ptalk > April 2009

I am a hacker

A reader from Maine asks:

Are your computer skills such that you could be a hacker if you wanted to
be? I’m just curious.

Gentle reader,

I am a hacker.

The popular press has co-opted the label “hacker”, which was originally a compliment of your high degree of computer skills, to mean a person who uses those skills for evil.1

If you are asking “Could I break into someone’s computer”, the answer is “yes”. There is no magic here. I started my computer career working in computer security at MITRE. And, believe it or not, things have not really changed much since those days. If anything, computer security has gone downhill quite a bit. No one has ever succeeded in commercializing the research we did (to build a secure system from the ground up), instead commercial enterprises have all focussed on selling “barn door” solutions, so called because they are attempts to close the barn door, despite the fact that a lot of (Trojan) horses have already been through…

—

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker(computing)#Hackerdefinition_controversy “Hacker (computing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”

I'm replacing all the wall outlets in my house with USB jacks...

This hint made me realize the answer to Martha Stewart’s problem! USB is the universal power supply. Who needs 110v? 5v suits me just fine…

Solving Global Warming

The government really ought to just nationalize the credit card industry, stop printing cash, and give everyone a free credit card. Then they can take 2.5% of everything that anyone ever spends (instead of AMEX/Visa/MC/etc.) and do away with the dumb income tax system. The savings in overhead, record-keeping, filing, etc. would probably snap the economy right out of the recession. And all those CPA’s could get real jobs and put their math skills toward solving something important like global warming…

P.S., Heck, global warming would probably be solved just by turning off all the computers that are wasting cpu-cycles folding, spindling, and mutilating tax returns today.

Silverlight != Apple Pie

Wow. How can MS be so stupid? They bundle Flash with Windows and not Silverlight? Doh!

First, baseball wanted Microsoft to make it possible for users to download Silverlight without having to possess administrative rights. When people are at work, it’s often the company that possesses those rights and employees would need authorization to download the player. That frustrated plenty of MLB.com subscribers, according to the sources

Why Major League Baseball dumped Microsoft’s Silverlight | The Industry Standard

Posted via email from PTWithy

Silverlight != Apple Pie

Wow. How can MS be so stupid? They bundle Flash with Windows and not Silverlight? Doh!

First, baseball wanted Microsoft to make it possible for users to download Silverlight without having to possess administrative rights. When people are at work, it’s often the company that possesses those rights and employees would need authorization to download the player. That frustrated plenty of MLB.com subscribers, according to the sources

Why Major League Baseball dumped Microsoft’s Silverlight | The Industry Standard

Posted via email from PTWithy

Silverlight != Apple Pie

Wow. How can MS be so stupid? They bundle Flash with Windows and not Silverlight? Doh!

First, baseball wanted Microsoft to make it possible for users to download Silverlight without having to possess administrative rights. When people are at work, it’s often the company that possesses those rights and employees would need authorization to download the player. That frustrated plenty of MLB.com subscribers, according to the sources.

Why Major League Baseball dumped Microsoft’s Silverlight | The Industry Standard”

Posted via email from PTWithy

OL 4.3!

We are pleased to announce that OpenLaszlo 4.3 is available now. You can download it from the OpenLaszlo Download page. It is the recommended platform for all application development for the SWF8, SWF9, and DHTML runtimes. OpenLaszlo 4.3 is a major release, with almost 300 bugs fixed since OpenLaszlo 4.2 introduced the SWF9 runtime.

OpenLaszlo 4.3 Released

‘nuff sed.