I have friends who run XP, and I want to help them secure their systems. I'd like to know what software firewalls people recommend for XP.
Every time Zone Alarm gets mentioned, someone says "don't use that, it sucks." So I guess not Zone Alarm.
How about the software firewall that is included with XP? Is that any good? (I hope so, because I don't want to make my friends spend money. Free-as-in-beer is a good thing.)
How about Norton Internet Security? BlackIce Defender?
if I'm not mistaken, Samba is GPL, and thus, MS would not be able to ship it in a proprietary product
I don't think this is completely true. Yes, the GPL would stop them from folding SAMBA right into Windows; but if they treated SAMBA as a plugin, and modified Windows such that it could run the plugin SAMBA, GPL ought to allow that. Just as you can run other GPL software on Windows. If MS had to modify SAMBA to get it to work nicely as a plugin, MS would of course have to release the source code changes for SAMBA.
they'd release updates [...] and wait a year or two until adoption was nearly complete. Then they'd declare the old antiquated protocol a security risk and release a service pack to "fix" it
If they do this, their customers will scream. At them. And not with happiness.
Any NAS box, such as a Cobalt Qube, will be locked out. Any old, non-updated workstations will be locked out. Any Macs will be locked out. Any not-yet-updated servers will be severed from the network. MS cannot do this without pain.
And lack-of-pain is what MS sells! If they are no longer compatible with their own stuff, they are increasing the TCO of Windows. There is no way they can spin this to make the customers happy about it.
And what will stop people from implementing the SAMBA client as a Windows driver, and rolling that out so they can keep using SAMBA?
At home, I have a very small network. It's now all Linux machines (although my workstation can dual-boot into Windows for gaming).
Currently I'm still using SAMBA on my server, but I have been wondering if there is something better I could use, now that the network is all Linux.
What would you recommend? Is NFS horribly insecure? Is there anything else, such as CODA, that you would suggest? Is SAMBA really my best bet?
P.S. The number one feature I wish for on my server is file backups, like the Norton Protected Recycle Bin features you get on Windows when you install Norton Utilities. The closest thing I have seen on Linux would be to run LVM and set up automatic snapshots. How would you suggest solving this problem?
MicroSoft has a history of maintaining its monopoly by breaking compatibility with competitor's products by subtily changing (or they claim its extending and enhancing) the protocol.
Maybe.
But they can't do that here.
Microsoft's big sales pitch is that if you buy everything from them, everything just works. If they break CIFS severely enough to lock out SAMBA, then they also lock out every Windows computer. Companies will not be happy if MS tells them they need to upgrade every computer on their network before those computers can talk to the newest servers; customers would be more likely to refuse to buy the new version of Windows, and roll out SAMBA on Linux or *BSD so their desktops can continue without upgrade.
Businesses like to upgrade on their own schedule. It takes time to roll out upgrades. A server product that requires a simultaneous upgrade of every Windows computer in a company would be a huge disaster for Microsoft. And MS is smart enough to know that.
odds are the cleaning up isn't going to show an immediate return to the company.
Insightful.
I used to work at Microsoft (on the Applications side, not the Systems side, so I never worked on SMB stuff). Microsoft worked on the basis of features. Program managers would come up with a list of new features, lead developers would negotiate the list with the program managers, and then features would be handed out to the developers. We developers would then develop our features. Testers would test the product, to make sure all the features worked. Then the product would ship.
There was almost never anyone working on cleaning up old code. As a side-effect of writing a feature, a developer might rewrite some old code, but usually not.
The feeling at Microsoft was that if you mess around with code that is shipping, you might introduce new bugs, and it was better to just add more features on top of the existing code base.
The SAMBA project doesn't have to worry about schedules and ship dates nearly as much as Microsoft developers, and they can take more time to get things right. They also have the option of ripping out large chunks of old code and re-writing them if they are broken.
If SAMBA really embarrasses Microsoft, they could afford to set up a "CIFS next generation" team to re-write all their networking stuff with a clean new design. I wonder what the internal politics surrounding such a decision would be like.
Also, MS does have the option of simply adopting SAMBA. Just as IBM can ship Linux and make money on their computers, MS could ship SAMBA and make money from the rest of the OS. I wonder what the internal politics surrounding that decision would be like!
I suspect that even if the CIFS networking is viewed as pure overhead at MS, they will be very reluctant to embrace SAMBA, because it could be construed as some sort of defeat, or as the first step on a slippery slope (away from Windows and towards Linux and *BSD).
steveha
I'm already using GIMP 1.3
on
GIMP goes SVG
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· Score: 1
I run the unstable branch of Debian, and there are packages both for the stable GIMP and for the 1.3 series. I really like 1.3; GTK 2 looks so much better on my screen, the new palette is so much nicer, and I like having a menu on each image. (The right-click menu still works, but a menu at the top of each window is worth the screen real estate, IMHO.)
If you run Debian, "apt-get install gimp-1.3" and try it out.
P.S. My biggest wish right now would be for XSane support for GIMP 1.3. Debian doesn't seem to offer it yet.
The US goverment changed their mind in the 1980's and that lead to the mess we have in today's US phone system.
It also led to the inexpensive, feature-filled telephones we have. And to the cheap access to the Internet that we now have. And the 3.5 cents per minute calling cards I buy at the local Costco store.
If there was still a huge monopoly Phone Company with a monopoly on the copper lines to our homes, DSL would cost just as much as a T1 used to cost (in other words, a LOT).
I for one like a free market. The more competition, the better.
The Shuttle, by NASA's own estimates, would have a loss of orbiter accident every 100-120 missions.
Since when has NASA been that honest? In the book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Richard Feynman wrote about his role in the Challenger investigation. I recall his saying that the official NASA estimate was five-nines reliability (99.999% chance of survival) and that to get that number, various sub-systems had estimated reliabilities of seven or eight nines; it appeared to him that they had "cooked the books", that they started out with the five-nines number and ginned up supporting numbers to make it look real.
(I can't find my copy of that book. Maybe it was only four nines. The important point here is NASA cooking the books.)
Has NASA, post-Challenger, actually started publishing real numbers?
[The Shuttle] is an enormously complex piece of engineering.
More complex than it should be, and worse-designed. It lands like a brick with wings, which flies differently than any normal airplane, and with no ability to make a second approach for a landing (you only get one chance to get it right). It uses solid rocket boosters that cannot be switched off and cannot be jettisoned until after they burn out on their own; if anything goes wrong on takeoff, everyone dies. If the insulation is damaged, everyone dies on reentry. The engines have to be torn down and overhauled after every flight.
We need something that is built for actual use. Top priority is safety and recoverability. Second priority is ease of reuse. A simple rocket design, with enough redundant engines that you can simply shut down a malfunctioning engine and continue the mission. A simple landing design -- probably just land on "a tail of fire" with the main rocket engines. (The vehicle will burn almost all of its fuel taking off, and it will be dramatically lighter for the landing, so landing by the rockets isn't as dumb as it might sound.) If you land on the rockets, you can control your speed -- no need to scream in so fast that the slightest flaw in your insulation means death. And you can come back around for another try if there is any problem with the landing area, and you only need a small flat spot to land instead of a huge long runway that has to be totally swept clean of debris.
Everyone who flies on the Shuttle IS a volunteer. You think NASA pushes its astronauts into the Shuttle cabin at gunpoint?
Four words: Teacher In Space program.
All I'm saying is that NASA needs to stop pretending that the Shuttle is or ever could be "safe" as normal people define "safe". If my car had a 1% chance to kill me each time I used it, I wouldn't use it.
The whole point of the Teacher In Space was that the Shuttle is so safe we can put a teacher on it. The Shuttle isn't safe and NASA shouldn't try to pretend otherwise.
Most supplies to ISS are delivered by Progress supply ships, Shuttle brings up components and crew for the most part.
I want components and crew delivered by something other than the Shuttle, ASAP. The Shuttle does have a great huge payload capacity, and if there is anything truly big that needs to go up, the Shuttle is the obvious way to go. But people and supplies shouldn't go up on the Shuttle -- and with small modules that interlock to make bigger modules, you could even send up new pieces of the space station without using the Shuttle.
Fine, make that "capable of putting 1000 kg into the same orbit". No need for the test to actually do it; come up with some other orbit for the test.
The important part of the idea is money for results, and no money for no results. With NASA the money is for studies and red tape, more than results. (And I mean modern NASA. NASA in the late 60's was by all accounts a very can-do sort of operation.)
What, "pretty much" isn't enough handwaving in front of "certain"? I never said it is impossible to fly more than 100 times. I'm aware that you can throw a die six times without seeing a six, flip a coin twice without it landing heads, etc. Would you have preferred "the estimated probability becomes 1"? Would "extremely likely" have made you happier than "pretty much certain"?
If I were teaching statistics I should be very careful how I phrase things -- more careful than in a Slashdot discussion about the Shuttle.
Individuals inside NASA may be genuinely smart and caring, but NASA as an organization is a horrible morass of red tape. Nothing important will change. They will slap a bandage over the Shuttle's current problems and that will be that.
The Shuttle is only about 99% reliable. In other words, if you fly it 100 times it is pretty much certain to have a fatal failure. We have two Shuttle orbiters left; that's about 200 flights we have left. Maybe less.
My suggestions:
Make sure anyone who flies on the Shuttle is a volunteer. You will get volunteers who want to be in space so badly they are willing to risk a 1% chance of death, so that's okay.
Immediately start finding ways to ship people and supplies to the Space Station without using the Shuttle. Never again use the Shuttle for any mission that could be done by, say, a Russian rocket.
Immediately offer a large, tax-free, cash prize for the first company to put 1000 kilograms in the same orbit as the Space Station, and then do it again within three weeks. Offer another, almost as large prize for the second company to do this. Also offer contracts for delivery of supplies and people to the Space Station. Something everyone needs to realize: there is no amount of money that anyone could spend that will buy another Shuttle orbiter. They are done. There are two left in the world, and that's all. When those two explode or whatever, there will be none left.
Something else everyone needs to realize: NASA is incapable, as an organization, of building any reasonable system for going to space. If we let NASA build a "Shuttle II", they will first spend billions of dollars, hire many people, and conduct many studies and write many documents. Perhaps even, someday, some hardware might fly. That hardware will be a haywire monstrosity almost as bad as the current Shuttle. Conclusion: don't give any additional money to NASA, and don't ask NASA to design any new spacecraft.
Yeah, sounds to me like the writer of that article messed up. This device is being marketed as a multi-purpose device, and one of the purposes is as a firewall. If it's intended for that, you would expect it to have a clearly-labeled uplink port. On my home firewall/router box, the uplink port is labeled "WAN".
Maybe it can also serve as a wireless access point if you attach a USB WiFi adapter. But mentioning that right next to mentioning the extra Ethernet jack is just weird.
Don't let the Windows CE fool you. This isn't a Pocket PC, this is a subnotebook.
I have an old laptop computer that is far less powerful than this thing; it also has an 800x600 16-bit display, but it weighs almost twice as much and has one-quarter the battery life. This thing's 400 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM, and 20 MB of available flash memory are already enough for many applications, and you can always add more storage in one of the three slots (PC card, CompactFlash, SD/MMC).
This thing has several niches it can play in. It could be trivially ruggedized (no hard disk, no moving parts of any sort) so it would be a good choice to throw in the back of a repair truck. It could be loaded with just a few corporate apps, and it should be a very reliable subnotebook (people won't be installing CometCursor or Gator on a CE device!). If your corporate apps are in Java, no problem, because they added Java (CE doesn't come standard with Java). Like another poster noted, this ought to be perfectly good for reading PDF tech manuals. It also ought to be perfectly good for email and web.
Heck, I'd love to own one of these, but not for US$1500. I'm too cheap, and there are not enough times when I wish I had a no-moving-parts laptop.
It would be even more fun if this thing were running Linux. It should actually be possible; I know Linux runs on the XScale CPU. But I don't know how tough it would be to get all the hardware working, including modems and WiFi cards. For my purposes, all I really need are web and ssh, and you can do both of those on CE.
I'm saddened to see all the comments like "I can already download it illegally for free, so why should I pay now?" or "I wish it were free, so someone should pass a law making it free" or "Well I think it's ethical to just take the ROM images, even if it isn't legal".
Personally, I would like to see copyright limited in some way; I think it's crazy that nothing has lapsed into the public domain since the 1920's. But even a limited copyright term would probably be long enough that arcade games from the 80's and 90's would still be under copyright. Anyway, whether we wish for limited copyrights or not, we have the system we have.
So now here's a chance to legally buy ROM images. You don't have to go to a garage sale and buy an old Rampart game to get legal. In many discussions of MAME I have seen the comment "Well, if there were some way that I could buy the ROMs legally, I would." Now's your chance.
And! Notice that they are just handing over the ROM images! There is no attempt to wrap them in DRM. You don't need a special DRM-enabled version of MAME to play the ROMs. You are buying a legal right to use the ROM image, and you can run it on your PC, your Palm, your laptop, whatever.
I plan to buy several games from that list. I'm hoping that whoever owns the Atari rights will make lots of money, and maybe some other companies will start licensing ROM images. I'd love a legal copy of Elevator Action and a few others I could name.
Back in the day, we would spend 25 cents to play video games once. For the cost of 8 to 24 plays, you can legally own the game, and play it as many times as you like -- hundreds of times, even.
These will look and play exactly like the original games, because guess what -- they are the original games. The only difference will be that you will be using your own controller, instead of a possibly better (or possibly half-broken) controller at an arcade.
Today, I can go down to the local movie theater (no arcades anywhere near my home) and I can play Hydro Thunder for $1 a game. Or I can buy the Playstation version of Hydro Thunder for $30, and it isn't even exactly the same game (the graphics were simplified a bit for the Playstation). So Hydro Thunder costs 30 plays to own, more than these ROM images.
Thanks for the info! I would like to be able to use it as a very small file server, plug and go, but as long as I can put my tunes on it from my Linux desktop, I guess I could live with needing to run a special app.
The Karma has a high-speed USB 2.0 port onboard. It also has a docking station that uses Ethernet. So, the Karma itself doesn't have an Ethernet port, but can be made to work with Ethernet using the docking station.
If I can just copy my Ogg files over using standard networking (NFS, SMB, heck, even FTP) I will buy one of these. If I have to run some special jukebox thing that does a secret DRM handshake, I'll pass.
Why has it been 20 years, and HURD isn't ready for production use yet?
The design of HURD, on paper, is arguably better than a monolithic kernel such as Linux. But getting HURD working has proven difficult. Linux, on the other hand, started out as a toy that didn't do very much... but it was a toy that worked.
Thus Linux and not HURD benefitted from Mozilla's Law, which is: Projects that work get more attention than projects that don't work. It's a positive feedback loop: the more it works, the more people will get interested in it, and the more people are likely to contribute.
If I am correct about this guess, HURD should advance more quickly now, because it does now work.
It's possible that Linux has drawn developers away from HURD, simply because it was ready for production use long before HURD: for example, HURD isn't ready for IBM's customers to use it, so IBM isn't contributing developers to HURD, and they've already decided to support Linux anyway. I think to some extent this is true, but it can't be the whole story. There are multiple versions of BSD out there, and they seem to have active developer communities.
So, what's the situation with HURD? It's supposed to be really easy to develop it (e.g. as I understand it, almost everything happens in user space, so you can single-step even low-level stuff in the debugger). Did that turn out to be true, or not? If not, is it a temporary problem, or did HURD just not work out as hoped? Also, how easy is it to join the HURD development? How easy is it to get patches accepted? What is the HURD community like?
P.S. You will know HURD has "arrived" when SCO starts selling licenses to it...;-)
Looking back, I'd say RMS's two greatest contributions to the world are the GNU Public License and the GCC compiler.
The GPL attracted a whole bunch of people who are willing to contribute code, but not if someone could rip the code off, change a few things, and sell it in a broken state. This is one of the reasons for the great vitality of Linux and of GNU software. Also, the GPL makes companies like IBM willing to donate patents (such as the Read-Copy-Update patent) for use in free software; thanks to the GPL they know they can still sell a patent license if anyone wants to use the patent for a proprietary purpose.
GCC, on the other hand, made it possible for people to write free software without paying thousands of dollars for a compiler. It also served as a common language across all the *NIX platforms; if you were writing a utility, you could write to GCC instead of needing to work around the quirks of the various C compilers.
Linus Torvalds got the ball rolling on the Linux kernel, but he used GCC and the GPL to do it.
Ogg is a container format. As far as I know, no one is seriously claiming patent protection on the idea of a container format.
Vorbis is a codec that does the same job as MP3 (only better). The Ogg guys worked very hard, with lawyers vetting the code at each stage of development, to make darn sure that no patents apply to anything in Vorbis. It would have been done a lot sooner if they hadn't had to do this.
Theora is a video codec, based on a video codec called VP3. The guys who developed VP3, On2, have patents that cover VP3, and they signed a complete and irrevokable release to allow Theora to be completely free software. I think Theora is what you were thinking of.
And the Ogg code is available under a BSD license, to speed the adoption by commercial entities. Originally they were using LGPL but enough people were worried about viral IP issues that they went to the BSD license.
<pedantic> And it's codec or codecs, not codex. A codex is a book. </pedantic>
Depending on how hard you work your calculator, you might do better to get a PDA and run a calculator program on it. If you bang on your calculator keys for hours, get a real calculator.
I use Palm PDAs (my current one is a Tungsten T) and I run a program called RPN on it. It's programmable and it has graphing, but I haven't used those features; but as a general-purpose RPN calculator, it's kept me happy.
What I really want is something similar to Palm RPN that is programmable in Python.
Anyway, the best thing about this is that I always have it with me. I used to have an HP calculator, but it was never handy when I wanted it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have friends who run XP, and I want to help them secure their systems. I'd like to know what software firewalls people recommend for XP.
Every time Zone Alarm gets mentioned, someone says "don't use that, it sucks." So I guess not Zone Alarm.
How about the software firewall that is included with XP? Is that any good? (I hope so, because I don't want to make my friends spend money. Free-as-in-beer is a good thing.)
How about Norton Internet Security? BlackIce Defender?
steveha
if I'm not mistaken, Samba is GPL, and thus, MS would not be able to ship it in a proprietary product
I don't think this is completely true. Yes, the GPL would stop them from folding SAMBA right into Windows; but if they treated SAMBA as a plugin, and modified Windows such that it could run the plugin SAMBA, GPL ought to allow that. Just as you can run other GPL software on Windows. If MS had to modify SAMBA to get it to work nicely as a plugin, MS would of course have to release the source code changes for SAMBA.
steveha
they'd release updates [...] and wait a year or two until adoption was nearly complete. Then they'd declare the old antiquated protocol a security risk and release a service pack to "fix" it
If they do this, their customers will scream. At them. And not with happiness.
Any NAS box, such as a Cobalt Qube, will be locked out. Any old, non-updated workstations will be locked out. Any Macs will be locked out. Any not-yet-updated servers will be severed from the network. MS cannot do this without pain.
And lack-of-pain is what MS sells! If they are no longer compatible with their own stuff, they are increasing the TCO of Windows. There is no way they can spin this to make the customers happy about it.
And what will stop people from implementing the SAMBA client as a Windows driver, and rolling that out so they can keep using SAMBA?
MS won't try your scheme.
steveha
Please give me some advice.
At home, I have a very small network. It's now all Linux machines (although my workstation can dual-boot into Windows for gaming).
Currently I'm still using SAMBA on my server, but I have been wondering if there is something better I could use, now that the network is all Linux.
What would you recommend? Is NFS horribly insecure? Is there anything else, such as CODA, that you would suggest? Is SAMBA really my best bet?
P.S. The number one feature I wish for on my server is file backups, like the Norton Protected Recycle Bin features you get on Windows when you install Norton Utilities. The closest thing I have seen on Linux would be to run LVM and set up automatic snapshots. How would you suggest solving this problem?
steveha
MicroSoft has a history of maintaining its monopoly by breaking compatibility with competitor's products by subtily changing (or they claim its extending and enhancing) the protocol.
Maybe.
But they can't do that here.
Microsoft's big sales pitch is that if you buy everything from them, everything just works. If they break CIFS severely enough to lock out SAMBA, then they also lock out every Windows computer. Companies will not be happy if MS tells them they need to upgrade every computer on their network before those computers can talk to the newest servers; customers would be more likely to refuse to buy the new version of Windows, and roll out SAMBA on Linux or *BSD so their desktops can continue without upgrade.
Businesses like to upgrade on their own schedule. It takes time to roll out upgrades. A server product that requires a simultaneous upgrade of every Windows computer in a company would be a huge disaster for Microsoft. And MS is smart enough to know that.
steveha
odds are the cleaning up isn't going to show an immediate return to the company.
Insightful.
I used to work at Microsoft (on the Applications side, not the Systems side, so I never worked on SMB stuff). Microsoft worked on the basis of features. Program managers would come up with a list of new features, lead developers would negotiate the list with the program managers, and then features would be handed out to the developers. We developers would then develop our features. Testers would test the product, to make sure all the features worked. Then the product would ship.
There was almost never anyone working on cleaning up old code. As a side-effect of writing a feature, a developer might rewrite some old code, but usually not.
The feeling at Microsoft was that if you mess around with code that is shipping, you might introduce new bugs, and it was better to just add more features on top of the existing code base.
The SAMBA project doesn't have to worry about schedules and ship dates nearly as much as Microsoft developers, and they can take more time to get things right. They also have the option of ripping out large chunks of old code and re-writing them if they are broken.
If SAMBA really embarrasses Microsoft, they could afford to set up a "CIFS next generation" team to re-write all their networking stuff with a clean new design. I wonder what the internal politics surrounding such a decision would be like.
Also, MS does have the option of simply adopting SAMBA. Just as IBM can ship Linux and make money on their computers, MS could ship SAMBA and make money from the rest of the OS. I wonder what the internal politics surrounding that decision would be like!
I suspect that even if the CIFS networking is viewed as pure overhead at MS, they will be very reluctant to embrace SAMBA, because it could be construed as some sort of defeat, or as the first step on a slippery slope (away from Windows and towards Linux and *BSD).
steveha
I run the unstable branch of Debian, and there are packages both for the stable GIMP and for the 1.3 series. I really like 1.3; GTK 2 looks so much better on my screen, the new palette is so much nicer, and I like having a menu on each image. (The right-click menu still works, but a menu at the top of each window is worth the screen real estate, IMHO.)
If you run Debian, "apt-get install gimp-1.3" and try it out.
P.S. My biggest wish right now would be for XSane support for GIMP 1.3. Debian doesn't seem to offer it yet.
steveha
The US goverment changed their mind in the 1980's and that lead to the mess we have in today's US phone system.
It also led to the inexpensive, feature-filled telephones we have. And to the cheap access to the Internet that we now have. And the 3.5 cents per minute calling cards I buy at the local Costco store.
If there was still a huge monopoly Phone Company with a monopoly on the copper lines to our homes, DSL would cost just as much as a T1 used to cost (in other words, a LOT).
I for one like a free market. The more competition, the better.
steveha
The Shuttle, by NASA's own estimates, would have a loss of orbiter accident every 100-120 missions.
Since when has NASA been that honest? In the book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Richard Feynman wrote about his role in the Challenger investigation. I recall his saying that the official NASA estimate was five-nines reliability (99.999% chance of survival) and that to get that number, various sub-systems had estimated reliabilities of seven or eight nines; it appeared to him that they had "cooked the books", that they started out with the five-nines number and ginned up supporting numbers to make it look real.
(I can't find my copy of that book. Maybe it was only four nines. The important point here is NASA cooking the books.)
Has NASA, post-Challenger, actually started publishing real numbers?
[The Shuttle] is an enormously complex piece of engineering.
More complex than it should be, and worse-designed. It lands like a brick with wings, which flies differently than any normal airplane, and with no ability to make a second approach for a landing (you only get one chance to get it right). It uses solid rocket boosters that cannot be switched off and cannot be jettisoned until after they burn out on their own; if anything goes wrong on takeoff, everyone dies. If the insulation is damaged, everyone dies on reentry. The engines have to be torn down and overhauled after every flight.
We need something that is built for actual use. Top priority is safety and recoverability. Second priority is ease of reuse. A simple rocket design, with enough redundant engines that you can simply shut down a malfunctioning engine and continue the mission. A simple landing design -- probably just land on "a tail of fire" with the main rocket engines. (The vehicle will burn almost all of its fuel taking off, and it will be dramatically lighter for the landing, so landing by the rockets isn't as dumb as it might sound.) If you land on the rockets, you can control your speed -- no need to scream in so fast that the slightest flaw in your insulation means death. And you can come back around for another try if there is any problem with the landing area, and you only need a small flat spot to land instead of a huge long runway that has to be totally swept clean of debris.
Everyone who flies on the Shuttle IS a volunteer. You think NASA pushes its astronauts into the Shuttle cabin at gunpoint?
Four words: Teacher In Space program.
All I'm saying is that NASA needs to stop pretending that the Shuttle is or ever could be "safe" as normal people define "safe". If my car had a 1% chance to kill me each time I used it, I wouldn't use it.
The whole point of the Teacher In Space was that the Shuttle is so safe we can put a teacher on it. The Shuttle isn't safe and NASA shouldn't try to pretend otherwise.
Most supplies to ISS are delivered by Progress supply ships, Shuttle brings up components and crew for the most part.
I want components and crew delivered by something other than the Shuttle, ASAP. The Shuttle does have a great huge payload capacity, and if there is anything truly big that needs to go up, the Shuttle is the obvious way to go. But people and supplies shouldn't go up on the Shuttle -- and with small modules that interlock to make bigger modules, you could even send up new pieces of the space station without using the Shuttle.
steveha
Fine, make that "capable of putting 1000 kg into the same orbit". No need for the test to actually do it; come up with some other orbit for the test.
The important part of the idea is money for results, and no money for no results. With NASA the money is for studies and red tape, more than results. (And I mean modern NASA. NASA in the late 60's was by all accounts a very can-do sort of operation.)
steveha
What, "pretty much" isn't enough handwaving in front of "certain"? I never said it is impossible to fly more than 100 times. I'm aware that you can throw a die six times without seeing a six, flip a coin twice without it landing heads, etc. Would you have preferred "the estimated probability becomes 1"? Would "extremely likely" have made you happier than "pretty much certain"?
If I were teaching statistics I should be very careful how I phrase things -- more careful than in a Slashdot discussion about the Shuttle.
steveha
Er, sorry about that. You are right, of course.
steveha
The Shuttle is only about 99% reliable. In other words, if you fly it 100 times it is pretty much certain to have a fatal failure. We have two Shuttle orbiters left; that's about 200 flights we have left. Maybe less.
My suggestions:
Make sure anyone who flies on the Shuttle is a volunteer. You will get volunteers who want to be in space so badly they are willing to risk a 1% chance of death, so that's okay.
Immediately start finding ways to ship people and supplies to the Space Station without using the Shuttle. Never again use the Shuttle for any mission that could be done by, say, a Russian rocket.
Immediately offer a large, tax-free, cash prize for the first company to put 1000 kilograms in the same orbit as the Space Station, and then do it again within three weeks. Offer another, almost as large prize for the second company to do this. Also offer contracts for delivery of supplies and people to the Space Station.
Something everyone needs to realize: there is no amount of money that anyone could spend that will buy another Shuttle orbiter. They are done. There are two left in the world, and that's all. When those two explode or whatever, there will be none left.
Something else everyone needs to realize: NASA is incapable, as an organization, of building any reasonable system for going to space. If we let NASA build a "Shuttle II", they will first spend billions of dollars, hire many people, and conduct many studies and write many documents. Perhaps even, someday, some hardware might fly. That hardware will be a haywire monstrosity almost as bad as the current Shuttle. Conclusion: don't give any additional money to NASA, and don't ask NASA to design any new spacecraft.
steveha
Yeah, sounds to me like the writer of that article messed up. This device is being marketed as a multi-purpose device, and one of the purposes is as a firewall. If it's intended for that, you would expect it to have a clearly-labeled uplink port. On my home firewall/router box, the uplink port is labeled "WAN".
Maybe it can also serve as a wireless access point if you attach a USB WiFi adapter. But mentioning that right next to mentioning the extra Ethernet jack is just weird.
steveha
Don't let the Windows CE fool you. This isn't a Pocket PC, this is a subnotebook.
I have an old laptop computer that is far less powerful than this thing; it also has an 800x600 16-bit display, but it weighs almost twice as much and has one-quarter the battery life. This thing's 400 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM, and 20 MB of available flash memory are already enough for many applications, and you can always add more storage in one of the three slots (PC card, CompactFlash, SD/MMC).
This thing has several niches it can play in. It could be trivially ruggedized (no hard disk, no moving parts of any sort) so it would be a good choice to throw in the back of a repair truck. It could be loaded with just a few corporate apps, and it should be a very reliable subnotebook (people won't be installing CometCursor or Gator on a CE device!). If your corporate apps are in Java, no problem, because they added Java (CE doesn't come standard with Java). Like another poster noted, this ought to be perfectly good for reading PDF tech manuals. It also ought to be perfectly good for email and web.
Heck, I'd love to own one of these, but not for US$1500. I'm too cheap, and there are not enough times when I wish I had a no-moving-parts laptop.
It would be even more fun if this thing were running Linux. It should actually be possible; I know Linux runs on the XScale CPU. But I don't know how tough it would be to get all the hardware working, including modems and WiFi cards. For my purposes, all I really need are web and ssh, and you can do both of those on CE.
steveha
I'm saddened to see all the comments like "I can already download it illegally for free, so why should I pay now?" or "I wish it were free, so someone should pass a law making it free" or "Well I think it's ethical to just take the ROM images, even if it isn't legal".
Personally, I would like to see copyright limited in some way; I think it's crazy that nothing has lapsed into the public domain since the 1920's. But even a limited copyright term would probably be long enough that arcade games from the 80's and 90's would still be under copyright. Anyway, whether we wish for limited copyrights or not, we have the system we have.
So now here's a chance to legally buy ROM images. You don't have to go to a garage sale and buy an old Rampart game to get legal. In many discussions of MAME I have seen the comment "Well, if there were some way that I could buy the ROMs legally, I would." Now's your chance.
And! Notice that they are just handing over the ROM images! There is no attempt to wrap them in DRM. You don't need a special DRM-enabled version of MAME to play the ROMs. You are buying a legal right to use the ROM image, and you can run it on your PC, your Palm, your laptop, whatever.
I plan to buy several games from that list. I'm hoping that whoever owns the Atari rights will make lots of money, and maybe some other companies will start licensing ROM images. I'd love a legal copy of Elevator Action and a few others I could name.
steveha
Back in the day, we would spend 25 cents to play video games once. For the cost of 8 to 24 plays, you can legally own the game, and play it as many times as you like -- hundreds of times, even.
These will look and play exactly like the original games, because guess what -- they are the original games. The only difference will be that you will be using your own controller, instead of a possibly better (or possibly half-broken) controller at an arcade.
Today, I can go down to the local movie theater (no arcades anywhere near my home) and I can play Hydro Thunder for $1 a game. Or I can buy the Playstation version of Hydro Thunder for $30, and it isn't even exactly the same game (the graphics were simplified a bit for the Playstation). So Hydro Thunder costs 30 plays to own, more than these ROM images.
This is a perfectly fair price.
steveha
Thanks for the info! I would like to be able to use it as a very small file server, plug and go, but as long as I can put my tunes on it from my Linux desktop, I guess I could live with needing to run a special app.
steveha
The Karma has a high-speed USB 2.0 port onboard. It also has a docking station that uses Ethernet. So, the Karma itself doesn't have an Ethernet port, but can be made to work with Ethernet using the docking station.
If I can just copy my Ogg files over using standard networking (NFS, SMB, heck, even FTP) I will buy one of these. If I have to run some special jukebox thing that does a secret DRM handshake, I'll pass.
steveha
Why has it been 20 years, and HURD isn't ready for production use yet?
;-)
The design of HURD, on paper, is arguably better than a monolithic kernel such as Linux. But getting HURD working has proven difficult. Linux, on the other hand, started out as a toy that didn't do very much... but it was a toy that worked.
Thus Linux and not HURD benefitted from Mozilla's Law, which is: Projects that work get more attention than projects that don't work. It's a positive feedback loop: the more it works, the more people will get interested in it, and the more people are likely to contribute.
If I am correct about this guess, HURD should advance more quickly now, because it does now work.
It's possible that Linux has drawn developers away from HURD, simply because it was ready for production use long before HURD: for example, HURD isn't ready for IBM's customers to use it, so IBM isn't contributing developers to HURD, and they've already decided to support Linux anyway. I think to some extent this is true, but it can't be the whole story. There are multiple versions of BSD out there, and they seem to have active developer communities.
So, what's the situation with HURD? It's supposed to be really easy to develop it (e.g. as I understand it, almost everything happens in user space, so you can single-step even low-level stuff in the debugger). Did that turn out to be true, or not? If not, is it a temporary problem, or did HURD just not work out as hoped? Also, how easy is it to join the HURD development? How easy is it to get patches accepted? What is the HURD community like?
P.S. You will know HURD has "arrived" when SCO starts selling licenses to it...
steveha
Looking back, I'd say RMS's two greatest contributions to the world are the GNU Public License and the GCC compiler.
The GPL attracted a whole bunch of people who are willing to contribute code, but not if someone could rip the code off, change a few things, and sell it in a broken state. This is one of the reasons for the great vitality of Linux and of GNU software. Also, the GPL makes companies like IBM willing to donate patents (such as the Read-Copy-Update patent) for use in free software; thanks to the GPL they know they can still sell a patent license if anyone wants to use the patent for a proprietary purpose.
GCC, on the other hand, made it possible for people to write free software without paying thousands of dollars for a compiler. It also served as a common language across all the *NIX platforms; if you were writing a utility, you could write to GCC instead of needing to work around the quirks of the various C compilers.
Linus Torvalds got the ball rolling on the Linux kernel, but he used GCC and the GPL to do it.
Thank you, RMS.
steveha
Ogg is a container format. As far as I know, no one is seriously claiming patent protection on the idea of a container format.
Vorbis is a codec that does the same job as MP3 (only better). The Ogg guys worked very hard, with lawyers vetting the code at each stage of development, to make darn sure that no patents apply to anything in Vorbis. It would have been done a lot sooner if they hadn't had to do this.
Theora is a video codec, based on a video codec called VP3. The guys who developed VP3, On2, have patents that cover VP3, and they signed a complete and irrevokable release to allow Theora to be completely free software. I think Theora is what you were thinking of.
And the Ogg code is available under a BSD license, to speed the adoption by commercial entities. Originally they were using LGPL but enough people were worried about viral IP issues that they went to the BSD license.
<pedantic>
And it's codec or codecs, not codex. A codex is a book.
</pedantic>
Want to know more? Check out the Ogg page at xiph.org.
steveha
To "give up the ghost" means to die.
I guess the idea is that after you die, a ghost comes out of you.
It is odd to think of little HP-48 ghosts coming out of broken calculators. At Halloween, they can haunt people scared of math.
steveha
Depending on how hard you work your calculator, you might do better to get a PDA and run a calculator program on it. If you bang on your calculator keys for hours, get a real calculator.
I use Palm PDAs (my current one is a Tungsten T) and I run a program called RPN on it. It's programmable and it has graphing, but I haven't used those features; but as a general-purpose RPN calculator, it's kept me happy.
What I really want is something similar to Palm RPN that is programmable in Python.
Anyway, the best thing about this is that I always have it with me. I used to have an HP calculator, but it was never handy when I wanted it.
steveha
They should ship it so that it runs with a user account and works properly that way out of the box.
I agree completely.
steveha