dionysiac

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Thanks, Whoaa. I was always carrying the iPad plus a pad of paper to every meeting three years ago when I started this fiasco :) There were other drawing & notes apps out there, but this is the one I wanted.

dionysiac

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Have a look at http://betterexplained.com/ - Kalid's got some of the most intuitive explanations I've seen.

dionysiac

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

And things are continuing to change, too. More and more FPGAs and CPLDs are showing up in end user electronics - our hardware is becoming software.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

It's an old one, but I still think of it every time someone is trying to come up with an acronym: http://dilbert.com/fast/1993-06-23/

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

IMO, A big danger of implementing centralized authentication across multiple sites is that will make social engineering schemes aimed at stealing a user's credentials more plausible and effective.

I know that systems such as OpenID and others perform authentication directly between the user and thetrusted provider (google, facebook, twitter, etc), and that the site ends up with a one-time token that confirms the user's identity. The site requesting authentication never gets the actual password to the openID account, which makes this approach viable in a technical security sense.

But here's the thing: general users are getting used to entering their centralized credentials to perform actions on untrusted sites. Technical users understand the design. We can confirm that, yes, TwitScoop does indeed direct us to twitter.com/oauth/... (no HTTPS, but that's another story).

Regular users posting a comment on a blog, though, don't see any difference between giving their credentials to a trusted Google login site and entering their credentials into some form on a blog.

If, for example, logging in with Facebook credentials becomes common, it would be trivial to create a rogue blog which collects login information. Fill it with a few incendiary posts, possibly create an official-looking Facebook login page that doesn't display its URL, and it would be possible to capture quite a few sets of credentials.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Hence the -maxdepth 3 param:

  # time find / -maxdepth 3 -perm -7 -type d -print
  /tmp
  /var/tmp

  real    0m0.034s
  user    0m0.005s
  sys     0m0.028s

This was run on a pretty anemic VPS. Might have to up the depth to 4 if it doesn't return anything, but IMO that's pretty unlikely.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

  find / -maxdepth 3 -perm -7 -type d -print

and tweak as needed.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

He did do some trading when he was around: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/einsteins-relative...

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

"The rest just want to forget about whatever is going on in their lives and get high. Why can't people just admit the truth?"

Many people consuming alcohol are doing so for similar reasons.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Storing something like a username in client-side data and then trusting its accuracy is effectively delegating your authentication outside you circle of control. Saying that encryption will make this magically secure is like saying encryption makes for effective DRM - eventually it will be compromised and you will have a systemic problem.

Storing, say, a username and a password hash in your encrypted cookie is at least as secure as direct authentication at each page load; even if they break your encryption they still have to know the admin's password.

Start with the assumption that the locks you use for security will fail, and ask "how will this break?" If we take the encryption out of the picture, do we trust the client to log in as root (or similar) with just a username and no password? The lock in question (as I understand it) is failing for an unrelated (information disclosure) reason. The design decision to lean so hard on the lock is what makes this such an issue.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

"..Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work."

This.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

It's getting there. Check out http://ccmixter.org/ .

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

The man wants to enrich himself by boning the hottest chick he can, and possibly at her expense if she is seeking a longer relationship. It's perceived sexual gratification vs perceived financial gratification. Both are similarly illusory IMO.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

For those interested, "The (Mis)Behavior of Markets" by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson examines, among many other things, the 1987 "Black Monday" event. Mandelbrot theorizes that sudden, disproportionate events such as these may be much more common than today's models and distributions predict. It's a great, accessible read even for those not mathematically inclined.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Masers (microwaves) were actually developed before lasers were, and do work pretty well for power transmission (as these things go - still quite a loss). You have the problem of directionality and tracking, though.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I have been looking into drafting tables for this very purpose - used ones can often be found in the local buy & sell for quite cheap. Being adjustable by design, they look ideal (not sure about weight capacity though). Anyone have any experience using one of these as a computer desk?

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

"It's all about expectations with the iPad."

My thoughts exactly. Purely as a reading device, it will be fantastic for scientific papers which are usually in hard formatted PDFs. Reflowing them for a small e-ink device sucks and makes them hard to read. Having color is a huge bonus (10 shades of grey in a color coded graph is a royal pain). The iPad + the GoodReader app will let you take hundreds of papers and technical books with you. The fact that it has a pretty good web browser and email app with WiFi is an awesome bonus.

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

The touch screen will not provide an adequate replacement for buttons and knobs - if you emulate buttons and knobs, that is. With capacitive multi-touch, there's a real opportunity to rethink the interface here. Interaction in the past was limited to what hardware can do in real life, so why should we keep those limitations now that they don't exist? The music world, unfortunately, has this "old-school" mentality for the most part. The focus is on previous hits and successes with synths and hardware that worked in the past (in this case the Electribe), not with what could be created with new ones. There's a real opportunity here that will take time to play out.

As for the sound card - I agree, the DAC in the iPad is probably similar to the other iDevices in the past.. Pretty good for consumer standards, but poor by pro standards - not to mention multiple outs, ins, etc. Where the iPad stands to gain the most is as a remote controller for a larger rig running on a laptop - via Bluetooth or Wifi. Heck the audio jack could be used for modulated data and have it interpreted by the host machine as a control input, a la Serato et al. Ever since the $2k Lemur people have been hungering for this - it will happen sooner or later!

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

It upgrades well to a HTML page if you don't have flash. FTFY :)

dionysiac

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

"I need a Mac to program the iPad? Why?"

You need a computer to transfer data to it, so why not to program it? Yes, the toolchain is not available for windows, but that's at least understandable. The iPad is not currently marketed as a stand-alone device.

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