A good public health care system isn't perhaps the first thing you'd think of when considering 'geek' requirements, but think about it for a moment: Job security right now is pretty poor in the tech sector... and even when it wasn't, many people work as contract employees. In the US as a general rule, no job == no health care. Having a good public health care system can provide Canadian cities a major boost over their American counterparts.
Other elements I think are important, in order:
Good electrical infrastructure, both outside and inside homes.
High speed internet access.
Cultural/sports events. I think cultural events are more important, however, since they are harder to televise.
A 24-hour-friendly support structure -- speaking from experience it is annoying to be treated like some sort of freak when you drive into a store at 4AM looking for food.
I bought myself an Acer Travelmate 521TE for christmas last year (cost $2700 Cdn = $1800 USD back then), and I have absolutely no complaints so far. Builtin ethernet, 600MHz P3, 1024x768 display, 4 hour battery life, and it is quite light as well (4lbs I think?).
It doesn't have toys like DVD or CD-RW drives, but let's face it, how often do you watch DVDs on your laptop anyway?
PS almost forgot, the 64MB RAM it came with was a bit low, but with memory prices as they are now it is very easy to upgrade that.
It looks like someone has a broken random number generator again.
At least, that's the only explanation I can see for the fact that out of 250 attacks I've seen so far, 47 came from the same source IP. Admittedly, it being in the same/16 I'd expect to see more attacks from it, but unless it scans the entire/16 every 5 seconds I think it is a sign of a broken random number generator.
Come on guys, if you're going to try to bring down the internet, at least do it right!
What's the big deal about 8.5W? My 600MHz PIII laptop survives quite easily on 13W (at least, it lasts over 4 hours on a "52 Watt-Hour" battery), and I'm sure that could easily be reduced further. Slowing down the hard drive, slowing down the processor (& running at lower voltage), and dimming that annoyingly bright LCD backlight come to mind as simple ways of reducing the power consumption.
Ok, I understand that the crystal is external because it can't easily be integrated, and the oscillators which are easy to build in silicon aren't very accurate.
But I wonder, could an inaccurate on-silicon clock be used to drive the system slowly until it could pick up an accurate time signal from some other source? I'm assuming that the easily built oscillators are relatively stable.
The "obvious" idea of using NTP to query external clocks in order to compute one's own frequency obviously wouldn't work, since without an accurate clock you can't communicate... or can you? Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Yes, this is all windy speculation, but I'm hoping that someone out there will have more of a clue about this stuff than I have.
At least, that's the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that a/. EDITOR seems to have a karma of below 25.
Hmm... wait a moment. Maybe moderation doesn't work. Given all the trolling, redundant stories, and flamebait produced by the editors, I don't know if they should even be posting at Score=1.
Is it entirely coincidental that MAPS is starting to charge a subscription fee almost immediately after ORBS was shut down? It seems interesting that as soon as they have no competition they start charging a subscription fee.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd prefer not to pay for the priviledge of having email erroneously blocked.
I really have to wonder at these IRC people: They build a spanning tree, and then complain about netsplits. Come on, you want to avoid having *any* single point of faliure... not maximize the number of such points.
IMHO, IRC networks should be set up to look more like usenet does: Each server should peer with several others, forwarding data about using basic flooding algorithms. Sure it would be a bit more complicated, and it would use more bandwidth (because you need to work out which data has already reached your peer and avoid resending it), but it would practically eliminate these problems.
Why can't people design computer systems with a bit of attention to redundancy and security in the first place?
Blosser clearly knew he had no permission to run his programs on the telco systems
From the horse's mouth:
My problem was that I got permission from our workstation crew to do a massive install, but I did not think to ask the people who run the proxy server, or the network security folks, etc
His apps ran in the background, but consumed so much CPU time that the entire directory assistance system slowed down to the point where it was unusable.
Nope. Actually the directory assistance system was slow before Blosser installed the software and after the software was removed; US West simply decided to use him as a scapegoat for their problems.
That's how he was discovered, the 411 system crashed, and sysadmins traced the apps back to him.
Again, no. The software was detected (by the network people who hadn't already given permission for it) when they suddenly noticed lots of traffic to entropia.com going through their proxy servers.
Aaron Blosser lost his job at US West and had his computers seized by the FBI two years ago for doing the same thing. Well, almost the same thing: Blosser actually thought that he had permission (IIRC he asked the computer administrators but not the network administrators), while it doesn't sound like David McOwen even tried to get permission.
Oh, and as for that 59 cents/second... I don't believe it for a moment: That would work out to somewhere around 18 billion dollars of damages. More likely the actual figure is 59 cents per day.
Possession of child pornography on the other hand is illegal because making it is illegal.
The creation of child pornography is not necessarily illegal simply by virtue of the acts being recorded. A recent case at the Canadian Supreme Court demonstrated this clearly in striking down certain portions of Canada's criminal code provisions against child pornography.
The Canadian Supreme Court restricted the law so that (paraphrased) "creation and possession of child pornography shall not be illegal if the material depicts legal acts between consenting persons, the material is intended for personal use only, and the material is not distributed". Even with this ruling in place, the law clearly states that the depiction of *perfectly legal acts* (for example, two 17 year olds having sex) may not legally be possessed by any other person.
If the laws only existed to criminalize possession of depictions of illegal acts, that would be reasonable. Similarly I don't think there would be very major objections raised to criminalizing the possession of "cracking logs" journaling the defacing of web sites (although that would be a rather bizzare law). When material is criminalized solely based on the purposes it could be used to accomplish (the most common reason given for criminalizing child pornography), child pornography is in exactly the same boat as "cracking tools" are.
This is going to sound odd, but... how is this different from the laws (which exist around the world) banning possession of child pornography?
In neither case does the mere fact of possession cause harm to anyone, in both cases there are very real reasons why people might want to possess them, and yet in both cases they are considered "paraphernalia" associated with criminal activity (abuse).
If we're going to complain about cracking tools being made illegal when they are obviously useful for non-cracking activities, why aren't we all complaining about child pornography being illegal when it is in many cases of worthy artistic value?
Is a gigabyte 10^9 bytes, or is it 2^30 bytes? It depends what you're talking about.
For computer memory, the SI prefixes are certainly used to refer to powers of 2: 640 kB of RAM means 655360 bytes, not 640000 bytes.
For networks or clock speeds, the SI prefixes are certainly used to refer to powers of 10: 10Mbps ethernet can carry 10^7 bits per second, not 10*2^20 bps; similarly, a 1GHz processor runs at 10^9 Hz, not at 2^30 Hz.
And disk space? The manufacturers all specify their sizes in terms of decimal powers. And why not? Everything else, with the exception of computer memory, is expressed in terms of decimal powers.
Let's put this silly argument to rest; I'm sure people have much more important things to argue about (vi vs emacs, BSD vs linux, bash vs ksh...)
Well, all the EU's member states are ISO members, at least, so each EU members' standardisation body could support such a request to ISO (according to procedure B/III of how to add names to ISO-3166).
No. Under procedure B you need to satisfy I, II, and III. I don't think that the EU counts as a "region geographically separated from its parent country".
Right. And everyone should remember when a worm infected over a hundred thousand RedHat systems and in so doing single-handedly (do worms have hands?) demonstrated that applying security patches is very, very important.
Unfortunately, many people seem to have forgotten that lesson as well.
Anyone care to speculate on what DoD's reaction to a full-scale slashdotting would be? Given that they report routine pings and port scans as "attacks" I imagine their reaction to this unsolicited SYN flood would be similarly excessive.
You should probably be able to use more or less any BSD VPN daemon. A quick search of FreeBSD's ports collection finds vpnd as an example. While it only officially supports linux and FreeBSD I don't expect you'd have much trouble porting it to OS X.
This sounds like an ideal place to do what everyone here likes to complain about: Support Windows, and only Windows.
In other words, draw up a list of software (Windows 2000, Office 2000, Norton Antivirus, etc.) which constitutes the "standard university computer"; if you're running a "standard university computer", you'll get (limited) support with it. If you install something like Linux, FreeBSD, or Mach-running-under-VMware-under-OpenBSD, *you are assumed to be able to take care of yourself*.
Slashdot Mirror
Other elements I think are important, in order:
Don't forget that MAPS is free for individuals' mail servers. It only costs if your server is for a business. This sounds wholly reasonable for me.
Yeah, of course. Because we all know that businesses have lots of money.
I bought myself an Acer Travelmate 521TE for christmas last year (cost $2700 Cdn = $1800 USD back then), and I have absolutely no complaints so far. Builtin ethernet, 600MHz P3, 1024x768 display, 4 hour battery life, and it is quite light as well (4lbs I think?).
It doesn't have toys like DVD or CD-RW drives, but let's face it, how often do you watch DVDs on your laptop anyway?
PS almost forgot, the 64MB RAM it came with was a bit low, but with memory prices as they are now it is very easy to upgrade that.
It looks like someone has a broken random number generator again.
/16 I'd expect to see more attacks from it, but unless it scans the entire /16 every 5 seconds I think it is a sign of a broken random number generator.
At least, that's the only explanation I can see for the fact that out of 250 attacks I've seen so far, 47 came from the same source IP. Admittedly, it being in the same
Come on guys, if you're going to try to bring down the internet, at least do it right!
If this bill was around a couple years ago this case might be rather more severe.
You sir, are a moron. Your 600mhz laptop survives on 52watts/hour
You, sir, cannot read. The battery on which the laptop survives happily for 4 hours is a 52 Watt-HOUR battery. 52Wh/4h=13W.
As for the bottom of my laptop... no, actually it isn't hot. Slightly warm, but that's about it.
What's the big deal about 8.5W? My 600MHz PIII laptop survives quite easily on 13W (at least, it lasts over 4 hours on a "52 Watt-Hour" battery), and I'm sure that could easily be reduced further. Slowing down the hard drive, slowing down the processor (& running at lower voltage), and dimming that annoyingly bright LCD backlight come to mind as simple ways of reducing the power consumption.
Ok, I understand that the crystal is external because it can't easily be integrated, and the oscillators which are easy to build in silicon aren't very accurate.
But I wonder, could an inaccurate on-silicon clock be used to drive the system slowly until it could pick up an accurate time signal from some other source? I'm assuming that the easily built oscillators are relatively stable.
The "obvious" idea of using NTP to query external clocks in order to compute one's own frequency obviously wouldn't work, since without an accurate clock you can't communicate... or can you? Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Yes, this is all windy speculation, but I'm hoping that someone out there will have more of a clue about this stuff than I have.
Hey, slashdot moderation works!
/. EDITOR seems to have a karma of below 25.
At least, that's the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that a
Hmm... wait a moment. Maybe moderation doesn't work. Given all the trolling, redundant stories, and flamebait produced by the editors, I don't know if they should even be posting at Score=1.
Is it entirely coincidental that MAPS is starting to charge a subscription fee almost immediately after ORBS was shut down? It seems interesting that as soon as they have no competition they start charging a subscription fee.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd prefer not to pay for the priviledge of having email erroneously blocked.
I really have to wonder at these IRC people: They build a spanning tree, and then complain about netsplits. Come on, you want to avoid having *any* single point of faliure... not maximize the number of such points.
IMHO, IRC networks should be set up to look more like usenet does: Each server should peer with several others, forwarding data about using basic flooding algorithms. Sure it would be a bit more complicated, and it would use more bandwidth (because you need to work out which data has already reached your peer and avoid resending it), but it would practically eliminate these problems.
Why can't people design computer systems with a bit of attention to redundancy and security in the first place?
From the horse's mouth:
His apps ran in the background, but consumed so much CPU time that the entire directory assistance system slowed down to the point where it was unusable.
Nope. Actually the directory assistance system was slow before Blosser installed the software and after the software was removed; US West simply decided to use him as a scapegoat for their problems.
That's how he was discovered, the 411 system crashed, and sysadmins traced the apps back to him.
Again, no. The software was detected (by the network people who hadn't already given permission for it) when they suddenly noticed lots of traffic to entropia.com going through their proxy servers.
Aaron Blosser lost his job at US West and had his computers seized by the FBI two years ago for doing the same thing. Well, almost the same thing: Blosser actually thought that he had permission (IIRC he asked the computer administrators but not the network administrators), while it doesn't sound like David McOwen even tried to get permission.
Oh, and as for that 59 cents/second... I don't believe it for a moment: That would work out to somewhere around 18 billion dollars of damages. More likely the actual figure is 59 cents per day.
Possession of child pornography on the other hand is illegal because making it is illegal.
The creation of child pornography is not necessarily illegal simply by virtue of the acts being recorded. A recent case at the Canadian Supreme Court demonstrated this clearly in striking down certain portions of Canada's criminal code provisions against child pornography.
The Canadian Supreme Court restricted the law so that (paraphrased) "creation and possession of child pornography shall not be illegal if the material depicts legal acts between consenting persons, the material is intended for personal use only, and the material is not distributed". Even with this ruling in place, the law clearly states that the depiction of *perfectly legal acts* (for example, two 17 year olds having sex) may not legally be possessed by any other person.
If the laws only existed to criminalize possession of depictions of illegal acts, that would be reasonable. Similarly I don't think there would be very major objections raised to criminalizing the possession of "cracking logs" journaling the defacing of web sites (although that would be a rather bizzare law). When material is criminalized solely based on the purposes it could be used to accomplish (the most common reason given for criminalizing child pornography), child pornography is in exactly the same boat as "cracking tools" are.
This is going to sound odd, but... how is this different from the laws (which exist around the world) banning possession of child pornography?
In neither case does the mere fact of possession cause harm to anyone, in both cases there are very real reasons why people might want to possess them, and yet in both cases they are considered "paraphernalia" associated with criminal activity (abuse).
If we're going to complain about cracking tools being made illegal when they are obviously useful for non-cracking activities, why aren't we all complaining about child pornography being illegal when it is in many cases of worthy artistic value?
Is a gigabyte 10^9 bytes, or is it 2^30 bytes? It depends what you're talking about.
For computer memory, the SI prefixes are certainly used to refer to powers of 2: 640 kB of RAM means 655360 bytes, not 640000 bytes.
For networks or clock speeds, the SI prefixes are certainly used to refer to powers of 10: 10Mbps ethernet can carry 10^7 bits per second, not 10*2^20 bps; similarly, a 1GHz processor runs at 10^9 Hz, not at 2^30 Hz.
And disk space? The manufacturers all specify their sizes in terms of decimal powers. And why not? Everything else, with the exception of computer memory, is expressed in terms of decimal powers.
Let's put this silly argument to rest; I'm sure people have much more important things to argue about (vi vs emacs, BSD vs linux, bash vs ksh...)
Well, all the EU's member states are ISO members, at least, so each EU members' standardisation body could support such a request to ISO (according to procedure B/III of how to add names to ISO-3166).
No. Under procedure B you need to satisfy I, II, and III. I don't think that the EU counts as a "region geographically separated from its parent country".
IANA has stated a number of times that it is not in the business of deciding what is or is not a country. Instead, they use the ISO 3166 standard to decide when they create new ccTLDs.
.eu would be created as a ccTLD would be if the UN added the EU to its list of "standard country codes".
.eu ccTLD any time soon? No.
Reading the rules for adding a name to the ISO-3166 standard you'll see that the only way that
Is the UN likely to recognize the EU as a nation any time soon? No. Is there likely to be a
Come on, who needs tools like apt-get or whatever-that-rpm-thing-was-called when make is available?
/usr/ports/*/apache13
cd
make all install
What could be simpler?
Wouldn't this be a one-line perl script?
Wait a moment, dumb question. Everything is a one-line perl script.
Right. And everyone should remember when a worm infected over a hundred thousand RedHat systems and in so doing single-handedly (do worms have hands?) demonstrated that applying security patches is very, very important.
Unfortunately, many people seem to have forgotten that lesson as well.
Anyone care to speculate on what DoD's reaction to a full-scale slashdotting would be? Given that they report routine pings and port scans as "attacks" I imagine their reaction to this unsolicited SYN flood would be similarly excessive.
You should probably be able to use more or less any BSD VPN daemon. A quick search of FreeBSD's ports collection finds vpnd as an example. While it only officially supports linux and FreeBSD I don't expect you'd have much trouble porting it to OS X.
This sounds like an ideal place to do what everyone here likes to complain about: Support Windows, and only Windows.
In other words, draw up a list of software (Windows 2000, Office 2000, Norton Antivirus, etc.) which constitutes the "standard university computer"; if you're running a "standard university computer", you'll get (limited) support with it. If you install something like Linux, FreeBSD, or Mach-running-under-VMware-under-OpenBSD, *you are assumed to be able to take care of yourself*.
How exectly is hockey a blood sport?
Have you ever seen a professional game of hockey? Most of the spectators are entirely uninterested by the game until fights start breaking out.