Traditionally they actually convert arial photography to an "orthophoto" - which is a processed version of the photo to have an orthographic projection.
(If you don't know what that is, it's when you take a camera that's completely directly on top of the target area, with a lens as big as what you're taking, so there's no perspective shortening at all.)
They can do it two ways, I guess they either know where the satelite is, or they locate enough points on the photo (ie: manually eyeball feature x) and knowing each point's real world coordinates (ie: feature x is at lat a long b) they can work out the projection / deprojection.
Certainly, the Auckland Harbour Bridge would look different - ie: not like a flat road in the water - if it was anything but an orthographic projection.
Outlook is trustworthy at what it does - but it's very much a 'one person' program, and thus it's often not the place to store information that's of interest to the company in the long term.
(It's insane if all the project documentation is stored in a folder in John's Inbox. It really should be stored in somewhere more approprate for such shared information. Once John leaves, or is assigned elsewhere and cleans up his inbox, it's all gone!)
This is still true if you use any mail program and mail server combination - kmail, Evolution or whatever else.
You've not been using Outlook 2003 in the recommended Cached Exchange Mode. We are - and it makes PST files look quaint.:-)
(In cached mode, Outlook "merely" synchronises against Exchange. Everything is stored in both places - meaning that nothing on the client has to be backed up, you only have to back-up the store on the Exchange server. This is easy to do - just use NTBACKUP to generate a BKF file - you don't even shut the server down. Also, since you only have to protect the server, you'll often use a decent RAID setup to reduce the chance the backup will ever be needed.)
If a workstation falls over, you reinstall outlook and set up the account. It just downloads everything back from the server and you're up and running.
It also sounds like you have an information managment problem - people's outlook account is not really where you should be storing important corporate information.
If that's the situation, you really need NZ law's way of dealing with that.
(Under NZ's fair trading act, if it is not disclosed that the prices are ex-GST, then you can assume that the prices are inclusive --Well, not disclosing that it's ex-GST is considerd a false or misleading representation under the Fair Trading Act, 1986.)
I imagine that in NZ in this situation, they could not enforce the contract against you, or could not enforce that price.
This writes to the disks write cache but I don't believe it actually issues the sync command to the drive.
Yeah - that's the point of this thing - what's supposed to happen with fsync? From memory, sometimes it will guarentee it's all the way to the platters, sometimes it will not, depending on what storage system you're using, and how easy such a guarentee is to make.
Linus in 2001 discussing this issue - it's not new. That whole thread was about comparing SCSI against IDE drives, and it seemed that the IDE drives were either breaking the laws of physics, or lying, but the SCSI drives were being honest.
From hazy memory, one problem is that without tagged-command-queing or native-command-queuing, one process issuing a sync will cause the hard drive and related software to wait until it has fully synched for all i/o "in flight"; holding up any other i/o tasks for other processes!
That's why fsync often lies; because it's not pratical for people that fsync all the time to flush buffers to screw around with the whole i/o subsystem, and apparently some programs were overzealous with calling fsync when they shouldn't.
However, with TCQ, commands that are synched overlap with other commands, so it's not that big a deal (other i/o tasks are not impacted any more than they would by other, unsynchronised, i/o). (Thus, with TCQ, fsync might go all the way to the platters, but without it it might just go to the IDE bus.) SCSI has had TCQ from day one, which is why a SCSI system is more likely to sync all the way than IDE.
If I'm wrong, somebody correct me please.
Brad's program certainly points out an issue - it should be possible for a database engine to write to disk and guarentee that it gets written; perhaps fsync() isn't good enough - be this fault in the drives, the IDE spec, IDE drivers or the OS.
that you get free minutes if you don't initiate the call?
It the norm virtually everywhere BUT the USA.:-) I'm in New Zealand, I do not pay to recieve a phone call - the complete cost is borne by the caller. (I understand Americans get charged to *receive* a cell-phone call.)
(One difference is that it's easy to recognise a cellphone number in New Zealand - it's the +64-2x area codes.)
There was somebody in New Zealand that, as a fund raising drive, tried to collect everyone's 5 cent coins that people had acccumlated at home doing nothing.
For them, it was worthwhile, as they collected so many, and they'd go to all the hassle of getting them counted. (The reserve bank thought yay, as it meant these old 5c's would re-enter circulation - they're expensive (as a fraction of their face value) to make.)
You could scrap pennies, yes. In New Zealand, we scrapped 1 and 2 cent coins without much difficultiy. It's quite possible that a 'quarter only' approach would work; (maybe quarters + fives or something.)
But you (ie: USA) have a slight issue:
You'd have to rejig your sales tax system to scrap penny coins.
If something is advertised at $4.00, you end up paying $4.00 + tax, and it's to allow for this tax which is often in the individual cent range, you have to keep the penny coin.
In New Zealand, by contrast, virtually all retailers quote tax-inclusive prices, and they're often rounded to 5 cents (our smallest coin is the 5 cent piece).
"Countries with low value coins generally have state and local consumption taxes which are added to the advertised prices of goods and services. Consequently, almost every cash transaction requires the exchange of very low denomination coins. In New Zealand, GST is almost always incorporated in the displayed price of products. Also, the use of electronic methods of making payments is more common in New Zealand than in most other countries.
Low denomination coins are unpopular in several developed countries. Finland has chosen not to issue 1 and 2 eurocent coins. Major retail organisations, banks and consumer organisations in the Netherlands have voluntarily agreed that all pricing should be in 5 eurocent intervals. A recent survey in the United Kingdom indicated that about 5 million people there regularly throw away low value coins. If Europe and the UK opted for lowest value coins of five eurocents and five pennies respectively these would be of similar value to a New Zealand 10 cent coin."
"The bottom line is, Black hole systems like MAPS/ORBS/etc... don't work as intended, period. "
I disagree - Open Relays don't happen any more, BECAUSE RBLs were out there to block open relays. I'm totally sure that without open relay block lists, open relay would still be a major source of spam.
Also don't confuse the technology of RBLs with the data on them. Spamhaus is a professional organisation, and the RBL data they produce is well respected. You have to pick the RBLs you trust.
And I do run a real mail server - it's usually those sods on the end of DSL lines that complain the most about RBLs.
One example of a cache poisining attack is for a DNS server to provide 'extra answers' for a query.
eg: dns resolver (for an ISP) asks ns.network.net for the records for www.network.net, because some user wants to look at it. No problem it says, and gives back the address of www.network.net.
However, if ns.network.net was malicious, it might also give the address of www.bank.com. If the resolver then accepted this address of www.bank.com and entered it into its cache, well, www.network.net has just taken control of www.bank.com.:-)
(This is why various DNS resolvers have features to ignore additional answers to queries, or ignore answers outside the 'bailiwick' of the server, or things like that. Glue records do make the situation more complex than I've described.)
Out of the box? You get a prompt asking if you want to install and run this control (assuming it's signed - as others mentioned, a lot of spyware is.) Once it's running, it can do anything. Sure, you get asked, but there are ways of doing dumb things (like repeating the control a hundred times, and your typical user will give up and just click yes.)
Note that there are dramatic improvments in XP SP2 - there, the information bar pops up. Most clueless users just ignore it -- which is what you normally want for them.:-)
Even if you lock it down and disable ActiveX, Internet Explorer helpfully makes sure you know about it by displaying a *modal* dialog box telling you that ActiveX is disabled on every page that uses it! (You can go the other way too, and make it wide open if you want. You shouldn't.)
Oh it's installed by default on 2003; but it's just not turned on. It's there on the System control panel if you want to look.
But it can be turned on easily by Group Policy - this really handy thing where you can configure settings for a whole group of computers incredibly quickly in Active Directory.
It could easily be set as such (ie: turned on) for your domain if you chose - just edit the Domain Default policy in Active Directory Users and Computers. (In our case, just one OU for Servers.)
"Intranet easily and/or transparently usable/installable/upgradeable is an ease-of-use feature"
Except that very very few, if any, intranet based products ever use it. Pretty much everyone's gone back to the traditional "use a web browser as a web browser and do the tricky stuff on the server."
I advocate a 'lockdown' mode for IE; where all the potentially dangerous stuff is completely locked off. Sure, this might break an Intranet, but for a typical home user, who cares?
Wow, I'm glad I'm not the only person to find bad that program was. (Well, from my POV, was, since we're using the slightly less bad Symantec product.)
(I had a discussion once with a tech support, I tried to educate him that the RFC's say "If an MX record exists, thou shalt NEVER attempt a direct A record delivery." He didn't believe me.)
One of the features added to Exchange 2003 (from 2000) was DNSBL (DNS blocklist) checking.
So, yes, they DID upgrade to a version of Exchange that includes anti-spam capabilities. Presumably the admins merely added "check spamhaus.org" and some others. Or something.
Turning this feature on would, of course, only be visible to the admins checking the logs.
Microsoft also have released the "Intelligent Message Filter" for Exchange 2003 that's supposed to help filter out spam too.
Since I've see email addresses for employees that have left for years being spammed still (in the logs) I do not believe for an instant that shutting down the mail server like that will work.
We use Vamsoft's ORFEE as our DNSBL and other assorted anti-spam checker. Works well, rejects mail at the SMTP level rather than accept-and-bounce.
Slashdot Mirror
Traditionally they actually convert arial photography to an "orthophoto" - which is a processed version of the photo to have an orthographic projection.
(If you don't know what that is, it's when you take a camera that's completely directly on top of the target area, with a lens as big as what you're taking, so there's no perspective shortening at all.)
They can do it two ways, I guess they either know where the satelite is, or they locate enough points on the photo (ie: manually eyeball feature x) and knowing each point's real world coordinates (ie: feature x is at lat a long b) they can work out the projection / deprojection.
Certainly, the Auckland Harbour Bridge would look different - ie: not like a flat road in the water - if it was anything but an orthographic projection.
I guess you're right - but then, there are a number of advantages to not using the same windows account for multiple people!
(In Exchange, you have to create user accounts in Active Directory for each mailbox anyway, so this is usually not a big problem.)
Outlook is trustworthy at what it does - but it's very much a 'one person' program, and thus it's often not the place to store information that's of interest to the company in the long term.
(It's insane if all the project documentation is stored in a folder in John's Inbox. It really should be stored in somewhere more approprate for such shared information. Once John leaves, or is assigned elsewhere and cleans up his inbox, it's all gone!)
This is still true if you use any mail program and mail server combination - kmail, Evolution or whatever else.
Without testing or checking up on it, I believe that's the case.
(Our server is not configured to do that -- if you need to control mailbox sizes, a direct quota makes far more sense to me.)
We do use it to clean out Deleted Items folders, and such messages do dissapear from Outlook.
You've not been using Outlook 2003 in the recommended Cached Exchange Mode. We are - and it makes PST files look quaint. :-)
(In cached mode, Outlook "merely" synchronises against Exchange. Everything is stored in both places - meaning that nothing on the client has to be backed up, you only have to back-up the store on the Exchange server. This is easy to do - just use NTBACKUP to generate a BKF file - you don't even shut the server down. Also, since you only have to protect the server, you'll often use a decent RAID setup to reduce the chance the backup will ever be needed.)
If a workstation falls over, you reinstall outlook and set up the account. It just downloads everything back from the server and you're up and running.
It also sounds like you have an information managment problem - people's outlook account is not really where you should be storing important corporate information.
If that's the situation, you really need NZ law's way of dealing with that.
(Under NZ's fair trading act, if it is not disclosed that the prices are ex-GST, then you can assume that the prices are inclusive --Well, not disclosing that it's ex-GST is considerd a false or misleading representation under the Fair Trading Act, 1986.)
I imagine that in NZ in this situation, they could not enforce the contract against you, or could not enforce that price.
IANAL, however.
This writes to the disks write cache but I don't believe it actually issues the sync command to the drive.
Yeah - that's the point of this thing - what's supposed to happen with fsync? From memory, sometimes it will guarentee it's all the way to the platters, sometimes it will not, depending on what storage system you're using, and how easy such a guarentee is to make.
Linus in 2001 discussing this issue - it's not new. That whole thread was about comparing SCSI against IDE drives, and it seemed that the IDE drives were either breaking the laws of physics, or lying, but the SCSI drives were being honest.
From hazy memory, one problem is that without tagged-command-queing or native-command-queuing, one process issuing a sync will cause the hard drive and related software to wait until it has fully synched for all i/o "in flight"; holding up any other i/o tasks for other processes!
That's why fsync often lies; because it's not pratical for people that fsync all the time to flush buffers to screw around with the whole i/o subsystem, and apparently some programs were overzealous with calling fsync when they shouldn't.
However, with TCQ, commands that are synched overlap with other commands, so it's not that big a deal (other i/o tasks are not impacted any more than they would by other, unsynchronised, i/o). (Thus, with TCQ, fsync might go all the way to the platters, but without it it might just go to the IDE bus.) SCSI has had TCQ from day one, which is why a SCSI system is more likely to sync all the way than IDE.
If I'm wrong, somebody correct me please.
Brad's program certainly points out an issue - it should be possible for a database engine to write to disk and guarentee that it gets written; perhaps fsync() isn't good enough - be this fault in the drives, the IDE spec, IDE drivers or the OS.
And they *always* consume memory bandwidth; which is why 'offboard' video often improves overall system performance.
that you get free minutes if you don't initiate the call?
:-) I'm in New Zealand, I do not pay to recieve a phone call - the complete cost is borne by the caller. (I understand Americans get charged to *receive* a cell-phone call.)
It the norm virtually everywhere BUT the USA.
(One difference is that it's easy to recognise a cellphone number in New Zealand - it's the +64-2x area codes.)
There was somebody in New Zealand that, as a fund raising drive, tried to collect everyone's 5 cent coins that people had acccumlated at home doing nothing.
For them, it was worthwhile, as they collected so many, and they'd go to all the hassle of getting them counted. (The reserve bank thought yay, as it meant these old 5c's would re-enter circulation - they're expensive (as a fraction of their face value) to make.)
But you (ie: USA) have a slight issue:
You'd have to rejig your sales tax system to scrap penny coins.
If something is advertised at $4.00, you end up paying $4.00 + tax, and it's to allow for this tax which is often in the individual cent range, you have to keep the penny coin.
In New Zealand, by contrast, virtually all retailers quote tax-inclusive prices, and they're often rounded to 5 cents (our smallest coin is the 5 cent piece).
Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
"The bottom line is, Black hole systems like MAPS/ORBS/etc... don't work as intended, period. "
I disagree - Open Relays don't happen any more, BECAUSE RBLs were out there to block open relays. I'm totally sure that without open relay block lists, open relay would still be a major source of spam.
Also don't confuse the technology of RBLs with the data on them. Spamhaus is a professional organisation, and the RBL data they produce is well respected. You have to pick the RBLs you trust.
And I do run a real mail server - it's usually those sods on the end of DSL lines that complain the most about RBLs.
Serious yes, but been around a long time.
:-)
One example of a cache poisining attack is for a DNS server to provide 'extra answers' for a query.
eg: dns resolver (for an ISP) asks ns.network.net for the records for www.network.net, because some user wants to look at it. No problem it says, and gives back the address of www.network.net.
However, if ns.network.net was malicious, it might also give the address of www.bank.com. If the resolver then accepted this address of www.bank.com and entered it into its cache, well, www.network.net has just taken control of www.bank.com.
(This is why various DNS resolvers have features to ignore additional answers to queries, or ignore answers outside the 'bailiwick' of the server, or things like that. Glue records do make the situation more complex than I've described.)
According to Amazon, it's actually entitled Make It So.
Look at your cellphone to "decrypt" your PIN number next time. (imagine; or actually try; typing your PIN into your cellphone).
Out of the box? You get a prompt asking if you want to install and run this control (assuming it's signed - as others mentioned, a lot of spyware is.) Once it's running, it can do anything. Sure, you get asked, but there are ways of doing dumb things (like repeating the control a hundred times, and your typical user will give up and just click yes.)
:-)
Note that there are dramatic improvments in XP SP2 - there, the information bar pops up. Most clueless users just ignore it -- which is what you normally want for them.
Even if you lock it down and disable ActiveX, Internet Explorer helpfully makes sure you know about it by displaying a *modal* dialog box telling you that ActiveX is disabled on every page that uses it! (You can go the other way too, and make it wide open if you want. You shouldn't.)
NT 4 Workstation has been completely unsupported since 30 June 2004. (It's only Server that's had the extensions until now.)
Oh it's installed by default on 2003; but it's just not turned on. It's there on the System control panel if you want to look.
But it can be turned on easily by Group Policy - this really handy thing where you can configure settings for a whole group of computers incredibly quickly in Active Directory.
It could easily be set as such (ie: turned on) for your domain if you chose - just edit the Domain Default policy in Active Directory Users and Computers. (In our case, just one OU for Servers.)
"Intranet easily and/or transparently usable/installable/upgradeable is an ease-of-use feature"
Except that very very few, if any, intranet based products ever use it. Pretty much everyone's gone back to the traditional "use a web browser as a web browser and do the tricky stuff on the server."
I advocate a 'lockdown' mode for IE; where all the potentially dangerous stuff is completely locked off. Sure, this might break an Intranet, but for a typical home user, who cares?
It's also a character in the movie Pulp Fiction.
Rather unpleasnt sort that wears quite a bit of leather.
The character is entirely deleted in certain TV versions (check the alternate versions information in IMDB.)
Yeah, Jimbo's associated with Bomis, that's true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomis.
What on earth is the point of working out sine or cosine with a TABLE? How is that more useful or 'fundamental' than using a calculator?
Both options are really 'black box magic occurs here'.
Mathworld gives the infinite-term series you should be summing up instead if you really want to remove some black box magic.
Easiest option, if you've already got the infrastructure to use a DNSBL and only really worried about SMTP.
Add "china.blackholes.us" as a standard for DNSBL. It supports TXT lookup too.
(Alternatively, "cn-kr.blackholes.us" if you want to ignore Korea as well as China.)
Alternate provider of country information is countries.nerd.dk.
Wow, I'm glad I'm not the only person to find bad that program was. (Well, from my POV, was, since we're using the slightly less bad Symantec product.)
(I had a discussion once with a tech support, I tried to educate him that the RFC's say "If an MX record exists, thou shalt NEVER attempt a direct A record delivery." He didn't believe me.)
One of the features added to Exchange 2003 (from 2000) was DNSBL (DNS blocklist) checking.
So, yes, they DID upgrade to a version of Exchange that includes anti-spam capabilities. Presumably the admins merely added "check spamhaus.org" and some others. Or something.
Turning this feature on would, of course, only be visible to the admins checking the logs.
Microsoft also have released the "Intelligent Message Filter" for Exchange 2003 that's supposed to help filter out spam too.
Since I've see email addresses for employees that have left for years being spammed still (in the logs) I do not believe for an instant that shutting down the mail server like that will work.
We use Vamsoft's ORFEE as our DNSBL and other assorted anti-spam checker. Works well, rejects mail at the SMTP level rather than accept-and-bounce.