Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Retail, Preparedness, Games
"Getting off easy" defined. dgroskind writes: "This AP story might be interesting as a slashback followup to an item about the theft of the Enigma machine from Bletchly Park. The accused got 10 months with the charge of blackmail left open for possible later prosecution. Also, this story today says a U.S. spy tipped off the Germans that the Enigma code had been broken but they didn't believe it."
Of course, you could tell your boss it got blown up. You may have already written your congressional representatives (especially if you live in South Carolina) about Fritz Holling's proposed SSSCA, but for air-traveling technical types, there's another post-bomb consideration. cloudscout writes: "In the past, I've always been nervous before travelling... am I remembering my toothpaste? Razor? Shoes? Now I've learned there is something else to remember. Charge my batteries. The current state of air travel security means more random searches and since I tend to travel with lots of electronic gadgets, these searches take a while and they test every device. I was chosen for a random search. Notebook, PDA, Digital Camera, Camcorder, Cellphone... the MiniDisc player had a dead battery. I was stuck. I didn't know what to do. They demanded that I prove the devices functionality. I dug around in my bag and, luckily, was able to take a battery from another device in order to power up the MD but it could have been a much worse situation if I didn't have a spare battery. The lesson here? If you're going to fly, be prepared."
Last week, flying between several supposedly very security-conscious airports (Dulles, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt), I never had to turn my laptop on, probably because I had carefully charged the battery beforehand.
I'll believe it when I record my 2nd sample FMD disk.
Perhaps unimpressed with the perpetually promised quarter-sized CDs mentioned the other day, an Anonymous Coward writes: "What optical medium has 8 layers, stores 24 GBs, and plays at 22Mbits/sec? And it's just the first age, with plans to reach 140 GB soon afterwards.
Constellation 3D are developing FMD-ROM format that will change the capacity of data storage we use today, furtheir information can be obtained from FMD insider which is a news site that reports the progress and general information about this product.
Constellation 3D seem to have lowered their expectations of their first line of products, to something more realistic and affordable, and they expect to make the technology available to some markets by the end of 2002.
Are you ready?"
Street performances need to beware Sturgeon's Law. joestar writes "As said on Slashdot this week-end, Transgaming is about to release - with Electronic Arts and MandrakeSoft - a special Linux distro aimed at games called Mandrake Linux Gaming Edition. Their technology - WineX - is actually a DirectX to Mesa translator that allows to port most recent Windows games to Linux apparently very efficiently compared to a simple Wine port. A great article with lots of details about that project GameSpyDaily has just been released. By the way, WineX is released under the Alladin License."
Picking your poison gets more complicated. Red Hat 7.2 is out, but as you might expect, MandrakeSoft isn't sitting still: The newest Mandrake, 8.1, is also available in stores. (But when will 8.1 PPC be ready? ;))
...hmmm ....
You'd think the Germans would have figured out that someone cracked Enigma when the Allied forces knew about their secret plans on a consistent basis.
OTOH, kudos to the Brits for knowing how to handle decrypted info. In Zimmermann's Note, for example, they intercepted and cracked the original message, but made it look like lax security in Mexico compromised the Note to the US.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Don't forget about SuSE 7.3...annother distro to keep an eye on this week.
that's a good point. you can tuck something inside a second battery slot or empty drive slot. But then again, laptops are required to still go through the xray machine, where something would (hopefully) be found.
But honestly, I dont know what turning something on would provide. A terrorist can always key a fake electronic device to act like a real device when placed under inspection. A cell phone is perfect for that, as they dont go through xray nor metal detectors (at least that was the case last time I was at an airport last August), and all one has to do is turn on the backlight or display panel.
Maybe it's just a false sense of security that some policy maker thought up.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Although Beta 1 obviously has less features than the final release, it's a good read.
I admit I'm a bit confused as to what they mean by "support for the Euro" - isn't is supported given Unicode support, character U+20AC? If anyone is curious, I recommend Microsoft's FAQ on the Euro.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
I'm not sure how you can mount a partition in Mandrake and not in RH, unless you're using some sort of graphical partition mounting system (I don't know, I dislike both distros), but you should be able to mount your drive from any terminal (straight console or xterm/wterm/aterm/etc) that has permissions to the device files in /dev...
/dev/hda1 /windows
/windows (which must already exist).
mount -t vfat
this assumes that your windows partition is partition 1 on the primary master IDE drive, and that you wish to mount it into
Don't mail. Fax. They will get it, they don't have to worry about anthrax, and sending something by fax seems a lot more spiffier to them than by standard mail.
Get it right, then get it right again.
m.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
Cell phones have to go through the airport's xray, at least in the european airports i've been to lately (london stansted, salzburg, frankfurt). actually i had to put everything except my clothes in my bag, even my newspapers, and this bag had to go through the xray. you and your clothes go through the metal detector then. the only things that don't get checked by the metal detectors or the xray are your keys and your wallet.
us airports HAVE to learn a lot more about security. i can't believe you were able to go tothe gates WITHOUT a ticket... european airports have a stronger sense of security, because almost every flight is an international flight.
-- To bloody go where no man has gone before.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Instead of carring your laptop thru security and making them wait while it starts up, simply put it to sleep while you are standing in line, so it wakes when they ask to see it work....then do a shut down. This could save a couple of minutes, and make friends along the way.
Don't ask about the time they wanted to know what the wireless mouse was supposed to be....