I can remember doing stuff about passwords and encryption in 1977, back when microprocessors were new and wonderful. There was all sorts of stuff buried in the pages of Byte and Dr. Dobbs Journal about this sort of stuff.

And my ISP uses the same password for the POP3 servers as for the service which provides access to mail via webpages, so that you can check your email from a cybercafe.

Yes, and the fact that the security hole that Mitnick used to smack Shinomura would have been closed had Shinomura even read Cochran and Wood (Unix System Security) and not been running rlogin, didn't stop him from making major dollars as an "expert" selling his ghostwritten book about it.

Back in the glory days of the dot-bubble, I only had one large client (a bank) who was even thinking of having us (jet set "fixer" subcontractors for big consulting practices) go through after JD Edwards finished their big, professional looking security review and shoot holes in it.

They do indeed NOT want to know what's wrong at a certain level, they might have to change things! :-)

That's pretty nifty, and probably beats the Britannica MMC for sheer amount of information. I wonder if they'll start selling prebuilt versions of that as a way to support Wikipedia?

Edited by author 10-12-2004 11:37 AM
Speaking of massaging wikipedia SQL dumps, you might be interested to know that I'm doing a contract gig that demands large samples of texts in various languages. Gutenberg is insufficient for many languages...so I wrote a bit of perl that downloads the Wiki dumps, discards the formatting, and generates large monolithic texts that have the odd property of jumping from topic to topic in an alphanetical fashion.

Long live free data!

And if anyone has any idea how to extract the data from the OED CD-ROM ...

I intend to have another go at it soon. It needs doing, even for use on my desktop, because the OED's interface *sucks*, and because it only works in Windows.

At 11:55 AM 10/12/2004, you wrote:
>And if anyone has any idea how to extract the data from the OED
>CD-ROM ...It needs doing, even
>for use on my desktop, because the OED's interface *sucks*, and
>because it only works in Windows.

Yeah, that'd be a great thing to stick on some DarkNet or another, wouldn't it?

Charlie prompted me to check the usual suspects for CompactFlash memory...

64MB is a ripoff, 128MB is only a quid more. The best price/size ratio seems to be 256MB, but that looks to be down to UK VAT on imports.

For my use, a digital camera, I wouldn't get anything bigger than 512MB. It keeps the job of copying the pics to a CD-ROM from getting complicated.

Charlie,

I used to work at Britannica. Some of the files in the structure of the DVD look familiar to me - it looks like they're reusing elements of the online site's architecture.

Unfortunately, there appears to be some kind of encryption on the data.

I'd love to be able to get at the data and do a native Cocoa implementation for OS X.

As of right now, it looks like 1GB is the cheapest per unit of storage for SD memory. How times change!

Wikipedia's text is supposedly 380MB, which compresses to 100-200 or so, but nobody seems to be able to get it to work on Plucker (am looking around for a solution to the same problem, right now.) So perhaps I can even include some images in there, if I get the right solution to the problem.

They've left us a legacy of a standard BIOS (bles their hearts and reverse engineers) and a bunch of dumb quotes on how Mainframes will never be outdone by desktops.

But they got us where we are now.

Big Blue - a tip of the hat to you.

I don't think IBM leaving the PC market means that they're getting out of the x86 market. The company I work for uses (and leases systems based on...) large IBM servers running Linux, and there's not been one peep from anyone about IBM selling off their x series line.

I think that "leaving the PC market" means "getting out of Windows machines", leaving IBM as a vendor of expensive PCs that are labelled "server" because they ship with Linux instead of Windows.

Orc -- absolutely. What did I say about the razor-thin margins in the PC world? IBM doesn't do razor-thin margins.

I wouldn't, however, be surprised to see IBM still selling PCs in a couple of years' time. They'll be branded "IBM" and you'll be able to buy them via IBMs e-commerce front end, but it'll actually just be a franchise job for whoever buys the PC business from them, with IBM skimming a percentage off the top simply for providing the trademark and the website.

Meanwhile, as usual, if you want a real IBM computer you'll go to IBM and show them your wallet and they'll book a time to fly the engineers in and assemble the components in your dinosaur pen.