Slashdot Mirror

The m505 is not the answer. Geek.com had the folloing story about the m505 having problems with its USB hotsync. Here is the article.

Microsoft bought out Digital Anvil in Dec. 2000

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2000nov/gam20001 205003170.htm

More often than buying up the companies, they just make deals with them where they are the only platform that that the game can be developed for.

I think that's what this is trying to avoid. The whole problem with National Id cards is what you just described.

Biometric encoding would eliminate this because you could easily match a peron to an id card.

My problem with this kind of stuff is just the security involved. I'm a System Administrator and so I know first hand how lazy people can be when it comes to security. People always choose convenience over security. No matter what. And the U.S government is no exception.

A couple small examples:

In the gulf war a U.S Navy ship was compromised and e-mail was leaked.

Presently there's a group of blackhat's calling themselves "The Deceptive Duo" who have succesfully hacked into government systems..

I don't want to trust every single piece of information that's very personal to an irresponsible government that doesn't take the security of it's network seriously. Because most likely everyone's information will be stored in a single database that government officials can use to lookup your information. It's already happening it's just not as centralized as they want it to be.

I guess the idea is that if you get pulled over the cop will take a hand or retinal scan, go to his cruiser and get every single piece of information he could possibly need to know about you from a central database.

That scares because of both security and privacy concerns that I have.

--
Garett

I think that's what this is trying to avoid. The whole problem with National Id cards is what you just described.

Biometric encoding would eliminate this because you could easily match a peron to an id card.

My problem with this kind of stuff is just the security involved. I'm a System Administrator and so I know first hand how lazy people can be when it comes to security. People always choose convenience over security. No matter what. And the U.S government is no exception.

A couple small examples:

In the gulf war a U.S Navy ship was compromised and e-mail was leaked.

Presently there's a group of blackhat's calling themselves "The Deceptive Duo" who have succesfully hacked into government systems..

I don't want to trust every single piece of information that's very personal to an irresponsible government that doesn't take the security of it's network seriously. Because most likely everyone's information will be stored in a single database that government officials can use to lookup your information. It's already happening it's just not as centralized as they want it to be.

I guess the idea is that if you get pulled over the cop will take a hand or retinal scan, go to his cruiser and get every single piece of information he could possibly need to know about you from a central database.

That scares because of both security and privacy concerns that I have.

--
Garett

Or do what I did and get yourself a Apple IIFX(another ex-supercomputer, just a bit cheaper), put a Radius Rocket in it and try running Linux on it.

If you want it a bit easier, get yourself a IICX and run NetBSD on it (nice and easy).

Slashdot:
Eight new security holes in IIS

Any Site with Journalistic integrity:
Microsoft fixes Eight new security holes in IIS

http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2002apr/gee200204110 11151.htm
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/04/10/ 020410hnflaws.xml

>I have a 1.47Ghz processor on my K7S5A...

You're lucky then.

These people haven't been so lucky.

This person seemed to think installing a hacked BIOS would solve the problem. It did. A perusal of ECS' site shows they've improved upon PCChips service (they provide BIOS updates for the K7S5A, so I'm assuming they didn't pirate this BIOS, or they've learned to hack it properly), but as of December/January ECS motherboards with the incompatible BIOS were still streaming into the store I worked at. The K7S5A BIOS support page doesn't list a specific 1.4 ghz fix, but it looks like they fixed it just in time for this year (BIOS V.01/11/09). I guess 3 months waiting time isn't too bad.

Perhaps with the BIOS fix this board isn't junk, but long-term reliability is definately not a trait associated with PCChips products, IMHO.

A lack of testing advertised features (and XP support was advertised on these motherboards) is sure proof the company doesn't care for its customers. This occasionally happens to name brand companies (Abit comes to mind) but is, in my opinion, the status quo for PCChips and their cronies. Maybe ECS will eventually escape the bad name of their suppliers -- they are providing far more support for their products than I expected to see.

As with all things, only time will tell. Perhaps in a year or two I might be able to forgive ECS prdocts for being PCChips knockoffs. We'll just have to see! :-)

Anyways,

Whip out that soldering iron and fix it yourself the manual way if you choose.

The FAQ will probably help explain this problem better than myself.

Its based on their GScube arch which is nothing like the current PS2's arch.
Only if consisting of multiple instances of the PS2's Graphics Synthesizer rendering subsystem in parallel is "nothing like" the PS2. Reading the first sentence of the second google hit supplies this clue. For free.

Sony Cell technology
NEWS
IBM, Sony, and Toshiba announced a partnership today in Tokyo to develop new, faster, smaller chips code-named Cell. Over the next 5 years the companies will spend US$400 million to break the 0.10 micron barrier. Cell chips will be targeted for use in high-speed Internet access and network-based computing.

Sony Computer Entertainment (the gaming folks) is the Sony division involved in the partnership, and it already has working arrangements with Toshiba--the two companies formed a joint venture to design and produce the PlayStation 2's chip. Adding IBM to the mix helps all three companies reduce development costs ... and Sony also gets to license IBM's 0.10 micron processing technology, which will probably be used in the PlayStation 3 (PS2 chips are currently at 0.18 and 0.25 microns, though Sony has announced a move to 0.13 micron technology) and other upcoming devices from Sony Computer Entertainment. Development work on the new Cell chips will take place in an Austin, Texas IBM facility and will eventually be produced at a new IBM fab in East Fishkill, New York, slated for completion next year.

IBM will also announce today that it is joining the Extreme Ultra Violet Consortium, another group working to shrink micron processes. Industry watchers think IBM's move may help boost the EUV technology's chances of success.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

Google is your friend!

I think Intel's procs are low performance compared to other, bigger/meaner procs. Maybe Alphas?

Intel bought the complete Alpha technology from Compaq -- including engineers, software developers and infrastructure managers (June 25th, 2001).

Just wait til this comes out. And then you'll find out why everything is so hard-wired it's going to be really hard to scale through generations without recompiling is an incorrect assumption.

Why doesn't standard power supplies come with a small builtin UPS?

I lived at a place for a short time where the fuses blew now and then. It only took me a few seconds to fix it, but it caused loss of soem data and an unclean crash.

I only need, say, one-and-a-half minute. When the UPS looses power from the net, it waits a few seconds to see if it was transient, then alerts the user (the user probably knows, as the lights may have gone out). If power isn't restored within one minute, the system will begin to take down and save large processes. When, finally, the "I'm dying" signal comes, the system will do a clean shutdown.

While I know of a few internal UPSes, some of which seems neat, I only know about one such unit, Amsdell IPPS, but that company seems rather dead. I know they still exist, but I'm not sure they will ever power an Athlon. Also, it comes with short cables, I need some long ones for my cabinet, and you need to take a wire out of the cabinet. I looked at my Mobo, and I have an SMBus, perhaps that could be used for this purpose?

I mean, this should be widespread...

I guess the answer to my question is that most people are so used to crashes, a crash because of power loss isn't such an issue... :-)

Saskatchewan ... approx 990,000

Here's a quote on DSL in Saskatchewan:

"I live in a city with a population of 170,000 and our Telco Company Sasktel has had ADSL offered here since 1996. Our cable company offers high speed even to small towns in our province. You know your person in charge of deploying this technology isn't moving fast enough when Farm Boys are playing Tribes2 with a 40 Ping."

Here's a list of small communities that should have DSL by now. Their projections for the next few years were amazing, something like 60-85% of the province having DSL by 2005 (only 40-45% of the province lives in the two main cities > 25,000 people).

It'll probably be delayed a bit now, seeing as how the Sept 11th thing meant that money that was going to go into DSL for Libraries/Schooles in rural areas (which would have effectively subsidized SaskTel entry into *really* tiny towns, pops of 1000 or so), is now going to security in the latest budget.

You may want to read this about the Mckinley, successor to Merced.

As far as I know, Merced is HP's design. Mckinley is Intel's. So... you could say Intel is learning from their mistakes by letting HP engineers do a good job.

Anyway, it's a mutually beneficial thing because HP doesn't have the resources to market and drive the product, while Intel doesn't have the engineers or resources to design and implement the architecture in a 'good' way. Intel provides process and HP provides layout, and together they will take over the world!

At least that's what I've heard and read. Myself, I own a G4 and use a Mac, it's not exactly as if Itanium is going to strike me down anytime soon.

The lawsuit will now move on the the penalty phase. The court will decide if Palm has to pay damages and if it is allowed to continue to use the technology. Xerox will urge the court to either require Palm to stop using Graffiti entirely or pay royalties.

Xerox sued U.S. Robotics, which was later bought by 3Com, back in 1997, claiming that Graffiti infringed a patent Xerox received in 1997. Palm was later spun off from 3Com.

Xerox originally filed for its patent in October of 1993. The first handhelds running the Palm OS, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, were released in April of 1996 by U.S. Robotics. These included Graffiti. A question not yet answered is why Jeff Hawkins didn't file for a patent on Graffiti earlier when he had been developing the idea since the 80s.

In June of last year, a judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that Graffiti wasn't similar enough to Unistrokes. In October, the suit was reinstated and moved to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York.

Judge Michael Telesca declared today that Xerox's patent is "valid and enforceable", and that Graffiti does infringe on it.

It is not yet known whether Xerox plans to sue other makers of handheld operating systems, like Microsoft, who also include some form of handwriting recognition.

"Xerox always aggressively defends its patent portfolio -- a valuable corporate asset. Today's ruling vindicates our position that our handwriting-recognition patent was infringed. Either Palm will have to cease production of its hand-held organizer or license the technology from Xerox," said Christina Clayton, Xerox general counsel.

Thanks to montyburns for the tip. -Ed"

Blatanly ripped from Palminfocenter.com

Unistrokes picture - Unistroke.gif

Because the reviews historically have not been kind.

It's neat. It's a swell toy. But it's expensive and produces photos of dubious quality. Anyone who has a couple hundred dollars to waste on something like this probably knows what he's getting into, but it's a damn shame the technology isn't quite there yet.

Watches are something everyone has, and it would be neat to get to the point where digital cameras are equally ubiquitous (albeit a bit scary from privacy and surveillance perspectives). But what are the odds that a consumer line like this will catch on when its flagship example is such a poor value? Most mainstream consumer products we see today started out expensive and crappy, but many more aren't around today because of those same drawbacks.

I suppose it'll change when another big player like Sony gets into the act. Though Sony is every bit as proprietary as Casio and perhaps more so, we'd at least benefit from having different proprietary techs banging it out on the open market. And maybe if I can transfer my low-res expensive watch photos to my low-res expensive pda, I'll feel better about having already wasted my money.

Speed: 2.0GHz?
Bus Speed: 133*2=266
L1 Cache: 128K
L2 Cache: 256K
Microns: .13=130nm
Form Factor: Socket A

I think 21264B is the beefed up version with 0.18 Micron. You should look at the specs: here, while 21264 is here. You can then compare it side by side.

Here is a good article about the iPod on geek.com.

Here is a good article about the iPod on geek.com.

Oh, yeah, and of course Verisign runs a really secure operation. What could be worse than issuing digital signatures for the company who provides 90% of all operating systems? Read this if you want to see how good Verisign is.

This was #1 for "Verisign fucks up" on Google. Of course, a search for "Verisign screws up" yields this article at geek.com coming in at #4 about MS & VeriSign working together on ".NET"... So, it looks like your desire to see Verisign involved is happening :)

Psion has already done this. It looks pretty damn cool, as does the other prototype they came out with (three flip-out screens). It's too damn bad they have suspended consumer market operations (for the time being... maybe... ok, maybe they didn't mean it... hell, I dunno... I can hope, can't I?). You can check out their prototypes here (at the bottom of the page, two of the last three pictures). There was another site that had more and better pictures, but I can't find it now.

Steve Gibson maintains that raw socket support should not be included in Windows XP because the consumer version of XP defaults at running you as administrator (a.k.a. root) mode.

That's not what I remember. The feds and the states have filed suits against the record companies for trying to fix prices (See http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/q22000/gee200081 0002089.htm. As that item mentions, the feds had their own antitrust action against the record companies.

If you think I'm joking take a peek at the following.

geek

new

UMich

And my favorite, check out his Darpa funding: Quinn

You have to give them some credit for trying to promote Linux even though it is not making them alot of money.

I'm reading this story and I remember to turn my ICQ on. Oddly enough, it seems that ICQ is down right now. Their site is down as well as their connection servers.

Strangley this is also very close on the heels of the Ceo to CFO logs that have recently gone public, taken from ICQ logs. I would have to say they are having an all time bad day right now.

I remember seeing a blurb on the news about the development of paper cell phones, prepaid, that you can just throw away. The inventor says one day she was calling someone on a cell phone and wanted to throw it out the window, and so she thought "hey, disposable cell phones!" The relevence here is that it contains no actual chips, only a three-layer peice of paper. I could only find a few stories about in, most notably this.

--

Third, why don't computers and related equipment have small builtin UPSs? They already have DC power supplies, and DC is what is needed to charge most batteries. DC is what the computer actually needs, and DC is what batteries produce. Doing some battery backup inside each box would be pretty easy. How much battery does a little ethernet hub need? External UPSs need to make AC from DC (which is never terribly efficient) and they themselves become single points for potential failure. Sure, if you need a survivable facility, buy big UPSs and generators, but the failover and resistance to tripping over power cords would be so much better if each piece of equipment had a few minutes of backup built in. A well maintained generator should be able to start up and be running smoothly within just a few minutes. If the equipment itself could last a dozen minutes or so, there would be no need for any external UPSs other than for a few CRTs. As most power problems are very short, even home users would like a few minutes of backup time.

The internal DC voltage on a typical switching power supply is 340 Volts DC which corresponds to rectifying 240 Volts AC. If you are running on 120 Volts AC, they double it first which is what that little switch on the back sets.

It would be relatively easy to add the battery back up system at this point using a boost converter and a couple of years ago I heard about someone doing just that. As a bonus, this would make an online UPS with no transfer time. It would be easy enough to add this kind of functionality to any power supply with the appropriate external connector. Too bad they (the power supply manufacturers) don't.

amsdell and globtek come up with a search on Google.

An article HEREInfoworld details a 10-Terabyte Optical Disc. The inventor of the disc says that it may become commercially available in a year (it was stated in oct).

An important part of this disc is that it is very stable -- instability occurs only after 5,000 years.

Did anyone notice that Caesar, over at Ars Technica, also got hitched this weekend? Big nuptual spike for the geeks. Some thoughts on this:

1. Hemos == Caesar??? If so, what is he trying to hide with this double life? Perhaps he may be lying in wait, plotting for a day when he can control all technology news everywhere! Obviously this means he is a hitherto unsuspected player in the worldwide Amish conspiracy. Shame on you Hemos/Caesar! We're on to you!

2. The great triad. OK, assuming the previous isn't true (yeah, right!), there is an old belief that events of similarity tend to come in threes. So, who was the geek news stringer to complete the hat-trick? Did Tom Pabst perhaps run off with that attractive young web designer he's been seeing? Perhaps one of the compatriots over at geek.compull a coup by wooing Stevie Case over to the light side? Where, my friends, where?!?

3. Elitism rampant on /.? Hundreds of wedding pics. Each over 100 MB. No thumbnails. Obviously hemos wants to share his wedding bliss ONLY with those worthy, i.e. those with enough bandwidth to not only siew the images quickly, but quickly enough to sort the good pictures from the blurry, jostly stuff. I wonder why.... perhaps a target list of people willing to run WorldDomination@home for his masters in the black suits and buggies? (Sorry, have I covered this topic?)

Well, that's all I can think of write now. I'm sure more will come to me when the medication wears off.

-TBHiX-
Matrix-style trenchcoats for sale: use the phrase "DODGE THIS!" in your order and get a 5% discount off most coats! (Hey, who says you have to be a big corporation to be commercial? ;) )

There's a new UGeek opinion about the AT&T PocketNet plan. Free access to 40 sites which they select, and two other options with costs.

Check out the Apex AD-600A DVD, VCD and MP3 player.

There are instructions at nerd-out.com for changing the Region ID, as well as the Macrovision options and, ahem, other things, via the secret menu.

LOL. The player costs $199 at Circuit City. People are buying it en masse. I ordered mine already. :)

The links are from an Ars Technica blurb