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May I suggest a really long password and
http://www.haxial.com/products/kdx/encryption.html
http://www.haxial.com/products/kdx/

May I suggest a really long password and
http://www.haxial.com/products/kdx/encryption.html
http://www.haxial.com/products/kdx/

Funny that you would show up here. I thought GameRanger was pretty cool when it first came out, but didn't really need much use of it since I didn't play online much. But whatever, it seemed like a pretty great app. I had won a free copy of QuakeFinder during a contest on a pretty popular mac gaming Hotline server, which was pretty cool (yes, with an actual purchased serial # by the server admin). Some time in the future, after I had been using KDX for some time, I started hearing on forums about how GameRanger wouldn't run if KDX was open (link for anyone who isn't aware of the sketchy-ass behaviour). Wow, what the heck? It gets even worse when people are banned from GR for even talking about KDX. As though people are somehow supposed to be okay with your hatred of KDX/Haxial, for whatever unknown reason. I'm sure you've had a lot of people pissed about it. Maybe I don't know how the story ends, but I don't see anyone saying "GameRanger no longer tries to prevent you from running KDX". Lame stuff, man.

This is a good read, from an Apple development house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANts_P2P

http://www.haxial.com/products/kdx/encryption.html

You can have safe, smart and easy to use options.
My only fear is that isp's will change from a "pipe" to the outside world to a sub set of http, ftp, news ect.
ie no more networking for end users at home.

I find a usefull utility is Xyxxy http://www.haxial.com/products/xyzzy/. It produces passwords which are fairly random yet are somewhat still pronouncable, making them easier to remember. This isn't the only utility to do this (there are numerous for linux), and there has apparently been some research into using such techniques. Xyxxy is just the program I know.

Waste

Kdx

Jabber

KDX is a powerful "BBS"-style (Bulletin Board System) encrypted internet communications system that provides voice chat (Internet Telephone), text chat, messaging, news, file and folder transfer, remote access, trackers and more. It uses strong encryption to protect your communications for security and privacy. It is very useful for groups that need to collaborate on a project via the Internet. It is also very useful for remote administration of a computer. KDX uses a client/server architecture (NOT peer-to-peer).

The software is available for Mac OS 9/X, MS Windows NT/2000/XP. The Linux server is currently in beta, and the client is coming soon.

KDX is a powerful "BBS"-style (Bulletin Board System) encrypted internet communications system that provides voice chat (Internet Telephone), text chat, messaging, news, file and folder transfer, remote access, trackers and more. It uses strong encryption to protect your communications for security and privacy. It is very useful for groups that need to collaborate on a project via the Internet. It is also very useful for remote administration of a computer. KDX uses a client/server architecture (NOT peer-to-peer).

The software is available for Mac OS 9/X, MS Windows NT/2000/XP. The Linux server is currently in beta, and the client is coming soon.

Open Source projects should start using a system of "feature bounties", where a person can post a feature that they want implemented on the site, put down their money, and when enough other people chip in for that feature, some hacker works full time to get the feature working and earns the bounty. KDX, a closed-source BBS-like program for Mac and Windows, used a system like this when it was still freeware, the one programmer working on it suggested people should pay him bounties for features, and apparently some people did it. Now it's paid software, $30 for the client, but oh well, it was a good idea. The only issue is, will it destroy the community to have these "mercenary hackers" running around implementing features for cash and then moving on? Or will it make free software more robust?

Haxial

I *like* the apps these guys make, but I hate the fact that they refuse to work within the HI/GUI guidelines. The apps by these people are:

1) Good, but
2) NOT intuitive in use
3) Inconsistant with the rest of my MacOS X GUI and
4) The fact that they REFUSE to make the Apps Mac-like on the Mac means I will never purchase their apps, even though I have reason to use them sometimes.

BTW, I love the terminal in OS X, I use it daily for a ton of tasks. I find the way that Apple has blended my un*x and MacOS experience seamlessly to be incredible. I now get more work done on my un*x box, than I ever did before, and additionally, I get to look at my pretty Mac instead of an old beige box.. :)

OpenSource OS kernel: $0
IBM developed (jointly?) processor: $800
Stylish 1-button mouse (no mouse wheel): $1199
Knowing you can run benchmarks under special conditions and configurations faster than Dell customers: priceless

KDX works well for me.

althought i havn't tried it yet, i'd recommend checking out netfone by haxial.

it's available both for mac & pc (supposedly works across platforms), and if the quality of this ware stands up to their other stuff (specially kdx server/client) it must be good.

f64 : doing the boing since 1978

The relevant optimisations when comparing two CPUs are precisely the ones that are different between the two CPUs. Some things that can be optimised in one cannot be optimised in the other, and vice versa. That's what gives one the advantage over the other, and that's why clock speed isn't everything. PPC and x86 are two very different architectures. Just because the compiler is the same doesn't mean it's as well optimised for one as it is for the other.

Furthermore, Apple did not use the same compiler for both systems. The Xeon benchmark was compiled with a "plain vanilla" version of the compiler, with no special optimisations. The G5 version, on the other hand, was compiledwith Apple's custom version of GCC, and highly optimised for the G5.

See the section "manipulating the results", in this article.

Also rather conspicuous is the absence of any Opteron benchmarks. You see, even with GCC and without any special tweaking, SPEC results for the Opteron (dual 1.8 GHz) are about 60% better than Apple's proposed results for the G5 (dual 2 GHz). So they just pretend the Opteron doesn't exist.

As many people have pointed out throughout this discussion (and the ones before it - BTW, can we please have some articles not about Apple's paper launches?), this is not information and it's not a hardware review, it's marketing.

Anyone who belives this sort of thing must have a lot of disappointments in life.

RMN
~~~

Back to the topic at hand, it is just you :), because psych studies have shown that people will think $2999 is MUCH cheaper than $3000 (not just by a dollar) That's why everyone and their mom does this.

Anyway, the point being made in the article is that such pricing is misleading. It misleads the majority of people into thinking they're getting a better deal. Just because everyone else does it, doesn't mean it's right. Many people have flamed the poor guy (I'm assuming it's a guy), but his problem may be just that he's a bit naive about how things work in this country. That would also explain why he answers every drooling lunatic that sends him an email, and why he feels it necessary to debunk astrology. Give the kid a break, you guys.

Of course, if he is a grown-up who's lived in the US for decades, then flame away :)

I agree in general that this guy's reputation does not make his point invalid, but I can't resist bringing up this soapbox about Infinity and the Universe. It's totally hysterical. Among other things, it refutes Einstein's theory of relativity and the law of conservation of energy. It's got absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the topic in hand, but if you have a basic knowledge of physics or mathematics, it's a great laugh.

If you're talking about this (section entitled "Apple Copies Ideas From Microsoft") then you'll find that he admits that Microsoft copies stuff from Apple, but that Apple have copied things from Microsoft too. Which wouldn't seem a too unreasonable claim.

If you're going to claim someone is a troll, the least you could do is give us an example which isn't guaranteed to mislead us.

No discussion of the nigerian fee scam is complete without a link to the single funniest thing I've read from Slashdot: a guy who went to a lot of trouble to scam the scammers. Trust me, you'll like it.

Even so, one needs to keep perspective. At risk of sounding religous: if that sort of thing makes one "lose one's faith" in "the system", then that faith can't have been very strong to begin with. Meaning, if you really understand the scientific method, then you'd realise that over time it WILL expose the fakes, and we can actually be quite relaxed and confident about that. The system itself is sound: the only thing we should worry about is society giving up this system in favour of another. To quote Carl Sagan: "At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense." ... "At the same time, science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way to winnow the wheat from the chaff is by critical experiment and analysis.".

This essay by Jearl Walker is an interesting and insightful read that relates this notion of "faith" in physics (read right up to the end).

I recommend the excellent Haxial product, Netfone. Mac/Win, encryption (of some form), multiparty, and more. Not free, but inexpensive.

The person who was scamming the scammer got very elaborate, sending fake passports, documents, etc. with the name "James Kirk". It's quote funny.

I tried the same thing some months back and I actually got the scammer to fax their documents to the FBI electronic fraud group. He e-mailed me back saying he phoned "my number" which actually was the FBI and the woman there said there was no James Kirk ... hehe

But seriously, if you receive a physical letter and you're in the USA, fax it to the FBI at (202) 406-5031. The Internet Fraud Complaint Centre is worth a visit, and in canada you can forward all such e-mails to wafl@phonebusters com which is Phonebusters which is a fraud specialist group that's federally funded.

All the more reason to use Server-to-Client networks instead.

For those who are unaware, Haxial uses their own, incredibly ugly GUI for all their applications, with no way to get the native GUI elements. There's some explanation for this on their webpage, but it's poor and I honestly don't feel like finding it!

dalamcd

find this one funny.

Why get upset?? This guy decided to turn the Nigerian Spam Scam into a contest. You forward the emails to him, he adds up the amounts promised to you. I'm currently in about 10th place with $82 million. There's no prize, it's just for fun.

And Slashdot already posted this entertaining saga of someone who pretended to go along with it to see what would happen. Hilarious.

One of the better "scamming the scammers" exchanges is documented here.

He plays along with the scammer, and when asked for a scan of his passport, he photoshops together a passport belonging to James Tiberius Kirk, complete with a picture of William Shatner in a Starfleet uniform. I can imagine someone trying to use that to get across the border....

If you want to read an exceptionally funny example of the Nigerian Fee scam, head on over to haxial.com -- the results are side-splitting. This all happened last week (check the dates).

sure, there's no money in it, but everyone could use a hobby!

He killed his wife!!! Oh my god!!!!

Nice rack though

The transcript of the Nigerian emails here looks to be garbled.

I am impressed that anyone who can deciphered that actually then sent their money to people! ;)

I must admit I did like their
photoshopped Passport they provided.

But - they got his place of birth wrong ? I thought he was from Iowa, he only worked in outer space ?

I am assuming that you are competent with *nix and nt, so installing a keystroke sniffer or VNC wouldn't go unnoticed. This works for offices with people who don't care what you are doing...

Now, to avoid those pesky little spyware, you can always bring your laptop to work. (best some exotic, like an iBook running MacOSX) From there, you can usually hook it up to the company network - ask your system admin before you do though and be so kind to find out his or her birthday and send him a card or give him a present, a long time before you ask :)

Now, being allowed to run your laptop on the company network either use SSH to connect to your home computer like another post suggested (btw, ssh does not HAVE to run at port 22 and some port on the network is likely not to be blocked). Or you can always use your favorite instant message client with SSH tunneling, or if you want to be extremely cool, you can use something like KDX which has a secure connection built in. Or you could use HXD...

As long as you are just a bit careful about what you do and dont start slacking at work, I doubt anyone will object to you being logged into an IM thing anyway.