I tried to set up RedHat 9.0 from the single CD that Mato gave me and have decided that these guys are so destined for the big time. No kidding, RedHat are going to be the Mainframe Boys of Linux. Their installation routine was designed by the same guy who wrote IBM's OS/400 operating system, paid according to how many commands he could invent. RedHot 9.0 boots into a menu that gives you a choice of intallation roadmaps. Choose one and you dive into solid retro installation chrome, hefty text making way for a first-grade graphical installer. Exactly one choice per page, no less, no more. The installer checked the CD for consistency. It asked what partition manager to use. It gave me a choice of boot managers and asked me to confirm, twice. It gave me a choice of five installation models, all with or without a custom-configured firewall. I had my choice of two GUI managers, or a text-mode Linux. I configured every package I wanted, and chose my language, keyboard, and then timezone from an animated map of the world, a blinking light for every major population centre including Tivalu. It formatted the disk. It created partitions. It prepared to install... it began to install. It installed. Package by package, step by step, it installed for over an hour. It animated every step with intelligent, informed, useful adverts proclaiming the joys of OpenOffice, the perils of perl, the trolling Gnome, the Kinky K desktop... and after about two fun packed, totally invoicable plus expenses, constructive and intricately detailed hours, after about the length of a foreign movie, no beer popcorn or murders but a decent plot and lots of subtitles, RedHat 9.0 stopped, ejected its CD and said, grimly:

"Please insert cdrom #2..."

I blinked. I blinked again and tossed the RedHot CD into the garbage. Found a virgin Xandros on the desk. Booted into a flashy installer that asked "First time here?" I said "Yeah..." and it said, "OK, let me handle this..." Five minutes later and two questions later my system was installed, configured, rebooted, and showing me Slashdot and my latest comments, all modded "-1 Troll".

Across the hall my friend Mato, who always has a better answer than I'm thinking of a question for, said, "Yah, but with Knoppix it only takes fifty seconds..."

There is a motto here. Xandros is sweet, Knoppix is faster, but RedHot's installer is really a ba.. -uh!

Microsoft Windows: "The Closest Thing To Real Software Money Can Buy!!"

-- Heironymouscoward, 11 December 2003

So we went and built a prototype. Beautifully simple: a Technics turntable, two optical mice, a Linux notebook and Sweep, an OSS package that lets you mix and scratch digital audio in realtime.

The two mice track the rotation speed/direction of the turntable, and the angle of the arm. With this one can calculate exactly where the music should be playing.

It did not, I have to admit, quite work. And then the cousin of a friend told us about 'FinalScratch', a commercial product that does exactly what we were trying to do, with a simple and elegant solution: special vinyls that hold a sound pattern which can be decoded into an absolute position.

And than I explained this to my DJ friend who said, "yeah, but if you can't see where the tracks stop and start, it's no use".

Moral: even a great idea is unlikely to be original, and even a great implementation of a great idea is unlikely to be entirely useful.

10 Things I'd Like To See In Slashdot. Perhaps some of these exist in the paid version. I'm too lazy to check:

1. Tradeable Karma: I give you karma, you sell me mod points.

2. Anonymous Slashdot credit cards: hey, my Karma is worth something, no?

3. Supercomment ratings - stopping at 5 gives excessive power to mod-down trolls. Allow comment ratings to go as high as they like.

4. Rolling karma: average of last twenty postings.

5. Private discussions between Slashdot aliases, using the existing message system.

6. Ratings on stories. It should be possible to get a story rated "-1 Blatant advertising" or "-1 Redundant".

7. A wider story submission structure. Too many of my excellent story submissions are rejected, this must change, and the sooner the better. :) I'd prefer a peer-review system more along the lines of kuro5hin.

8. Fully-skinned Slashdot site. The content should be produced as XML, allowing arbitrary front-ends to add their preferred look and feel. Come on, this is 2003 (or did I miss something?)

9. "Slow down cowboy" should not (and I repeat this, SHOULD NOT) cause one's text to vanish. Many of my incisive and witty comments have been lost to humanity because Slashdot decided I was a few seconds too quick on the button.

10. Some new ambition in the direction Slashdot is going. OK, we have a great news discussion site, but how about turning the Slashdot effect into a weapon for good? I have some ideas (naturally these were rejected as story submissions). For instance, I believe Slashdot could be a viable alternative to the W3C as a forum for proposing and testing new Internet standards, especially the small experimental standards that are the lifeblood of progress.

11. There is no eleven.

12. See 11.

I read this discussion about population control by Pieter Hintjens.

One quote:

We don't really have any control over events, neither at the small scale of our own lives, nor at the large scale of planetary life. We are almost totally ignorant of and blind to the forces that direct us. Our destiny is not in our own hands, and it never has been. We are actors in the game of life, but the lines we speak come from an evolutionary past we cannot control, by definition, and barely understand.
No-one and nothing is in charge. Understanding this is a first step to enlightenment. I do not know whether there are further steps.

I have to admit his writing is very close to my own ideas. What do you think?

A blantant theft from a site called Slashdot, with a twist.

The problem with video conferencing is that you can't look your correspondent in the eyes, you're watching the screen while the camera is just a little bit higher.

My solution is the Gremlin, a doll about 12" high with a large, expressive face controlled by a hundred or so tiny motors. Its eyes hold the dual cameras that track the person speaking to it. Its mouth lip-synchs with the voice of the person at the other end. Its facial expressions imitate those of the person at the other end.

It has a reactive skin that changes color under computer control. Using simple rules of highlighting and shading, it can create a fair replica of any person's face.

Both callers find themselves speaking to a realistically expressive face.

The dolls plug into a computer and are sold as simple perhiperals.

Posting an email address to Slashdot is too indiscrete for my purposes. A telephone number can be abused. Perhaps the simplest way to meet is the old-fashioned way, in a dimly-lit cafe, for instance near the Bourse.

Inspired by the insipid story of 'will you be my friend' (the answer is a firm "no") badges.

The problem is certainly there: dating is expensive, inefficient, and far too random. Surely there are accurate ways of finding your soulmate in a crowded room or nightclub without the hassle and expense of mismatches.

MDPA/6 makes the dating game a thing of the anachronistic past. Forget horoscopes, common interests, ages, and ethnic origin. Even a perfact match in these departments cannot deliver true love, unless it's narcistic.

My extensive studies, both theoretical and practical, have discovered the answer, which I'm now prepared to unleash on the world. Not just an answer, but an implementation that will shock you to your very roots. If you're a lonely romantic tree, that is. If you're a blase human of the 21st Century you will likely yawn and click 'Next!' Very well, I will make my stand and take my chances.

We start with the discovery some years ago of one of the primary biological basis for sexual attraction. If (s)he smells good, (s)he probably is. Quote from the article: "We smell best to a person whose genetically based immunity to disease differs most from our own."

Next we add the recent development of biosensors on chips which allow instant analysis of tissue samples to give pertinent information. In this case, we'll program our little biosensor to build an HLA/MHC map for the wearer. In theory a biosensor is not needed, one could build a HLA/MHC map when buying the ring and programme it into the ring. But I like gadgets, and this will make the ring more 'plug and play', so to speak.

Thirdly, we add BlueTooth to the ring, so that it can scan for and talk to other rings in the area. The negotiation process is simple: the rings look for other rings with the most different HLA/MHC maps, indicating the best chances of profound sexual attraction. On finding a good to excellent match, the ring will light up with a specific color. Look around, find someone with the ring of the same color, that's your date for the evening.

The Love Ring will cost quite a lot: starting at $299 and rising in various steps to a $4999 gold-and-diamond affair. The more expensive rings can lie to the cheaper ones.

This is an old idea, I'm just putting it here for the record.

Problem statement: there are still too few people enjoying the wonders of massive copyright violations. This smallish number creates a viable target for the *A boys.

Solution: The Granny Box.

This is the hardware, roughly:

  1. small black box, domestic DVD player format
  2. DVD drive (read-only, nothing fancy)
  3. HFHD (huge flipping hard disk), 250Gb+
  4. low-cost tiny PC, 256MG RAM, 1Ghz CPU
  5. video: TV out, with IR remote controller
  6. audio: 5+1 decoder
  7. network interface
  8. USB ports
  9. 128Mb flash memory (bootable)

This, roughly is the software:

  1. Linux operating system
  2. Auto-configuring firewall/router/proxy
  3. UML running arbitrary images

The standard operating system software boots from the flash memory and loads a number of UML images as virtual machines. One of these is the firewall/router/proxy, which automatically connects to whatever network it finds, grabs an IP address, and locks down the system securely.

That is the standard, default package. Now we come to the hack.

This is a box meant to be modded. A Granny Box mod is a Linux distribution plus applications that is burnt onto CD and slipped into the Granny Box's DVD slot. The system detects it and loads it into a UML virtual machine.

Our first mod will be a media application that does something like this:

  - Inserting a DVD or CD of any kind will launch an application (mplayer is our first choice) that allows the user to select/play the media.

  - Simultaneously with this, the media is also ripped to disk and queued for encoding.

  - The user is encouraged to leave the box switched on through the use of a small blinking led that blinks orange when the box is encoding.

  - Lastly, and not leastly, the box joins a p2p network and shares everything it has.

The box crawls the p2p network finding media of a similar nature to that played by the user. This is done through several techniques, but the simplest is the 'More of the same' principle.

To protect privacy (Granpad likes Sylvia Saint, Granny has a taste for S&M), the media stored on the box can be segmented into user areas, each protected by a PIN code.

Not content with turning millions of honest citizens into pirates, we will produce other titles on loadable Linux disks: games, speciality media titles (like the complete works of Wagner on DVD/ogg), and so on.

Comments welcome.

Speaking to a friend who's a trance-techno DJ, he's hurting because vinyl is getting so expensive. 10 Euro, he says, for a 5 minute piece. But a working DJ needs dozens of these each week, always the latest and newest stuff.

Pioneer have a cd-based turntable that DJs like, but it's not the same. Good, yes, but it's not as good as vinyl.

So, this prompted MDPA/4. The concept is a modded dual-platter turntable, consisting of:

  - laser diode and reader mounted on the needle heads
  - rotation sensor on the playback arms
  - internals augmented with a digital music player
  - small touch screen allows selection of left and right tracks

The original audio circuits are completely disconnected, although in principle they could be left in place for the fun. The laser diode and rotation sensor tracks the movement of the head across the vinyl and this movement (track play, skip left/right, back, slow/fast) is translated by the media player into a realistic simulated sound.

If the DJ picks up the needle and drops it again a few tracks further, the digital playback follows. If the DJ scratches the music, the playback scratches. If the DJ slows or speeds up the record,... you get the picture.

The advantages of this design? The DJ gets a pure vinyl feeling, finger-tip control over that glorious black plastic. The record companies and artists producing the original pieces have a much cheaper distribution mechanism.

Implementation of the media player: probably needs to be based on a lossless compression format (even WAV files), and using a harddrive for storage. The use of a lossless format may help with the main problem, which is to ensure a perfect playback with no noticeable lag.

The player would have to be calibrated for a particular vinyl. This is done simply by playing the record once, so that the needle and rotation sensor can track and map the surface. This mapping can be overlaid onto the track being played so that a perfect match can be made between the position of the playback head, and the portion of music being played.

Optional extras: a CD reader which loads tracks of a CD, digitises them, and adds them to the database for later selection.

Price: should be doable for about $200-400, depending on the amount of storage provided.

Instant poll:

Who smoked the most crack in 2003?

    (_) SCO
    (_) Belkin
    (_) Verisign
    (_) *A
    (_) All of the above
    (_) CowboyNeal
    (_) YIS I can't afford crack!

This one comes from a discussion on /. today about spam.

Spam, spam, glorious spam. It's not getting any better, despite creative solutions of all kinds. And how can it? For every inventive and courageous spamfighter, there is an equally desperate and inventive spammer. Necessity breeds invention and what man makes, man can hack.

To me the end game is clear: all data transferring in through the firewall - email, HTTP, ICQ, ... - will eventually be treated as hostile unless it is assured to be safe.

The days when the Internet was a global village happily exchanging high moral values by NNTP are dead and gone.

The trick will be to extract the legitimate data from the mass of corrupted garbage that will wash around the fibre optic oceans of the Net. Data mining? I already do this... over a thousand spams a week, and somewhere in there are several dozen vital business and personal emails. I miss a few each month, it's rarely tragic, but this is despite having the latest tools (SpamAssassin) to help.

A consumer PC is infected before it can download the Windows patches it needs to be "secure". 90% (99%?) of all new home PCs bought this year will be infected before their owners have time to click 'Windows Update'.

My solution is a system of data delivery via a global trust network. Six steps around the world. If I want to send data to someone, I send it to my data broker. This is a company that spends its whole time checking its client list: clients are vetted, must pay deposits, and generally treated with the same paranoia that a bank would treat a new client asking for a home loan.

You can't simply connect and start sending data. When your reputation is low, the price is high. As you build up a good karma, your price drops until it's very low or free.

The broker, in turn, speaks to other brokers and passes your data along in turn. Brokers pay for this, so your money is actually used to finance the trust network.

You can choose brokers: the most highly rated are also the most expensive, but you will be certain that your data will arrive, because no-one will refuse data from an AAA broker.

The system does not require micropayments or any other complex financials: you either pay upfront for a bulk traffic package, or pay an invoice as you would a credit card. As an unknown and untrusted client, you will have a tiny allocation that you can abuse with little risk to the broker. As your reputation (with that broker, mind you) improves, you get larger and larger allocations.

It's up to the broker to implement the necessary checks and balances so that a spammer cannot create an account and then cause havoc.

Now implementation. This has to happen at the packet level, cover all protocols. All data has to be encrypted between parties, so that it's impossible to someone else's identity and steal their reputation. And it has to happen in realtime, without slowing down interactive use of the web.

I think the parties best placed to make this happen are large web email providers, who can implement 'guaranteed email' delivery to and from their clients. This will be a paid service, spam free, and with delivery reciepts.

That's the idea for now.

Cars should be able to show emotions. I'm not just talking about the brake lights that shine brighter when you brake harder, I'm talking about a fully controllable paint job that can flick from blue to red, to green and back.

When some jerk drives too close behind me, my car will start to glow angry red. "Back off, dude!" When the cops are prowling, the car goes discreet black, "nothing to see here, move on."

When it rains, the car will turn violent neon yellow, visible from a mile away. When it's beautiful blue weather, it will turn a reflective silver, a gleaming mirror.

And finally, when it's parked in my street, in one of the worse areas of town, it will look rusty and cracked, a poor man's car.

Implementation: an all-over digital skin made from the same stuff those building-size disposable flatscreens are made of. (Yeah, we're 2010 already!)

This will be an irregular section for wacky ideas that I want to publish before some jerk places a patent on it and steals my millions. There's a logic in there somewhere... Anyhow!

Today's entry: self-rotating web adverts. Yes, you read about it here first! (PatPend Heironymous Coward 2003).

Description: instead of showing a new banner ad for each new web page, the advert shall be reloaded au-to-ma-ti-cal-ly every ten seconds using (gasp!) a JavaScript timer (gosh!). Yes, the logic will be to wait ten seconds, the fetch a new random advert from the ad server.

Advantages: many more impressions per viewer, and direct targetting for the morbid crowd who have nothing better to do on a cold winter evening than to watch the banner ads. "It's Art, Jim, but not as we know it!"

Implementation:

var the_timeout = setTimeout ("javascript:refresh()", 10000);

That's all from More Damn Prior Art for today. Tune in again soon for more news!!!

Heironymous' Thought for the Day:

"You can measure a man by the size of his lawyer."

Context: Heironymous is learning about company law the 'interesting' way, and particularly enjoying the ongoing chessgame between the two lawyers. Mine is going to win, I can see it. The other has already regretted starting the game.

'Nuf said about this subject.