a "peanut CPU". "The consequences of [this contraint] is that, while strong symmetric cryptography is feasible, modular arithmetic is difficule and so is strong asymmetric cryptography." Because of this, these devices cannot use IPv6. In general, the specification clearly shows why conventional solutions to these problems do not apply to these classes of devices.
For those of you who don't know, SPI does promotion and education of free software systems. They are a good organization and have been affiliated with Debian for a while. Their web page is at http://www.spi-inc.org/.
Isn't this just MicroSoft Bob with voice instead of text bubbles? Will it sell this time? Can we disable these little buddies (I can't figure out how to disable the clip in Word. I've been told it can't be done).
Speaking of buddies, my wife runs a program that has a talking parrot that read webpages out lout while she does stuff and tells her about other webpages that she may be interested in based on what pages she's been to (it also has some "my portal" type service). I wonder if Bill is thinking of buying the technology from them or just crushing them.
Wishing I could remember the name of that program
I can see ads like this one cutting into Linux acceptance. Basically this is an ad for a Linux product saying that the free stuff ain't worth it. The average non-Linux user is going to get from it that inorder to have a stable graphics system on Linux, you have to pay. In the minds of many, they will goon to think that you have to pay for anything good on linux and will become disillusioned with Linux advocates. They will refer to the ad as "proof" that you have to pay to run Linux.
I certainly hope that we all take this as a lesson of what not to do.
Ever since I was a child I've wanted to go into space. I remember reading an article in Wired a few years ago about a company that was planning on offering civilian space cruises. Essentially it was a week for $80K and is supposed to be operational in 2012. Since then I've heard more and more about privatizing the space industry (mostly for turing the launching of satellites over to the private sector) and the possibility that I will be able to do this.
If this technology works, then a launch into space will only cost $75 plus the repairs involved in the trip. It seems like this will bring this dream even closer.
That isn't even to mention the increased feaibility of building larger, more habitable space stations. At this cost, sending the materials up will be much cheaper.
Finally, another great thing this may open is the easy disposal of radioactive waste. With this technology, we may be able to send our waste to Jupiter.
All and all, I think this is tax money well spent.
I really don't know how to take this. I work for a software company that among other things, does online software for clinics. I can tell you that this kind of thing is actually in use. It has medical records, lists of services used (OB, Dietician, etc). Pretty much everything you don't really want online, especially on port 80.
So, from my perspective, this information is already out there for some clinics. All this annoucement means is that they are going to come up with some authentication stuff to (hopefully) make it more secure than it is already.
But then there is another problem: the fact that this is not widespread. It is probably true that most people's records are not online. And it is probably true that few people know about our services and where to go to get the goods. It seems that the future is big websites, with everyone's records online, advertising on eBay, and practicaly begging for breakins. There is a lot of money to be made in blackmail.
But let's face it, the medical industry want this info online. They are begging for it to be online. They want it flying around in XML bewteen hospitals so that an ER doctor can intantly know that the guy whose rolling in is on such and such medication and has this blood type and thse know reactivity problems and these biohazard warnings. And with good reason: this information can and will save lives.
So it is good that a major player is backing the security side of things. Let's just hope that everything is up for public review for holes, etc, and that enough people work to make this thing secure.
Perhaps they can set up a dummy system that has fake information on it and give rewards for cracking it (and telling them the crack). I have faith that there are more people who want to help than people who want to profit.
Maybe I'm just fooling myself into feeling better about it.
My bad. They aren't getting passwords from OperaMail, that's just where the trojans are coming from.
Actually, now that I think about it though, you could write a trojan that gets passwords from the IE5 "remember my password feature". Ugh. Just don't run untrusted programs.
While I agree that the software the AOL uses should be a secure about private information like passwords, ultimately OperaMail has to be able to decrypt the password so it can authenticate with the server. If OperaMail can do this, then a trojan can do it. There was nothing in the item that indictated to me that OperaMail is really at fault here.
Email that may be using a trojan horse-like virus -- the effects of which aren't immediately detected -- arrives at the inbox of an unsuspecting AOL user. One user reported that the attached program bore the name "buddylist.exe." If the user opens the attached file -- an action AOL claims to repeatedly warn users against -- it launches a small program that obtains the user's password off the hard disk and sends it back to the hacker's OperaMail address.
It is really not a good idea to run files that are sent to you, even if those files are sent by what you think is a friend. There have been a few viruses/trojan horses that use the method of looking through the address book of its host and sending itself out as it its from the host user. Because of thise, you just cannot rust executable content that you get in your mailbox/ICQ. In ICQ, you should at least ask the person who is sending it "What is this?". The interactive conversation about the software that is being sent will help verify if it is a real program. Similar verification can be done by mail, although it is more of a pain.
The real solution to all of this, I suppose, is to type your password in everytime you start your emailer, and not use any "remember my password" features. If a program you run remembers your password, then another program run by you can find that password.
This article would have been better if, instead of trying to cut down AOL/OperaMail for something that isn't really its fault, it educated users on the dangers of running foreign programs whether or not they are named "buddylist.exe"