Re:He he ... "fabulous work" he said ..
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HDCP Break Proven
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"Good crypto can only be developed in the open where it is subject to formal peer review and detailed scrutiny".
I'm sure everyone in NSA shares your educated opinion.
Most likely, NSA fully subscribes to this idea and promotes peer review of top-secret work. They have plenty of scientists with security clearances for that. If NSA doesn't send a paper for review to me or to you it doesn't mean that someone else, better qualified, doesn't look at it.
Transmeta had to have a REAL competitive advantage.
And this advantage is NOT in Laptoplandia. Imagine having a PDA - larger than Palm, with some Flash (come on, my camera has 96MB!), some RAM (not too much, save power) and Crusoe CPU. But instead of the LCD it has heads-up display. These are very small, very light (50-100g assembled), very sharp (I tried one, 1024x768 - better than my 17" monitor back then) and need just milliwatts to operate. That's where the CPU would make a difference. Unfortunately, there is a negative market reaction to any wearable computer with HUD.
I mean if you have one chip that you can swap from an Intel board to an Apple board by just telling it "ok, now emulate PPC," I mean, that's gotta be useful to somebody I would imagine?
Absolutely not useful. The reason is that all m/boards (and the rest of the computer hardware) is supposed to be perfectly optimized to do only one job - to run one instruction set as fast as possible, and as cheaply as possible.
There is no benefit to the end user if the same "universal" chip is used on two less-than-perfectly performing m/boards. There may be some marginal benefit to the manufacturing people (who need to order fewer different parts), but even that is not enough.
Such system would be beneficial only on multi-CPU emulation boards, where you could run several OSes designed originally for several different CPUs. But there is no need for monsters like that.
It is also awfully difficult to achieve production-quality compatibility with someone's else bugs, misfeatures and even correctly working microcode. Some programs may depend on relative timing of machine commands; in embedded world this is routine to count clocks spent in some loops; in desktop world you could just get a BSOD, and guess all you want why.
The point is that the original IP holders have a huge advantage - they have all the sources, they are the standard. Emulation business is nothing but chasing someone's taillights.
With 15" LCD's on laptops these days sucking down the batteries, the power savings of the Transmeta chips weren't worth the lower performance
Especially because if you use slower CPU your work takes longer time, and during that longer time the LCD and the rest of the hardware suck more juice from the battery that you saved on the CPU in first place. Often it means "slower CPU == shorter battery life".
he BITS are still there, and can be copied to a new medium, with ZERO loss.
Especially when you use redundant coding. Then even if you lose part of the datastream you still can recover the complete data as if nothing was lost. These coding methods are widely used in telecommunication.
Lastly, I don't think digital cameras will ever fully replace film, at least not until photo printers become a lot cheaper for the average consumer. Your grandmother won't want to whip out a Flash card everytime someone wants to see a picture of her grandson, she's going to want something tangible, in a frame.
A decent printer at her local Wal-Mart or Rite Aid will do the trick. They already have photo centres, and printing of a few digital photos is much faster than developing and printing the whole roll. The 3Mpixel quality is already more than she will ever need (or can see the difference).
First problem is that CDR media does degrade. Most estimates I've heard say that CDR media's lifespan is about a decade or so. After that, things get shaky.
We had this very problem with floppies. You know, these pesky 5.25" disks were quite fragile, and drive heads could wear them out. Is it a problem? Not at all. All the data that I ever had on floppies now occupies one small portion of one CD-R. The point is that as technology progresses you wouldn't want to keep old media around, just because it is inconvenient or obsolete. Even now you can dump a lot of CD-R's onto a DVD.
Developing film is MUCH more expensive than storing digital images.
I would add here that developer (especially color one) is very hazardous material. Some people have allergies to methol and glycin, and color developers (that work on the silver image) are outright poisonous. Used developer can be somewhat recycled, but in the end it goes back into the environment. Not good.
most of the points that the author makes are moot.
My guess is that while she was writing her thesis the technology moved ahead and obsoleted it:-)
usable linux distros (SMS/slack) were around before an ordinary person could install BSD on their home system
I tend to agree. In spring of 1995 I got a then-OK Compaq 486/80 box at work, and decided to install on it, one after another, WinNT 3.51, Linux 1.3.10 (?) that I got from Walnut Creek guys, and FreeBSD (of release that I don't recall) bought from the same place recently by our local sysadmin.
I will spare you from hearing the NT story; suffice to say, it was not very fast:-)
FreeBSD was next. But I found that it didn't have support for IDE CDROM drives! Only SCSI drives were supported, and I had to use the CD! So I transferred whole CD connent onto the HDD, and that did the trick. Later I borrowed a SCSI CD-ROM drive, and it worked. I had to jump through many hoops to get X up and running, but that's hardly BSD fault.
After that I installed Linux (Slackware distribution). It worked out of the box and recognized everything.
I didn't keep any of these OSes at that time, but FreeBSD definitely appeared to be more elitist than others. Our sysadmin ran this very release of FreeBSD on our Internet gateway, back then connected through 14Kbps modem. It worked very well, I had an account on that box and compiled stuff from time to time. As an OS it is fine. But its requirements definitely were more stringent.
I never went back to FreeBSD since then, because of several reasons. I worked for some time with NetBSD (as a job), and it was OK too, just a bit sluggish. I haven't contributed a single bit of BSD code, though, because of licensing - I am a GPL person. I wrote some drivers and apps for Linux, and I like the Linux community as it is now; there are no fanatics among developers. By the way, *BSD developers are also fairly normal people:-) while working on NetBSD projects I was subscibed to NetBSD mailing lists and helped few people with stuff that I knew about.
While I was there a good portion of the St. Petersburg lost hot water because they were fixing all of the pipes.
This can be unclear to some readers.
In many western countries (like USA?) the city only provides cold water, and homeowners have to heat it themselves (in water heaters).
In Russia, however, the city typically provides both cold and hot water. The hot water is fed into water taps and is also used for heating in winter. During summer the hot water pipelines are normally inspected and tested, this is planned well ahead.
When Nasa called for design projects for the ISS, they got a few proposals, and they reduced the thing to basically two options: 1) building ISS at sea level, pack it up and ship it in 2 or 3 shuttles flights to deploy it
It is quite obvious that ISS is several orders of magnitude larger than anything the Shuttle can lift in its payload bay. To be specific, just MPLM alone - "a moving van" of the ISS - occupies most of the payload bay, and that MPLM is tiny compared to the rest of the station.
Plan (1) is not technically possible - not because of weight but because of geometry of modules. Each of them is bigger than the Shuttle.
Ever notice that most places you walk into have a small sticker or sign somewhere that says something like "Closed-circuit cameras on premises"?
A VCR hasn't accused anyone yet of theft before the crime. However the proposed system is designed and intended to dispense accusations based on very flimsy foundation (that you look like some bad guy). This is a big difference.
Of course, the store owner always could, even without computer, approach you and ask to leave - but that situation is well within normal human interaction standards.
Problems begin exactly when nameless, irresponsible mechanism fingers you as a criminal and directs bouncers to show you the door - that's actually the least trouble you should be expecting. That's like bad credit or identity theft - you will be running in circles for years trying to prove - at your own expense - that you are not a criminal. Even if owners of databases will correct the error, it will be haunting you for very long time because not all copies will be updated.
In some cases, when real identity of a criminal is not known, you can forever be branded as thief just because another camera, years ago, saw someone like you doing a crime, and at that time he got away. How would prove that it wasn't you back then? This database is the judge and the jury, and it won't even tell you why that face was put into the database in first place! Talk about that obsolete right to challenge your accuser...
I dislike ads very much, and I use Linux and Win2K boxes all the time. Rare an ad slips through my filters. So here is how it works.
Firstly, I use Mozilla on both OSes. I configure it to ask permission before loading images, and remember the choice. This quickly populates the database of junk image sites. Same is done with cookies, of course. Animated GIFs are set to never loop.
Secondly, I use Squid + Junkbuster chain on another computer. It acts as a caching/filtering proxy to block ads and cookies that slipped through Mozilla.
Thirdly, the firewall is configured to direct all traffic to/from known Evil Sites (tm) to where it belongs. Input packets are denied, outgoing are rejected. Doubleclick and friends are all there, as well as some "legitimate" Web sites that have questionable privacy policies (like Real). This blocks a spyware traffic from apps like RealPlayer - which require 15 minutes to properly set up, otherwise they send everything they can to an unknown 3rd party.
Fourthly, though I haven't done that yet, you can disable outgoing traffic through your firewall, except the proxy server. This makes the whole Web accessible only through your proxy.
If you want to "sponsor" some Web site and give it an ad image request without actually seeing the ad, you can use Mozilla's CSS hacks. Then the image will be downloaded but not displayed. This is also necessary in SSL mode because the proxy becomes transparent and can't block images for you; then only Mozilla itself can help.
Why would anyone want to have those "cues"? It is not easy to put wires on the floor (or hide them in walls, ceiling), so some effort is needed. But where is the benefit? Even if I once in a blue moon see a useful ad (can't recall such case though) I can always write down the info and research it later. At least the cat was a novelty. A bunch of wires isn't. Most people don't even have the computer on when they aren't using it. DC apparently thinks people run their PCs non-stop... but that's not true.
The just (fortunately) one Shuttle loss does not give you enough statistics to decide which system is more safe.
True, if you count just few Shuttles that were made. Untrue, if you count number of launches or number of people launched.
As I recall, nobody ever died using rockets - flying upward. Hundreds of people successfully went to space. Four died on the way back (1967 and 1971), but that was not the problem of the rocket - the rocket was long gone by then. We do have enough statistics on launches and on deaths, and so far the launch on a rocket is safer (0% of observed fatalities) than driving on a highway.
One also can't directly compare number of catastrophic fires/explosions on rockets and on Shuttle. Fire of a rocket is not fatal or even dangerous, it happened once or twice, but the crew was saved by an independent hardware that was intentionally designed in, knowing that sooner or later a rocket will explode on launch. A single failure of a Shuttle killed everyone because the Shuttle was built with zero tolerance to a failure. Flexible systems bend, rigid systems break.
A Shuttle service history is another data point. Many failures are caught after the flight, many failures are caught on pre-launch countdown, and lately every Shuttle flight gets its own, unique malfunction to entertain the crew. That's because the fleet gets older and older, and no upgrade can help. Rockets, on the other hand, are made practically on a conveyor, and every cosmonaut gets a shining, brand new vehicle to ride on.
Yet another consideration is numbers of launches of rockets vs. Shuttles. Rockets are launched very frequently, but when they only carry a satellite it is not news any more. Every launch is an addition to the database of known successes and failures. Many manned flights were successful because similarly designed rockets carried a satellite earlier - and failed. The failure was analyzed and prevented in next rockets. Evolution in rockets progresses very fast, as in fruit flies, because they live fast lives. If some component can be improved it will be introduced in new rockets, very fast. Shuttle riders have to test all flaws on themselves because there are no unmanned launches, and there is no redesign of parts of the Shuttle. When such redesign is needed (after the explosion) the fleet was grounded for many, many years.
Looks like the word "protected" will let Tivo an easy way out.
Indeed, the law makes clear distinction between "a computer" and "a protected computer". However what protected means here is unclear to me. It may be protected by this law or protected by user. The former qualifies, the latter may be argued (a rape can not be justified because the victim was too weak to defend herself.)
why would he need to be connected to the phone at all?
Because it's his unit and the user is free to plug it wherever he pleases, including even less obvious possibilities:-) If seriously, the cable might have been plugged to evaluate the service with possible intent to subscribe. Failure of a homeowner to install a better lock would be a very weak defense at the trial of a burglar.
We have been flying space shuttles for decades and only lost one.
That's not something to be proud of - one too many shuttle destroyed and a bunch of people killed. Compare that to traditional rockets - they are the safest vehicle to space today, once people learned how to make them right (in both Russia and USA). The shuttle still doesn't have an emergency ejection system in case of disaster on launch. The design of shuttle's cabin can't accomodate that, and so astronauts just have to pray that everything works.
Russia was never interested in robotics in space - mostly because there was no application for the technology. Canada has the best expertise in this area, so it is only logical that it got the job.
However russian designs - not only in space but in aviation and other areas - are indeed very different from western ones. The equipment is intentionally made as simple as possible, with highest reliability. Western style is opposite - to install 17 embedded computers, entrust everyone's life to them and when they all crash just say "it can't happen". We all saw it happening on ISS last month. Russian sections worked because they don't depend so much on computers, and computers are known to be unreliable in space - where high energy particles are plentiful.
So in my opinion, the robot arm is overdesigned. It is too complicated. Maybe it works great, but what's use of that greatness if it doesn't move? Computer controls outside of the station? Why? Saving on few wires? I think the device could be much simpler and more reliable. Note that the current failure mode was not even expected by designers! That's bad. You must always have plan B.
Well, this cheesy virus can "infect" only boxen that got the virus and stay unpatched for a long, long time. These are likely to be unattended or purely adminned boxes. They can become a breeding ground for a new wave of DoS attacks, but now they are fixed as easily as they were br0ken into.
This is a totally new, proactive approach to Internet security. As soon as new virus is found it gets rev-engineered and an "antibody" is released (officially, from very official Web site, cryptographically signed if you like). This can be permitted by laws.
This antibody then may check certain file in certain place, like/etc/please_no_antibodies, and if this file does not contain a valid gpg-signed request to bug off then it proceeds, cleans up the virus, creates log of changes and mails it to the box owner.
Thinking commercially, this can be even a subscription service. You register IPs of your boxen on the Net, and the service scans your boxes (from a central server) from time to time; if the box is r00ted with known virus then it will inform you.
Even if you don't like this "commercial" approach, I hereby transfer this business plan into public domain. Logs of/. and Google will preserve it forever. Patent this!:-)
There are, IMO, several reasons for getting bad grades in school: [...]
You haven't mentioned one big reason that I think is fairly common. People have different kinds of minds (artistic, scientific etc.) and they learn different subjects with different success.
Myself, for example, at school I easily understood basics of nuclear physics, and I had no doubt why helium is unlikely to react with anything else. However I couldn't bear literature, touchy-feely stuff, what some fictituous persons might have thought and other junk like that. If a teacher asked me about some novel I couldn't tell anything coherent, unless that was in the novel (that I surely read).
I had similar issues with grammar classes. Teacher required everyone to memorize hundreds of numbered rules (how to spell words, how to compose sentences etc.) I never did that - mostly because I didn't need those rules:-)
What is so cruel and unusual about telling this kid the truth?
What if your doctor tells you: "Sorry to tell you, but you have a tumor. You will die, and quite soon I might say."
However he fails to tell you that the tumor is not dangerous, and you will die in about 70 years from now, of old age. Since the doctor is interested in cosmology, 70 years are "really soon" on his scale.
You go home and kill yourself. Looks similar...
The point here is that even absolutely truthful statements are often ambiguous and misleading ("Chicken is ready for dinner"). Kids are not mature philosophers who may be able to distinguish between shades of truth.
So telling him that, as an adult, he could go to jail, is not only correct but - if phrased correctly - a very important reality check that this playful hacking is a serious issue.
Obviously, the current policy is correct, and it does not matter if someone gets frightened to death - the policy, the procedure is above all.
By the way, the school has a unique place in society - it can impose punishments on members of society without due process. This case is an obvious example of abuse of that privilege/responsibility.
Good innovations (Re: Nautilus was crap anyway)
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Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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· Score: 1
I tried Nautilus many times, in many revisions starting from earliest betas. Most of my boxen @work are 400-450 MHz K6-II and K6-III, so we are talking about 1000 BogoMIPS here. Nautilus was always very slow. I managed to upgrade to latest GNOME a week ago, it contained released Nautilus and felt a bit faster. But it is still too slow, compared to gmc and to practically anything else.
I haven't looked at the code yet but it appears that developers managed to make more than one performance-impeding mistake. If the code gets moved to SF then it will be even beneficial to the project - because more people will be able to contribute and to make changes.
Some ideas of Nautilus I really like, some I don't care about and some I do not like.
I like selection shading - it is much nicer than traditional dashed line. I like MP3 preview (when it worked). I like thumbnailing of images - when I want it. I like the idea of pluggable viewers and document handlers, though not many are available yet.
Resizable icons are of no value to me, too time-consuming to resize an icon; easier just to open the file. Text inside of icons is totally useless - who works with text files today to start with, and even who does (sysadmins) how much they will learn from few lines of the content?
I don't particularly care about services. That part of their business plan was surely shaky. Companies like X-Drive offered some disk space year(s) ago. But who would even want some 25 MB (good for 5-7 mp3 files or 10 Word documents) over slow Internet link?
I absolutely hate Nautilus's performance. It is unacceptable for normal people. Geeks understand what's going on inside and may be inclined to tolerate slow operation. Non-geeks (like my boss) ask "what's going on, I already clicked here!" - or even worse, click again and again (or move objects again and again), with likely disastrous results.
Themes are one of problems indeed. I tried several and haven't found a single one that I would like. They are either too dark, or too hard to render, or hard to understand. Antialiased fonts are unusable (too blurred), and probably this piece of code better be removed in favor of native support of antialiasing in X.
Medusa and emblems are very weird. They needed to extend the filesystem to hold extra attributes of each file, so they decided to drop a dot-file in every directory. However this approach works only inside of Nautilus; commands that do not know about that magic file won't copy these "attributes". It is very portable though. But Medusa runs too aggressively and consumes too much CPU and disk activity. Eazel said that Medusa is required for good search - what search? I don't think I ever used that feature.
Builtin browser (piece of Mozilla) is unusable. It is not a complete Mozilla but just a restricted version, with very little customization. I do not understand why I (or anyone else) would want browser without decent controls if the full, complete browser is also installed (and even requred). I'd rather run Mozilla instead. This embedded browser business is not needed.
But generally Nautilus is an interesting, significant development. It needs many usability fixes, speed and good default theme being probably most important. After that it may be released onto unsuspecting users.
Revolts erupted, and the government was overthrown
In what country? Surely not in Russia. Last time russian government was overthrown was 1917:-)
If you refer to events of 1991 and 1993, people defended their government.
Does the Soviet Union still exist? It went down without a shot fired; sounds like victory...
If an enemy changes uniform, picks up another weapon and does not look like your old foe - it does not yet mean that you won.
Soviet Union had many problems. For one, stronger republics financed weaker ones. The dissolution of USSR cleansed the country, allowed to replace ossified political and economical system with hopefully better one.
Cold war had no winner at least because sides still have virtually same number of nuclear warheads pointed in each other's direction. The name of one participant changed, but not much more. Political climate started to improve, but events of last couple of years undid all that.
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I'm sure everyone in NSA shares your educated opinion.
Most likely, NSA fully subscribes to this idea and promotes peer review of top-secret work. They have plenty of scientists with security clearances for that. If NSA doesn't send a paper for review to me or to you it doesn't mean that someone else, better qualified, doesn't look at it.
And this advantage is NOT in Laptoplandia. Imagine having a PDA - larger than Palm, with some Flash (come on, my camera has 96MB!), some RAM (not too much, save power) and Crusoe CPU. But instead of the LCD it has heads-up display. These are very small, very light (50-100g assembled), very sharp (I tried one, 1024x768 - better than my 17" monitor back then) and need just milliwatts to operate. That's where the CPU would make a difference. Unfortunately, there is a negative market reaction to any wearable computer with HUD.
Absolutely not useful. The reason is that all m/boards (and the rest of the computer hardware) is supposed to be perfectly optimized to do only one job - to run one instruction set as fast as possible, and as cheaply as possible.
There is no benefit to the end user if the same "universal" chip is used on two less-than-perfectly performing m/boards. There may be some marginal benefit to the manufacturing people (who need to order fewer different parts), but even that is not enough.
Such system would be beneficial only on multi-CPU emulation boards, where you could run several OSes designed originally for several different CPUs. But there is no need for monsters like that.
It is also awfully difficult to achieve production-quality compatibility with someone's else bugs, misfeatures and even correctly working microcode. Some programs may depend on relative timing of machine commands; in embedded world this is routine to count clocks spent in some loops; in desktop world you could just get a BSOD, and guess all you want why.
The point is that the original IP holders have a huge advantage - they have all the sources, they are the standard. Emulation business is nothing but chasing someone's taillights.
Especially because if you use slower CPU your work takes longer time, and during that longer time the LCD and the rest of the hardware suck more juice from the battery that you saved on the CPU in first place. Often it means "slower CPU == shorter battery life".
Especially when you use redundant coding. Then even if you lose part of the datastream you still can recover the complete data as if nothing was lost. These coding methods are widely used in telecommunication.
A decent printer at her local Wal-Mart or Rite Aid will do the trick. They already have photo centres, and printing of a few digital photos is much faster than developing and printing the whole roll. The 3Mpixel quality is already more than she will ever need (or can see the difference).
We had this very problem with floppies. You know, these pesky 5.25" disks were quite fragile, and drive heads could wear them out. Is it a problem? Not at all. All the data that I ever had on floppies now occupies one small portion of one CD-R. The point is that as technology progresses you wouldn't want to keep old media around, just because it is inconvenient or obsolete. Even now you can dump a lot of CD-R's onto a DVD.
Developing film is MUCH more expensive than storing digital images.
I would add here that developer (especially color one) is very hazardous material. Some people have allergies to methol and glycin, and color developers (that work on the silver image) are outright poisonous. Used developer can be somewhat recycled, but in the end it goes back into the environment. Not good.
most of the points that the author makes are moot.
My guess is that while she was writing her thesis the technology moved ahead and obsoleted it :-)
I tend to agree. In spring of 1995 I got a then-OK Compaq 486/80 box at work, and decided to install on it, one after another, WinNT 3.51, Linux 1.3.10 (?) that I got from Walnut Creek guys, and FreeBSD (of release that I don't recall) bought from the same place recently by our local sysadmin.
I will spare you from hearing the NT story; suffice to say, it was not very fast :-)
FreeBSD was next. But I found that it didn't have support for IDE CDROM drives! Only SCSI drives were supported, and I had to use the CD! So I transferred whole CD connent onto the HDD, and that did the trick. Later I borrowed a SCSI CD-ROM drive, and it worked. I had to jump through many hoops to get X up and running, but that's hardly BSD fault.
After that I installed Linux (Slackware distribution). It worked out of the box and recognized everything.
I didn't keep any of these OSes at that time, but FreeBSD definitely appeared to be more elitist than others. Our sysadmin ran this very release of FreeBSD on our Internet gateway, back then connected through 14Kbps modem. It worked very well, I had an account on that box and compiled stuff from time to time. As an OS it is fine. But its requirements definitely were more stringent.
I never went back to FreeBSD since then, because of several reasons. I worked for some time with NetBSD (as a job), and it was OK too, just a bit sluggish. I haven't contributed a single bit of BSD code, though, because of licensing - I am a GPL person. I wrote some drivers and apps for Linux, and I like the Linux community as it is now; there are no fanatics among developers. By the way, *BSD developers are also fairly normal people :-) while working on NetBSD projects I was subscibed to NetBSD mailing lists and helped few people with stuff that I knew about.
One of russian newspapers: infamous Pravda. The translation is awful but you can get the news.
This can be unclear to some readers. In many western countries (like USA?) the city only provides cold water, and homeowners have to heat it themselves (in water heaters).
In Russia, however, the city typically provides both cold and hot water. The hot water is fed into water taps and is also used for heating in winter. During summer the hot water pipelines are normally inspected and tested, this is planned well ahead.
It is quite obvious that ISS is several orders of magnitude larger than anything the Shuttle can lift in its payload bay. To be specific, just MPLM alone - "a moving van" of the ISS - occupies most of the payload bay, and that MPLM is tiny compared to the rest of the station.
Plan (1) is not technically possible - not because of weight but because of geometry of modules. Each of them is bigger than the Shuttle.
A VCR hasn't accused anyone yet of theft before the crime. However the proposed system is designed and intended to dispense accusations based on very flimsy foundation (that you look like some bad guy). This is a big difference.
Of course, the store owner always could, even without computer, approach you and ask to leave - but that situation is well within normal human interaction standards.
Problems begin exactly when nameless, irresponsible mechanism fingers you as a criminal and directs bouncers to show you the door - that's actually the least trouble you should be expecting. That's like bad credit or identity theft - you will be running in circles for years trying to prove - at your own expense - that you are not a criminal. Even if owners of databases will correct the error, it will be haunting you for very long time because not all copies will be updated.
In some cases, when real identity of a criminal is not known, you can forever be branded as thief just because another camera, years ago, saw someone like you doing a crime, and at that time he got away. How would prove that it wasn't you back then? This database is the judge and the jury, and it won't even tell you why that face was put into the database in first place! Talk about that obsolete right to challenge your accuser...
Firstly, I use Mozilla on both OSes. I configure it to ask permission before loading images, and remember the choice. This quickly populates the database of junk image sites. Same is done with cookies, of course. Animated GIFs are set to never loop.
Secondly, I use Squid + Junkbuster chain on another computer. It acts as a caching/filtering proxy to block ads and cookies that slipped through Mozilla.
Thirdly, the firewall is configured to direct all traffic to/from known Evil Sites (tm) to where it belongs. Input packets are denied, outgoing are rejected. Doubleclick and friends are all there, as well as some "legitimate" Web sites that have questionable privacy policies (like Real). This blocks a spyware traffic from apps like RealPlayer - which require 15 minutes to properly set up, otherwise they send everything they can to an unknown 3rd party.
Fourthly, though I haven't done that yet, you can disable outgoing traffic through your firewall, except the proxy server. This makes the whole Web accessible only through your proxy.
If you want to "sponsor" some Web site and give it an ad image request without actually seeing the ad, you can use Mozilla's CSS hacks. Then the image will be downloaded but not displayed. This is also necessary in SSL mode because the proxy becomes transparent and can't block images for you; then only Mozilla itself can help.
Why would anyone want to have those "cues"? It is not easy to put wires on the floor (or hide them in walls, ceiling), so some effort is needed. But where is the benefit? Even if I once in a blue moon see a useful ad (can't recall such case though) I can always write down the info and research it later. At least the cat was a novelty. A bunch of wires isn't. Most people don't even have the computer on when they aren't using it. DC apparently thinks people run their PCs non-stop... but that's not true.
True, if you count just few Shuttles that were made. Untrue, if you count number of launches or number of people launched.
As I recall, nobody ever died using rockets - flying upward. Hundreds of people successfully went to space. Four died on the way back (1967 and 1971), but that was not the problem of the rocket - the rocket was long gone by then. We do have enough statistics on launches and on deaths, and so far the launch on a rocket is safer (0% of observed fatalities) than driving on a highway.
One also can't directly compare number of catastrophic fires/explosions on rockets and on Shuttle. Fire of a rocket is not fatal or even dangerous, it happened once or twice, but the crew was saved by an independent hardware that was intentionally designed in, knowing that sooner or later a rocket will explode on launch. A single failure of a Shuttle killed everyone because the Shuttle was built with zero tolerance to a failure. Flexible systems bend, rigid systems break.
A Shuttle service history is another data point. Many failures are caught after the flight, many failures are caught on pre-launch countdown, and lately every Shuttle flight gets its own, unique malfunction to entertain the crew. That's because the fleet gets older and older, and no upgrade can help. Rockets, on the other hand, are made practically on a conveyor, and every cosmonaut gets a shining, brand new vehicle to ride on.
Yet another consideration is numbers of launches of rockets vs. Shuttles. Rockets are launched very frequently, but when they only carry a satellite it is not news any more. Every launch is an addition to the database of known successes and failures. Many manned flights were successful because similarly designed rockets carried a satellite earlier - and failed. The failure was analyzed and prevented in next rockets. Evolution in rockets progresses very fast, as in fruit flies, because they live fast lives. If some component can be improved it will be introduced in new rockets, very fast. Shuttle riders have to test all flaws on themselves because there are no unmanned launches, and there is no redesign of parts of the Shuttle. When such redesign is needed (after the explosion) the fleet was grounded for many, many years.
Looks like the word "protected" will let Tivo an easy way out.
Indeed, the law makes clear distinction between "a computer" and "a protected computer". However what protected means here is unclear to me. It may be protected by this law or protected by user. The former qualifies, the latter may be argued (a rape can not be justified because the victim was too weak to defend herself.)
why would he need to be connected to the phone at all?
Because it's his unit and the user is free to plug it wherever he pleases, including even less obvious possibilities :-) If seriously, the cable might have been plugged to evaluate the service with possible intent to subscribe. Failure of a homeowner to install a better lock would be a very weak defense at the trial of a burglar.
That's not something to be proud of - one too many shuttle destroyed and a bunch of people killed. Compare that to traditional rockets - they are the safest vehicle to space today, once people learned how to make them right (in both Russia and USA). The shuttle still doesn't have an emergency ejection system in case of disaster on launch. The design of shuttle's cabin can't accomodate that, and so astronauts just have to pray that everything works.
However russian designs - not only in space but in aviation and other areas - are indeed very different from western ones. The equipment is intentionally made as simple as possible, with highest reliability. Western style is opposite - to install 17 embedded computers, entrust everyone's life to them and when they all crash just say "it can't happen". We all saw it happening on ISS last month. Russian sections worked because they don't depend so much on computers, and computers are known to be unreliable in space - where high energy particles are plentiful.
So in my opinion, the robot arm is overdesigned. It is too complicated. Maybe it works great, but what's use of that greatness if it doesn't move? Computer controls outside of the station? Why? Saving on few wires? I think the device could be much simpler and more reliable. Note that the current failure mode was not even expected by designers! That's bad. You must always have plan B.
Well, this cheesy virus can "infect" only boxen that got the virus and stay unpatched for a long, long time. These are likely to be unattended or purely adminned boxes. They can become a breeding ground for a new wave of DoS attacks, but now they are fixed as easily as they were br0ken into.
This is a totally new, proactive approach to Internet security. As soon as new virus is found it gets rev-engineered and an "antibody" is released (officially, from very official Web site, cryptographically signed if you like). This can be permitted by laws.
This antibody then may check certain file in certain place, like /etc/please_no_antibodies, and if this file does not contain a valid gpg-signed request to bug off then it proceeds, cleans up the virus, creates log of changes and mails it to the box owner.
Thinking commercially, this can be even a subscription service. You register IPs of your boxen on the Net, and the service scans your boxes (from a central server) from time to time; if the box is r00ted with known virus then it will inform you.
Even if you don't like this "commercial" approach, I hereby transfer this business plan into public domain. Logs of /. and Google will preserve it forever. Patent this! :-)
You haven't mentioned one big reason that I think is fairly common. People have different kinds of minds (artistic, scientific etc.) and they learn different subjects with different success.
Myself, for example, at school I easily understood basics of nuclear physics, and I had no doubt why helium is unlikely to react with anything else. However I couldn't bear literature, touchy-feely stuff, what some fictituous persons might have thought and other junk like that. If a teacher asked me about some novel I couldn't tell anything coherent, unless that was in the novel (that I surely read).
I had similar issues with grammar classes. Teacher required everyone to memorize hundreds of numbered rules (how to spell words, how to compose sentences etc.) I never did that - mostly because I didn't need those rules :-)
What if your doctor tells you: "Sorry to tell you, but you have a tumor. You will die, and quite soon I might say."
However he fails to tell you that the tumor is not dangerous, and you will die in about 70 years from now, of old age. Since the doctor is interested in cosmology, 70 years are "really soon" on his scale. You go home and kill yourself. Looks similar...
The point here is that even absolutely truthful statements are often ambiguous and misleading ("Chicken is ready for dinner"). Kids are not mature philosophers who may be able to distinguish between shades of truth.
So telling him that, as an adult, he could go to jail, is not only correct but - if phrased correctly - a very important reality check that this playful hacking is a serious issue.
Obviously, the current policy is correct, and it does not matter if someone gets frightened to death - the policy, the procedure is above all.
By the way, the school has a unique place in society - it can impose punishments on members of society without due process. This case is an obvious example of abuse of that privilege/responsibility.
I haven't looked at the code yet but it appears that developers managed to make more than one performance-impeding mistake. If the code gets moved to SF then it will be even beneficial to the project - because more people will be able to contribute and to make changes.
Some ideas of Nautilus I really like, some I don't care about and some I do not like.
I like selection shading - it is much nicer than traditional dashed line. I like MP3 preview (when it worked). I like thumbnailing of images - when I want it. I like the idea of pluggable viewers and document handlers, though not many are available yet. Resizable icons are of no value to me, too time-consuming to resize an icon; easier just to open the file. Text inside of icons is totally useless - who works with text files today to start with, and even who does (sysadmins) how much they will learn from few lines of the content?
I don't particularly care about services. That part of their business plan was surely shaky. Companies like X-Drive offered some disk space year(s) ago. But who would even want some 25 MB (good for 5-7 mp3 files or 10 Word documents) over slow Internet link?
I absolutely hate Nautilus's performance. It is unacceptable for normal people. Geeks understand what's going on inside and may be inclined to tolerate slow operation. Non-geeks (like my boss) ask "what's going on, I already clicked here!" - or even worse, click again and again (or move objects again and again), with likely disastrous results.
Themes are one of problems indeed. I tried several and haven't found a single one that I would like. They are either too dark, or too hard to render, or hard to understand. Antialiased fonts are unusable (too blurred), and probably this piece of code better be removed in favor of native support of antialiasing in X.
Medusa and emblems are very weird. They needed to extend the filesystem to hold extra attributes of each file, so they decided to drop a dot-file in every directory. However this approach works only inside of Nautilus; commands that do not know about that magic file won't copy these "attributes". It is very portable though. But Medusa runs too aggressively and consumes too much CPU and disk activity. Eazel said that Medusa is required for good search - what search? I don't think I ever used that feature.
Builtin browser (piece of Mozilla) is unusable. It is not a complete Mozilla but just a restricted version, with very little customization. I do not understand why I (or anyone else) would want browser without decent controls if the full, complete browser is also installed (and even requred). I'd rather run Mozilla instead. This embedded browser business is not needed.
But generally Nautilus is an interesting, significant development. It needs many usability fixes, speed and good default theme being probably most important. After that it may be released onto unsuspecting users.
Sure he didn't. He was dead for 32 years!
Gorbachev never attempted any crackdowns :-)
Revolts erupted, and the government was overthrown
In what country? Surely not in Russia. Last time russian government was overthrown was 1917 :-)
If you refer to events of 1991 and 1993, people defended their government.
If an enemy changes uniform, picks up another weapon and does not look like your old foe - it does not yet mean that you won.
Soviet Union had many problems. For one, stronger republics financed weaker ones. The dissolution of USSR cleansed the country, allowed to replace ossified political and economical system with hopefully better one.
Cold war had no winner at least because sides still have virtually same number of nuclear warheads pointed in each other's direction. The name of one participant changed, but not much more. Political climate started to improve, but events of last couple of years undid all that.