. . . that i never read Asimov. Those 'laws' and the painfully tedious asomov-obsessors who preach them like they make sense or something. Good $diety you people are boring.
I read scifi. I read *hard scifi. Stanislaw lem, Michael Moorcock, etc. But i never touched asimov. Because of those astoundingly dull nerds who would try to use the laws of robotics in a debate as though they were some sort of actual law.
I can't even hear the name 'asimov' without imagining David Shirk saying, "No, your wrong, the first law says . . "
ugh.
That being said, I'm not seeing MIBRobot because it looks stupid. It looks like Men In Black meets A.I.. It looks DUMB.
This time, however, Yahoo said it will continue changing its protocols to prevent clients such as Trillian from finding new ways to incorporate Yahoo. Again, the measure was cited by Yahoo as a way to prevent IM spam.
"By making frequent protocol changes, it is our expectation that spammers will be blocked from abusing our system to spam our users," Osako said.
I think the anti-spam thing is a sameful made-up excuse, since most users already run with authorization required.
But I think they're pretty clear about their intention to make frequent protocol changes to prevent 3rd party clients from working.
Now, if I just had a box powerful enough to drive one of these...
Your box is powerful enough to drive one of these.
The Bt8x8 line have an on-die risc processor and are designed to perform pci busmaster transfers directly into your video card's memory with little to no interference from your processor once you've set them up.
You could use it on a Pentium 60. You could use it on a 486 if it didn't require stuff that's in post-486-era pci specs.
The overlay transfer uses essentially zero cpu. In fact, if you crash the OS, the overlay transfer keeps going and the video window remains live because the southbridge is still live even if the cpu is trapped.
The PROBLEM, is that mostly the windows drivers don't use the overlay method for reasons that are lame. they use the grab-and-display method, which is dumber than dumb.
The btwincap drivers get around that issue. it's also a total nonissue in linux.
I mean one of those countries where you don't have to produce reliable science to be revered as a great scientist.
Admittedly, we're running out of them, but I'm sure there's probably somewhere in the southern hemisphere that's just aching for cutting edge physics that just can't be replicated outside of one man's notebooks.
If you falsify data you're not a scientist, it's as simple as that. In order to be a scientist you have to be able to embrace failure.
Being incorrect in your hypothesis is a step that takes you toward your ultimate goal. If you can't grok that, you're in the wrong line of work.
You can't just forge ahead in the face of data to the contrary. That's the dark ages. You may as well start believing that the sun orbits around the earth purely because it suits you for it to do so.
Bell Labs should sue him for fraud in addition to firing him. It's disgusting. It's an insult to humanity.
Kick his ass, then send him to some country where they like pseudoscience.
For the next two weeks until i start a non-crappy job at a linux based company, I still work graveyards at one of the larger aggregate dialup resellers in the US (no, my email address, whois records, etc, are not indicative) and this means i mainly handle abuse complaints.
We get the occasional hit & run spammer who signs up for one of the $9.95/mo services with a prepaid credit card (so we can't effectively fine them) and then spams the heck out of the connection until we cut them off, but 99% of spammer complaints (that aren't due to spamcop being fooled by well crafted headers from brazil, or confused by unpublished relay hosts in our spam filtering cluster) are traced to users who have been with us for some time, who have never given us any trouble, and who have called customer service frequently for fairly basic help with simple internet setup tasks -- usually an account shared by a family with several children, or used by an old lady who just wants to look at pictures of the grandkids on the intarweb gadget. Pretty unlikely spammers.
The accounting department doesn't like it, would prefer to shoot first with a $100 fine and let customers beg for forgiveness later, but i argue constantly that we should give them at least one chance to disinfect their computer. We go ahead and fine 'em if they don't fix their issue within a few days, though, and then accounting makes them prove they are disinfected before giving them their money back.
It's poor customer service, ultimately, but wtf is an isp to do? If we just pestered them with email they'd assume we didn't really mean it, and would never fix their systems.
A.backed by an existing bricks and mortar bank (to provide security and confidence that there is real money in a vault somewhere to back up your virtual dollars)
PayPal is backed by DeutcheBank. Doesn't get a whole lot more brick & mortar than that.
It's really too bad that the commandline pizzas you can get from Dominoes are so much more bland than the Windows based pizzas you can get from Pizzahut or Papa Johna.
OK, didn't like that one? (though it's true, I haven't eaten Domeinoes in over a decade, because it is teh suck).
How about this one:
How long until we get the security advisory that says that a local attacker could order several pizzas in your name to be delivered to your home as a prank?
Come on. This is *Stupid. This is goofy-stupid. This is dumber than "push technology" was.
Have you *noticed the signal to noise ratio we're dealing with here?
This is the most tedious and worthless 'enhancement' I've heard of in at least a year.
Unless they somehow developed a scheme for automatically detecting useful content in a webpage, I'm going to keep visually skimming them with my own two eyes until i find the one tidbit of useful data mixed in with all the dross.
I can just see this tool. "Ok, no, that sentence didn't help. Nope, not that one eather . . . no . . . no . . . . no . . . . god this is boring . . "
True, but a WHOIS on your domain identifies an ISP. Of course, there is no way of knowing if this is who you work for.
Sure aint. But thanks for playing.
How exactly do you know that Symantec doesn't have a department, or secret links to one, that does what is necessary to ensure continued profit?
I wouldn't put that past Peter Norton, actually. I'm old enough to remember when downloaded a bunch of public domain programs from BBSes and called it "Norton Utilities". This was not illegal at the time.
I certainly wouldn't put it past John McAfee either, there's even allegations that he did just that in the early days, which i have no way of substantiating.
But these two shysters still also depend on their antivirus apps Actually Working, and if they wrote the virus, we can be pretty sure they know how to remove it.
Your approach sounds good though. If you just popup a message, it will be ignored. A previous poster suggested redirecting people to a sandbox where they could only download virus killers, and otherwise do no harm - is that approach feasible?
It's trickier than it sounds. For ComCast, it's probably possible, since like the old days of independent ISPs, they control the pipe until it reaches their router.
In the world of aggregate dialup - and if you use a national dialup ISP that isn't also a telco, you're using aggregate dialup - it's pretty much impossible.
By 'aggregate' I mean, the modem that answers when you dial up probably doesn't belong to the company that bills you each month. And someone the next town over probably dials into one owned by a different company still. There are dozens of these companies. And most telcos fit into this category as well.
Not only that, the route it takes usually doesn't belong to them either. SOME - but not all - dialup equipment supports some sort of filtering, but it's generally port based. My employer's radius server requests of the NAS (the equipment you dial into) that it block port 25 inbound on your connection, for example. But support for this sort of feature is spotty at best, and you can't get very fancy with it.
In some cases the IP you get assigned is owned by the company you pay to be your ISP, but the ISP generally doesn't control the routing.
AT&T Worldnet is probably the only national dialup isp that owns an actual world-wide dialup network, because they bought one from IBM some years back. I dunno if they still own all of it, though.
National DSL services are in much the same boat, but I'm not sure to what extent. There's issues like the legality of inter-LATA atm fabric going over state lines that I don't comprehend at all. This is something my employer does, that's a few too many eschelons of engineering above me for me to osmote - at least during the graveyard shift.
As an aside to my previous comment - you have to understand that most internet services don't own the whole path between you and the internet. They own a bunch of important pieces of it, but there's a lot of cooperation involved. There usually isn't a really effective way to proactively detect if a user's computer is pulling some crap or other online.
So we depend on complaints.
A lot of those - largely, the most effective of those - come through SpamCop and through a comany called MyNetWatchman.
SpamCop isn't perfect, but it's effective when it works properly, and relatively innocuous when their header parsing is wrong. And yes, i've seen it be demonstrably wrong.
I am in no way affiliated with MyNetWatchman. I've never seen their product. I dunno how much it costs, if anything. All I know is, aparantly, their product/service collects incident reports from end user systems running their software, traces them to the originating network, and notifies whoever is responsible for them. When they tell us that one of our dialup users has a computer spreading MyDoom, we pretty much believe them. It always lines up nicely with what we know about when our users were online and with what address. It's effective.
The MyNetWatchman concept is a good one - someone should come up with something free-as-in-freedom that does the same thing. Having a centralized clearinghouse for incident reports helps a lot.
Wouldn't that be great? just let it parse through your firewall logs, run the data by you just in case you want to edit out some auditing you did for your own security, and then funnel it off to something like spamcop to be aggregated.
I work for one of the largest meta-ISPs. To put things simply, my employer operates the back-end of of a few hundred interest services. Said employer shall remain nameless, and no, my email address does not reflect said employer.
Anyway. I'm a graveyard shift network operator. There isn't a whole lot to do on the graveyard shift except make sure nothing bursts into flames. So I'm pretty bored until about 5am when our authentication logs gets rolled into the database.
And this is when i can go through all the complaints about spam, viruses, port scans, and whatever else our teeming masses of end users have perpetrated, and figure out exactly who's computer is doing what. And then shut 'em off.
I agree completely that it would be great if there were some way i could efficiently get the end user to disinfect or secure their systems without having to resort to strong-arm tactics, but the truth is that, for 99.99999% of home users, disabling their supply of email and porn is the only way we can get them to sit up and pay attention.
Think about it. If you got some popup on your screen that said you have a virus and your internet connection is at risk, you'd just close it and go about your business. Unless your connection didn't work, and then you'd call customer service and try and get it 'fixed'.
Heck, most people get popups that tell them that sort of thing all the time.
Would a smart person trust that the 'free' antivirus tools are indeed what they claim to be without some way of independently verifying that? I sure wouldn't.
Would an *average end user be able to use them effectively? That joke isn't even funny. I did my time in tech support - the sheer number of people who have asked me what a comma is while I'm trying to help them disable call waiting on their phone line are shadowed only by the monumental stupidity of the woman who was overheard - on several calls - shouting at her husband - over and over - "IT'S THE A IN THE CIRCLE! THE *A* IN THE *CIRCLE*!!!". It would be funnier if it didn't make one lose all faith in the future of humanity.
Furthermore, have you considered the liability issues here? You want a corporation to tell a user to run a program that proports to remove a virus from their system? a FREE program? What happens when it runs across some new variant of some virus, thinks it's the old variant, does the wrong thing to remove it, and ends up rendering the whole system inoperable? I'll tell you what, some arm-chair attorney is going to threaten legal action. You have no idea how frequently this really happens. Even if you so much as recommend third party software.
So we cut 'em off. Just to force them to call us. And then we tell them, essentially, "Look, buddy. Your computer has this problem. And your computer's problem is our problem. And that makes it your problem. We don't care what you do to solve this problem, but you better do it. We suggest antivirus software as a first step. We hear that you can get a free version of something called AVG."
And then, if they seem to understand, we turn their connection back on, so that they can update their norton or download avg or whatever.
And every week, there's two or three end users who get their accounts totally closed because we've been over this with them three times already and they haven't managed to get the picture.
I wish there were a kinder, gentler way to do it. So far, I don't think there is.
You misunderstand, and should have done some research. ReiserFS does not journal data, only metadata.
From the faq:
"As of now, ReiserFS only provides meta-data journaling--that is, it records which files have been created or opened, whether they have had their size changed, or where they have been relocated. It guarantees that the structure of the internal ReiserFS tree will be correct, thereby allowing you after an unclean shutdown to start back up without having to run fsck on all the files that have not been changed.
Data in files that were being used at the time of the crash could have been corrupted. This is usual for most filesystems. Data journaling filesystems guarantee that there will be no garbage written into a file, but they don't guarantee that a file update will be. (Only reiser4 guarantees that filesystem operations are performed as atomic operations, and provides atomic transaction functionality.)"
Not just because i'd have to upgrade my registration key to get rid of the ads, but because the entire ui just feels dumb. They threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't like the new UI. If they release a skin that makes it look and behave like opera 6 (or, better yet, 5), maybe I might consider it then, but they also dumbed down the configuration interface.
Great to hear that it's a complete rewrite. I guess now they'll never fix the ECMA bugs in 6.12.
That many yen doesn;t go all that far in japan. I'm pretty sure Lineo spent more than that on rent alone in their japan linux operation, and where did it get them?
This has been done before, it's actually been done a lot better before.
I apologize for not being able to find the URL. For some reason, dreamcast hackers don't link to eachother much at all, so the info is hard to find with google. Somewhere around here, I have a PDF with a schematic.
About a year and a half ago, someone released an unfinished schematic for a board that connects where the modem or BBA connects and has an onboard IDE controller and an ISA slot. The website for it also had pictures of an improved design with a notebook ide connector and mounting hardware, and a pcmcia slot instead of an ISA slot. All this hardware being supported under netbsd, with source provided.
the creator / author said on the page that the complete design was unfinished but very close to finished. It was uncertian whether he was planning on printing and selling boards, or even telling anyone else how to do it.
I think this thing needs either a serial port or a second CF slot.
There's no reason to believe you couldn't get a serial port dongle that clips onto the docking port as are available for palm pilots.
Two CF slots would make it rather large, but the prototype I've played with does have an MMC slot in addition to the CF slot.
The USB is a nice touch, but it looks like it might get in the way of the CF slot.
What the heck are you looking at? There's no USB port on the device except for the USB what runs through the docking connector.
Regardless, like most (all?) strongarm handhelds it's probably using the built-in USB on the strongarm chip itself. That means that it's target-only. The SA1110 is a USB device, not a USB host. You can't attach USB peripherals to it as it is a USB peripheral.
SA1110 usb also isn't very fast, it's a design limitation. But how fast does it have to be to copy a few megs of data to the host computer?
There are usb chips available that can be interfaced to the SA1110, but I haven't heard of a PDA that has one, given the voltage requirements. A USB hub has to be able provide 500mA of +5v to each device. Not practical for something that fits in your pocket.
The problem is when you start assembling systems to do things like field surveying systems, the features you get don't add up (e.g. you need a huge CF card to hold your maps files, but then yo have no way to connect your GPS). I do a lot of (simple) stuff with GPS hand PDAs -- I think every PDA should have a serial port!
It does have a serial port. The docking interface may provide the serial buffer chip but that's no big deal to build into a dongle. It just doesn't have a DB9 right on the case, which is perfectly reasonable.
Like i pointed out before, it does have an MMC slot on the side. MMC cards are not as cheap as CF or SmartMedia but they do exist, and if push came to shove you could put a 64 meg MMC card in the side and stick something else in the CF slot.
Keep in mind that while CF can be implemented as a storage-only interface, in order to be capable of hot-swap it is generally implemented as sortof a small formfactor PCMCIA. There exist LAN cards, modems, video confrencing cameras, and all manner of peripherals available in the CF formfactor. It's just like pcmcia, but smaller.
Re:Moans for casio...where's the decent graphics?
on
Info on the New iPAQ H3800
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· Score: 3, Informative
oh yeah and xscale is strongarm. It just has better power consumption, more instructions, but yes you were right there not ready yet. i've heard q1 2002 from intels press releases and such. damn man read shit before spouting your mouth off like an ass.
The XScale is lower *voltage, but that does not mean it is lower *power.
The XScale is SIMILAR internally to a strongarm but it is NOT a strongarm. It does NOT have integrated io & periopherals like a strongarm and it's companion io chipset has things in it that are INSANE for palm style devices, like a friggin PCI bus!
For pete's sake, man, the 80310 evaluation board runs at an ambient temperature of 60c, and rquires heatsinks if the temperature inside the case rises above 90c! A strongarm runs COLD. It needs fewer VOLTS but it's dissipating more WATTS of power as HEAT than the SA1110 even draws!
The SA1110 is perfect for palm-type devices because it has integrated USB, integrated serial, integrated LCD controller, integrated sound, integrated pcmcia, and a bunch of other bits & pieces that the XScale does NOT have. And neither does the IO companion chip. When you get all those components on a board together, it's going to need a LOT more juice than a little bubblegum stick of lithium polymer is going to put out.
You will probably see XScale cpus in hand held data terminals, mini-notebooks, and that ilk, but you're never going to see it in something like an ipaq. Get over the hype already. Even though there's a picture of a handheld in the marketing literature, it was designed for other applications.
The more pertinent question is: when will the iPaq and other devices start to use the even faster and lower power XScale processors that are ARM compatible?
The XScale is much faster, but is not lower power (Actually draws much more power) and it is not designed for use in handhelds.
For starters, it runs hot. StrongARM cpus do not.
Then there's the matter of it not having integrated peripherals like a StrongARM.
Oh, and did i mention that the XScale is not yet ready for primetime? Nobody seems to have an OS running stable on it yet.
It's aging quite nicely -- the processor is only 133 MHz, but that's MIPS and not this cheap-slow-crunches-x86-code-easily StrongARM BS
Where did you get the impression that a StrongARM crunches x86 code at all? It can only execute ARMv4 code.
I can personally guarantee that a 206mhz SA1110 runs circles around a 133mhz NEC Vr processor.
The Casio may have a quicker LCD controller, but you definately get a lot more work done per Mhz on an ARMv4 cpu than a MIPSv4 cpu. I work with both archetectures all the time.
However, this new iPaq still has the same crummy 12 bit downsampled (meaning that the proc takes time to shave off the extra 4 bits) screen as its predessors.
What do you mean? The SA1110 lcd controller is addressable as a 16 bit display for convenience, but the LCD itself is only capable of displaying 12 bits. Just like your casio.
Best I can guess, you're either a moron, or a troll, or someone who paid a lot of money for a cheezy mips handheld who has to then attack everything else in existance in order ot defend his expenditure.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . that i never read Asimov. Those 'laws' and the painfully tedious asomov-obsessors who preach them like they make sense or something. Good $diety you people are boring.
I read scifi. I read *hard scifi. Stanislaw lem, Michael Moorcock, etc. But i never touched asimov. Because of those astoundingly dull nerds who would try to use the laws of robotics in a debate as though they were some sort of actual law.
I can't even hear the name 'asimov' without imagining David Shirk saying, "No, your wrong, the first law says . . "
ugh.
That being said, I'm not seeing MIBRobot because it looks stupid. It looks like Men In Black meets A.I.. It looks DUMB.
I could dig up the older comments/articles which thoroughly contradict this troll-ish article summary but I don't think it deserves my time.
o +t he+hand/2100-1032_3-5245821.html
How 'bout this article?
http://news.com.com/Yahoo+to+Trillian%3A+Talk+t
Lemme paste in the meaningful passages:
This time, however, Yahoo said it will continue changing its protocols to prevent clients such as Trillian from finding new ways to incorporate Yahoo. Again, the measure was cited by Yahoo as a way to prevent IM spam.
"By making frequent protocol changes, it is our expectation that spammers will be blocked from abusing our system to spam our users," Osako said.
I think the anti-spam thing is a sameful made-up excuse, since most users already run with authorization required.
But I think they're pretty clear about their intention to make frequent protocol changes to prevent 3rd party clients from working.
Now, if I just had a box powerful enough to drive one of these...
Your box is powerful enough to drive one of these.
The Bt8x8 line have an on-die risc processor and are designed to perform pci busmaster transfers directly into your video card's memory with little to no interference from your processor once you've set them up.
You could use it on a Pentium 60. You could use it on a 486 if it didn't require stuff that's in post-486-era pci specs.
The overlay transfer uses essentially zero cpu. In fact, if you crash the OS, the overlay transfer keeps going and the video window remains live because the southbridge is still live even if the cpu is trapped.
The PROBLEM, is that mostly the windows drivers don't use the overlay method for reasons that are lame. they use the grab-and-display method, which is dumber than dumb.
The btwincap drivers get around that issue. it's also a total nonissue in linux.
*recording video is another story entirely.
The US standard is indeed not DVB (EchoStar/Dish Network is, but it is encrypted so you can't decode it).
Never say "can't decode it" - all I'm sayin.
I mean one of those countries where you don't have to produce reliable science to be revered as a great scientist.
Admittedly, we're running out of them, but I'm sure there's probably somewhere in the southern hemisphere that's just aching for cutting edge physics that just can't be replicated outside of one man's notebooks.
If you falsify data you're not a scientist, it's as simple as that. In order to be a scientist you have to be able to embrace failure.
Being incorrect in your hypothesis is a step that takes you toward your ultimate goal. If you can't grok that, you're in the wrong line of work.
You can't just forge ahead in the face of data to the contrary. That's the dark ages. You may as well start believing that the sun orbits around the earth purely because it suits you for it to do so.
Bell Labs should sue him for fraud in addition to firing him. It's disgusting. It's an insult to humanity.
Kick his ass, then send him to some country where they like pseudoscience.
For the next two weeks until i start a non-crappy job at a linux based company, I still work graveyards at one of the larger aggregate dialup resellers in the US (no, my email address, whois records, etc, are not indicative) and this means i mainly handle abuse complaints.
We get the occasional hit & run spammer who signs up for one of the $9.95/mo services with a prepaid credit card (so we can't effectively fine them) and then spams the heck out of the connection until we cut them off, but 99% of spammer complaints (that aren't due to spamcop being fooled by well crafted headers from brazil, or confused by unpublished relay hosts in our spam filtering cluster) are traced to users who have been with us for some time, who have never given us any trouble, and who have called customer service frequently for fairly basic help with simple internet setup tasks -- usually an account shared by a family with several children, or used by an old lady who just wants to look at pictures of the grandkids on the intarweb gadget. Pretty unlikely spammers.
The accounting department doesn't like it, would prefer to shoot first with a $100 fine and let customers beg for forgiveness later, but i argue constantly that we should give them at least one chance to disinfect their computer. We go ahead and fine 'em if they don't fix their issue within a few days, though, and then accounting makes them prove they are disinfected before giving them their money back.
It's poor customer service, ultimately, but wtf is an isp to do? If we just pestered them with email they'd assume we didn't really mean it, and would never fix their systems.
A.backed by an existing bricks and mortar bank (to provide security and confidence that there is real money in a vault somewhere to back up your virtual dollars)
PayPal is backed by DeutcheBank. Doesn't get a whole lot more brick & mortar than that.
Yes.
It's an auction marketplace, for crying out loud. "eBay" doesn't sell product. Comparison with Sears is apples & mushrooms.
It's really too bad that the commandline pizzas you can get from Dominoes are so much more bland than the Windows based pizzas you can get from Pizzahut or Papa Johna.
OK, didn't like that one? (though it's true, I haven't eaten Domeinoes in over a decade, because it is teh suck).
How about this one:
How long until we get the security advisory that says that a local attacker could order several pizzas in your name to be delivered to your home as a prank?
Come on. This is *Stupid. This is goofy-stupid. This is dumber than "push technology" was.
Have you *noticed the signal to noise ratio we're dealing with here?
This is the most tedious and worthless 'enhancement' I've heard of in at least a year.
Unless they somehow developed a scheme for automatically detecting useful content in a webpage, I'm going to keep visually skimming them with my own two eyes until i find the one tidbit of useful data mixed in with all the dross.
I can just see this tool. "Ok, no, that sentence didn't help. Nope, not that one eather . . . no . . . no . . . . no . . . . god this is boring . . "
True, but a WHOIS on your domain identifies an ISP. Of course, there is no way of knowing if this is who you work for.
Sure aint. But thanks for playing.
How exactly do you know that Symantec doesn't have a department, or secret links to one, that does what is necessary to ensure continued profit?
I wouldn't put that past Peter Norton, actually. I'm old enough to remember when downloaded a bunch of public domain programs from BBSes and called it "Norton Utilities". This was not illegal at the time.
I certainly wouldn't put it past John McAfee either, there's even allegations that he did just that in the early days, which i have no way of substantiating.
But these two shysters still also depend on their antivirus apps Actually Working, and if they wrote the virus, we can be pretty sure they know how to remove it.
Your approach sounds good though. If you just popup a message, it will be ignored. A previous poster suggested redirecting people to a sandbox where they could only download virus killers, and otherwise do no harm - is that approach feasible?
It's trickier than it sounds. For ComCast, it's probably possible, since like the old days of independent ISPs, they control the pipe until it reaches their router.
In the world of aggregate dialup - and if you use a national dialup ISP that isn't also a telco, you're using aggregate dialup - it's pretty much impossible.
By 'aggregate' I mean, the modem that answers when you dial up probably doesn't belong to the company that bills you each month. And someone the next town over probably dials into one owned by a different company still. There are dozens of these companies. And most telcos fit into this category as well.
Not only that, the route it takes usually doesn't belong to them either. SOME - but not all - dialup equipment supports some sort of filtering, but it's generally port based. My employer's radius server requests of the NAS (the equipment you dial into) that it block port 25 inbound on your connection, for example. But support for this sort of feature is spotty at best, and you can't get very fancy with it.
In some cases the IP you get assigned is owned by the company you pay to be your ISP, but the ISP generally doesn't control the routing.
AT&T Worldnet is probably the only national dialup isp that owns an actual world-wide dialup network, because they bought one from IBM some years back. I dunno if they still own all of it, though.
National DSL services are in much the same boat, but I'm not sure to what extent. There's issues like the legality of inter-LATA atm fabric going over state lines that I don't comprehend at all. This is something my employer does, that's a few too many eschelons of engineering above me for me to osmote - at least during the graveyard shift.
As an aside to my previous comment - you have to understand that most internet services don't own the whole path between you and the internet. They own a bunch of important pieces of it, but there's a lot of cooperation involved. There usually isn't a really effective way to proactively detect if a user's computer is pulling some crap or other online.
So we depend on complaints.
A lot of those - largely, the most effective of those - come through SpamCop and through a comany called MyNetWatchman.
SpamCop isn't perfect, but it's effective when it works properly, and relatively innocuous when their header parsing is wrong. And yes, i've seen it be demonstrably wrong.
I am in no way affiliated with MyNetWatchman. I've never seen their product. I dunno how much it costs, if anything. All I know is, aparantly, their product/service collects incident reports from end user systems running their software, traces them to the originating network, and notifies whoever is responsible for them. When they tell us that one of our dialup users has a computer spreading MyDoom, we pretty much believe them. It always lines up nicely with what we know about when our users were online and with what address. It's effective.
The MyNetWatchman concept is a good one - someone should come up with something free-as-in-freedom that does the same thing. Having a centralized clearinghouse for incident reports helps a lot.
Wouldn't that be great? just let it parse through your firewall logs, run the data by you just in case you want to edit out some auditing you did for your own security, and then funnel it off to something like spamcop to be aggregated.
Anyway, I'm done.
That's all well and good, but . . .
I work for one of the largest meta-ISPs. To put things simply, my employer operates the back-end of of a few hundred interest services. Said employer shall remain nameless, and no, my email address does not reflect said employer.
Anyway. I'm a graveyard shift network operator. There isn't a whole lot to do on the graveyard shift except make sure nothing bursts into flames. So I'm pretty bored until about 5am when our authentication logs gets rolled into the database.
And this is when i can go through all the complaints about spam, viruses, port scans, and whatever else our teeming masses of end users have perpetrated, and figure out exactly who's computer is doing what. And then shut 'em off.
I agree completely that it would be great if there were some way i could efficiently get the end user to disinfect or secure their systems without having to resort to strong-arm tactics, but the truth is that, for 99.99999% of home users, disabling their supply of email and porn is the only way we can get them to sit up and pay attention.
Think about it. If you got some popup on your screen that said you have a virus and your internet connection is at risk, you'd just close it and go about your business. Unless your connection didn't work, and then you'd call customer service and try and get it 'fixed'.
Heck, most people get popups that tell them that sort of thing all the time.
Would a smart person trust that the 'free' antivirus tools are indeed what they claim to be without some way of independently verifying that? I sure wouldn't.
Would an *average end user be able to use them effectively? That joke isn't even funny. I did my time in tech support - the sheer number of people who have asked me what a comma is while I'm trying to help them disable call waiting on their phone line are shadowed only by the monumental stupidity of the woman who was overheard - on several calls - shouting at her husband - over and over - "IT'S THE A IN THE CIRCLE! THE *A* IN THE *CIRCLE*!!!". It would be funnier if it didn't make one lose all faith in the future of humanity.
Furthermore, have you considered the liability issues here? You want a corporation to tell a user to run a program that proports to remove a virus from their system? a FREE program? What happens when it runs across some new variant of some virus, thinks it's the old variant, does the wrong thing to remove it, and ends up rendering the whole system inoperable? I'll tell you what, some arm-chair attorney is going to threaten legal action. You have no idea how frequently this really happens. Even if you so much as recommend third party software.
So we cut 'em off. Just to force them to call us. And then we tell them, essentially, "Look, buddy. Your computer has this problem. And your computer's problem is our problem. And that makes it your problem. We don't care what you do to solve this problem, but you better do it. We suggest antivirus software as a first step. We hear that you can get a free version of something called AVG."
And then, if they seem to understand, we turn their connection back on, so that they can update their norton or download avg or whatever.
And every week, there's two or three end users who get their accounts totally closed because we've been over this with them three times already and they haven't managed to get the picture.
I wish there were a kinder, gentler way to do it. So far, I don't think there is.
You misunderstand, and should have done some research. ReiserFS does not journal data, only metadata.
From the faq:
"As of now, ReiserFS only provides meta-data journaling--that is, it records which files have been created or opened, whether they have had their size changed, or where they have been relocated. It guarantees that the structure of the internal ReiserFS tree will be correct, thereby allowing you after an unclean shutdown to start back up without having to run fsck on all the files that have not been changed.
Data in files that were being used at the time of the crash could have been corrupted. This is usual for most filesystems. Data journaling filesystems guarantee that there will be no garbage written into a file, but they don't guarantee that a file update will be. (Only reiser4 guarantees that filesystem operations are performed as atomic operations, and provides atomic transaction functionality.)"
I will not be upgrading to 7.0 any time soon.
Not just because i'd have to upgrade my registration key to get rid of the ads, but because the entire ui just feels dumb. They threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't like the new UI. If they release a skin that makes it look and behave like opera 6 (or, better yet, 5), maybe I might consider it then, but they also dumbed down the configuration interface.
Great to hear that it's a complete rewrite. I guess now they'll never fix the ECMA bugs in 6.12.
That many yen doesn;t go all that far in japan. I'm pretty sure Lineo spent more than that on rent alone in their japan linux operation, and where did it get them?
This has been done before, it's actually been done a lot better before.
I apologize for not being able to find the URL. For some reason, dreamcast hackers don't link to eachother much at all, so the info is hard to find with google. Somewhere around here, I have a PDF with a schematic.
About a year and a half ago, someone released an unfinished schematic for a board that connects where the modem or BBA connects and has an onboard IDE controller and an ISA slot. The website for it also had pictures of an improved design with a notebook ide connector and mounting hardware, and a pcmcia slot instead of an ISA slot. All this hardware being supported under netbsd, with source provided.
the creator / author said on the page that the complete design was unfinished but very close to finished. It was uncertian whether he was planning on printing and selling boards, or even telling anyone else how to do it.
The guy was begging for it, frankly.
Personally, from what i read in google's cache right after it went down, I think the guy's crazy.
On one page, he's got a headline that actually says the feds kill babies.
On another, he's got a page full of bomb making instructions.
Face it, you're either for killing people or against killing people. Throwing in political reasoning only makes you more similar to your adversary.
Legally, that just makes him a whacko. It's when you combine "whacko" with "attacks government websites" that you get "terrorist".
The guy's an idiot, frankly. He doesn't know what he's fighting for, and was stupid enough to get caught doing something illegal.
I think this thing needs either a serial port or a second CF slot.
There's no reason to believe you couldn't get a serial port dongle that clips onto the docking port as are available for palm pilots.
Two CF slots would make it rather large, but the prototype I've played with does have an MMC slot in addition to the CF slot.
The USB is a nice touch, but it looks like it might get in the way of the CF slot.
What the heck are you looking at? There's no USB port on the device except for the USB what runs through the docking connector.
Regardless, like most (all?) strongarm handhelds it's probably using the built-in USB on the strongarm chip itself. That means that it's target-only. The SA1110 is a USB device, not a USB host. You can't attach USB peripherals to it as it is a USB peripheral.
SA1110 usb also isn't very fast, it's a design limitation. But how fast does it have to be to copy a few megs of data to the host computer?
There are usb chips available that can be interfaced to the SA1110, but I haven't heard of a PDA that has one, given the voltage requirements. A USB hub has to be able provide 500mA of +5v to each device. Not practical for something that fits in your pocket.
The problem is when you start assembling systems to do things like field surveying systems, the features you get don't add up (e.g. you need a huge CF card to hold your maps files, but then yo have no way to connect your GPS). I do a lot of (simple) stuff with GPS hand PDAs -- I think every PDA should have a serial port!
It does have a serial port. The docking interface may provide the serial buffer chip but that's no big deal to build into a dongle. It just doesn't have a DB9 right on the case, which is perfectly reasonable.
Like i pointed out before, it does have an MMC slot on the side. MMC cards are not as cheap as CF or SmartMedia but they do exist, and if push came to shove you could put a 64 meg MMC card in the side and stick something else in the CF slot.
Keep in mind that while CF can be implemented as a storage-only interface, in order to be capable of hot-swap it is generally implemented as sortof a small formfactor PCMCIA. There exist LAN cards, modems, video confrencing cameras, and all manner of peripherals available in the CF formfactor. It's just like pcmcia, but smaller.
oh yeah and xscale is strongarm. It just has better power consumption, more instructions, but yes you were right there not ready yet. i've heard q1 2002 from intels press releases and such. damn man read shit before spouting your mouth off like an ass.
The XScale is lower *voltage, but that does not mean it is lower *power.
The XScale is SIMILAR internally to a strongarm but it is NOT a strongarm. It does NOT have integrated io & periopherals like a strongarm and it's companion io chipset has things in it that are INSANE for palm style devices, like a friggin PCI bus!
For pete's sake, man, the 80310 evaluation board runs at an ambient temperature of 60c, and rquires heatsinks if the temperature inside the case rises above 90c! A strongarm runs COLD. It needs fewer VOLTS but it's dissipating more WATTS of power as HEAT than the SA1110 even draws!
The SA1110 is perfect for palm-type devices because it has integrated USB, integrated serial, integrated LCD controller, integrated sound, integrated pcmcia, and a bunch of other bits & pieces that the XScale does NOT have. And neither does the IO companion chip. When you get all those components on a board together, it's going to need a LOT more juice than a little bubblegum stick of lithium polymer is going to put out.
You will probably see XScale cpus in hand held data terminals, mini-notebooks, and that ilk, but you're never going to see it in something like an ipaq. Get over the hype already. Even though there's a picture of a handheld in the marketing literature, it was designed for other applications.
The more pertinent question is: when will the iPaq and other devices start to use the even faster and lower power XScale processors that are ARM compatible?
The XScale is much faster, but is not lower power (Actually draws much more power) and it is not designed for use in handhelds.
For starters, it runs hot. StrongARM cpus do not.
Then there's the matter of it not having integrated peripherals like a StrongARM.
Oh, and did i mention that the XScale is not yet ready for primetime? Nobody seems to have an OS running stable on it yet.
It's aging quite nicely -- the processor is only 133 MHz, but that's MIPS and not this cheap-slow-crunches-x86-code-easily StrongARM BS
Where did you get the impression that a StrongARM crunches x86 code at all? It can only execute ARMv4 code.
I can personally guarantee that a 206mhz SA1110 runs circles around a 133mhz NEC Vr processor.
The Casio may have a quicker LCD controller, but you definately get a lot more work done per Mhz on an ARMv4 cpu than a MIPSv4 cpu. I work with both archetectures all the time.
However, this new iPaq still has the same crummy 12 bit downsampled (meaning that the proc takes time to shave off the extra 4 bits) screen as its predessors.
What do you mean? The SA1110 lcd controller is addressable as a 16 bit display for convenience, but the LCD itself is only capable of displaying 12 bits. Just like your casio.
Best I can guess, you're either a moron, or a troll, or someone who paid a lot of money for a cheezy mips handheld who has to then attack everything else in existance in order ot defend his expenditure.
Go read the actual article. Fret not, they're still demonizing and criminalizing.
(They're asking 'hacktivists' to lay off)
No, it doesn't. But it has a serial port on the back. You can plug an X10 interface into that quite easily.