Dont get me wrong. I want to see Eolas crash and burn, but frankly Eolas winning the case is the only way you'll see MS fix their plugin holes. That's why it would be the best thing to happen to IE if they did lose.
They have to completely trash the way they handle plugins and just about everything ActiveX with something else more secure and bound to either a sandbox or a specific file restricted guest user, and since thats not going to happen anytime soon, an Eolas win would be the next best thing since it forces them to remove plugins altogether.
Before I got a job at the Current College I work for I worked for one of Penn State's Satellite Campuses.
The IT director that works there is a good friend of mine. when he took the IT position I helped him out for awile and eventually worked there while I was still in college.
Security was priority one there. We didn't screw around when it came to protection of the network. We also understood that our PC's had to be rock solid since they had direct static IP connections to the internet.
Virus wise, I can remember one machine in the 2 years I was there getting infected once we took over, and it was a machine that was setup before we showed up and was so mission critical that PSU main did not let us touch it until we forced them to let us take it over. Hacking wise the only problem we had was outside the network with a particular virus spamming the JetDirect cards with garbled data sothat they would print constantly, which we soon fixed with firmware updates, and this is coming from a place that ran Windows 2000 2 weeks after it went RTM.
Security is only as good as the initial setup of the lab PC. If it is set up correctly no virus can infect it. Basicially you have to handle protection similar to a layer system. that way if the browser protections are compromised then the virus scanner takes over, all the way to user access and the os core itself. Frankly. I can guarantee that the reason their sending that to the students is because it's easier to tell them to switch to something that the spyware people haven't directly targeted yet then give them a five page lesson it how to secure their OS.
MS isn't blame free on this. The best thing on earth that could ever happen to IE is that they lose the Eolas Case, Cause thats the reason their in this hole in the first place. 90% of the exploits in IE occur becuase of their stupid ActiveX plugin automatic download and install garbage that they developed to beat Java. If ActiveX install went away IE would be as secure as any other browser out there. MS knows it and and they know they screwed up and could fix it by removing activeX altogether and replacing it with something that makes some sense, but they will never do that cause they dont want Sun to start pointing the finger saying "see I told you so" or have millions of ActiveX programmers drive to redmond with their pitchforks and torches looking for blood.
If this is going into a cold building, go with the least amount of fans possible. less fans is less points of failure.
A Case fan for a 733 in freezing temps should be pretty much unnessary. The power supply fan should be more than enough to handle venting the case. in fact, If you can find an older ATX power supply that blows air from the power supply onto the cpu that would be better cause it would elimate the fan for the cpu if you use a zalman like cooler.
Hard drive needs to be on all the time. it will generate enough heat to be ok. Especially the large drives. if your going to use raid, in a cold environment keep the drives close together so they will transfer heat to each of the drives.
Protect all the vent holes with high strength screen. you will be amazed what you will find trying to get in there.
I work for a Thinkpad University. We just became one this year and this came up in our meeting Monday.
Basicially, With the official announcement now out, what was a done deal for who we were going to buy from next year has instantly became a toss up all over again. At this point, relibility and customer service (the biggest selling points for IBM) is now questionable, and we don't need the students (who are already ticked off that their paying more because they had to pay for a laptop now) to start pointing the finger and shouting "Dude! you should have bought a Dell!" all day.
Frankly, Thinkpad's are Rocks. We've seen pop, flash floods and even a candle spilled in these things and they still keep going. I cant imagine a comparibly priced competitor holding up to this much abuse. Frankly they should have sold everything else but the Thinkpads. Those were worth every penny hands down.
Actually, if you pre ordered it through steam it was pretty much painless. Basicially I had to wait 20 minutes while HL2 unpacked and it was ready to go.
Basicially, the only reason you should have bought HL2 CD's was if you were on dialup or restricted broadband (IE 1GB and then your screwed) and didn't want to download 6GB worth of data over your Internet connection. Either that or you dodn't have a credit card, which could be easily fixed by selling Steam HL2 cards (similar to what MMORPG's use for 1 month subscriptions) at local retailers.
What valve could of done that would have greatly diminished this would have been to distrubute pre order cards when you pre ordered HL2. That way, it would have spread the authentication load across the month or two they were taking pre orders. Then Steam would just ask for your CD key and steam would report the CD key to the server whenever it could and you could still play HL2 because your steam account already has been ok'ed by the pre order card.
Playing around with it, Google Definetly trounces it, but it's got some interesting features to it that are nice.
The Search Builder is something I'm liking so far. Specificially the "results ranking" adjuster that allows you to adjust the search based on match, popularity, and update frequency.
The Near Me function, although it has some issues like not knowing exactly where you are (it says im in cincinnati, ohio and Im in PA) could be something useful. At least I'd use it more than "Im Feeling Lucky"
It's not bad, but it's got a long way before it takes google on.
I just installed Firefox today, and being a Mozilla user there's one thing that firefox doesn't do that mozilla does that I've grown accustomed with.
In Mozilla, you could hide the sidebar by clicking in the middle of the edge of the sidebar. In Firefox they removed that and now to close the bar you have to click on the X similar to how IE handles them. It also seems that you cannot merge sidebars, such as the history and favorites, so you can't view them both at the same time.
Is there a theme or a way to return that functionality in firefox short of rewriting the whole thing?
seeing the trailer it looks like this movie was made on the same hardware to render the original Toy Story, but without the same rendering staff so it looks worse.
Maybe my expectations are much higher now since square pictures is doing such a great job with their renderings, but frankly The Polar Express characters look emotionless and puppetlike where Advent Children's characters look almost photorealistic and sometimes hard to believe their rendered.
Just got off the phone from Verizon. and the nice lady gave me some details of availibility.
1) First off, the Number that the script tells you to call (the (888) 662-8275 one) is wrong according to the person that I got on that line. She directed me to (888) 991-4999. Whether or not that's the right number for overall rollout I dont know, but it had all the answers I got. Not that you'll need to call after reading this.
2) From what she was seeing, it's still only available in the Texas area where it was deployed for it's Pilot Program. She wouldn't confirm where they were expanding the service, but she did confirm that it is going to expand in the coming months because it was very successful in the pilot program apparently.
3) She said that availability will be announced in your Verizon bill (If you get one) as soon as it's available in your area (probably to cover the costs of the equipment). the web site also will tell you about availibility whenever it's updated, but for right now it's Texas only.
We have a Sony store in a factory outlet mall, and it's been there for over five years now. Granted its not dealing with new merchendise, and usually sells refubrished equipment, but it's one of the busiest stores in the outlet complex. In fact, it's where I bought my TV from and I got a heck of a deal on it. Saved $200 on it.
Most likely their going to expand these stores, sell new equipment in them, and see what happens.
I've owned an NForce1 and 2 and honestly, the audio was one of the big reasons I bought into it. I Skipped on the NForce3 becasue of this and most likely I'm going to be skipping on the NForce4 as well.
At this point I'm hoping that NVidia makes a Soundstorm chip and sells it to manufactures the same way they sell video chips, but it's not looking too good. Frankly after the living hell I had to put up with Creative and their crap drivers and hardware, I'm praying that this happens, although from what I'm reading NVidia disbanded the entire group, which was a big mistake in my opinon. They had a tech that made Creative sweat and still does even in it's old age, and could easily gain marketshare in the audio front, but they seem to refuse to compete in that market.
I understand that there is always going to be people that fear anything resembling a computer, but if you design the UI to be as easy to use as possible this shouldn't be an issue.
I've seen what our own districts systems look like that I talked about here and it seems to be simple enough. The big problems I saw during voting was the first year, because everyone not computer literate feared them, but once you got there the machine itself would walk you through everything and voters got more used to it over time.
Most of the voting problems your seeing is not voter user error but system error or pollster user error, and if it is voter user error, then the voting machine (or at least the UI) should be tossed and replaced with something that doesn't have a UI issue.
Basicially if you cant train a monkey to use it then it's not useable as a user interface.
Ill second that. If you turned on turbo on an NES advantage and set it to it's lowest turbo setting and held the button in you got a 1up just about every time.
I'm basing a lot of this on evoting system we use here. from what I saw of our box, it appears that one box can drive up to four LCD screens using a properitery connetion for video and power. This would keep the overall expenses down and would consolidate a lot of the votes as well as allow more voting stations to be available.
A LAN that is closed to outside traffic could add a reliability issue to the system, but if the OS and terminals were designed correctly, it would sense that a connection has been lost and either pause or cancel the voting sequence and lock itself out of availability until attention is given to it.
Also a LAN can be very secure. Pretty much what Im talking about here is a client/server relationship with a dumb terminal and a smart server similar to a mainframe setup, with the server sending screen data to the dumb clients and the terminals sending the entries to the server in real time and the server reponds with more screen data. Using a network on the internet is asking for corruption. using a standard connection and protocol is asking for problems too.
Of course, just driving four screens on one box directly is a good way of avoiding any network problems whatsoever.
Printer wise, the Flash card should be the primary way of counting votes and the paper should be used for verification and certification that the votes on the flash card are the same as on the paper. The idea of E-voting is to spped up the process of counting votes. Basicially all the paper is going to do is print off a barcode that has a number that corresponds to the vote count and a hash of how he voted, so when voter #342 vote for x y and z it will write that number to the flash and to the paper in barcode form and that can be interperted by someone or a machine that voter #342 voted for x y and z.
Encryption is a definite must on the card. CD's, although last longer and are permament, increase the chance of failure. A CF card that is write once could be developed that could result in more permanent storage of data, but with encryption like it is today a CF card could be made safe without major changes to hardware type.
thats a good point. Thermal printing is not a good choice for long term printing, but generally speaking, it's the best in the environment your dealing with and long term storage is not necessarially needed for the purpose of the paper.
Any impact printer is out of the question due to the noise and the fact you have to worry about changing ribbions in it. a specificially built laser or LED printer would work without noise, but then toner becomes a factor as well as more parts to fail. A Thermal printer doesn't have these problems and tend to be more reliable.
Basicially the paper is necessary to verify that the votes on the CF are the same as the ones on the paper, or if a catastrofic event occurs to the machine where a backup is necessary. Once the vote is verified then it could be put in a more permanment record keeping system, such as a CD or a redundant server or even reprinted in a more permament form and stored in a repository.
Also keep in mind that the printer would be absoletly transparent to the user. basicially it would be in a box accessable only to a pollster and would roll the printed on paper into another roll. many cash registers have this for verification purposes so it wouldnt be hard to adapt a printer for this purpose. since very little handling would be done to the paper during the process the chances of the paper becoming corrupted would be reduced.
Im parapraising "Trimuph of the Nerds" here so I'm probably missing something here, but basicially this is what it said.
IBM First went to MS asking for BASIC and if they could buy the OS that was built into Microsoft Softcards for the Apple II for the IBM PC. MS directed them to Digital Research saying that they didn't have the right to sell IBM the OS.
IBM goes to Digital Research, and basicially gets the cold shoulder.
IBM Goes back to MS asking for an alternative to CP\M.
Bill gates finds QDOS, buyes it for $50,000 dollars and sells the rights to it to IBM.
I dont even understand why they would even need a platform as powerful as this. they should be using the K.I.S.S. method when it comes to these things.
I live in Mercer Co. Pennsylvania, and we went from ancient 7 foot voting machines to a electronic system. The systems appear to be running some sort of simple low power propritery system on a simple and inexpensive black and white passive lcd display which most likely saves the vote data to flash memory. You basicially just walk up, press the screen and your done. afterwards it prints out the results on standard ribbon paper that an adding machine uses.
In fact they had a crash in 2003 with one of the boxes in one of the precincts, but the paper tape backup was more than adaquate to verify the results.
Basicially, a computer system equivelent to a first generation palmpilot could handle Evoting in a reliable manner. All an evoting machine needs is: * An inexpensive but mission critical reliable low speed system (ie: 386 class speed or even less if the OS is super efficient) * a reliable, small, efficient, and simple mission critical OS dedicated only for evoting programmed in flash rom on the motherboard (almost BIOS like in design) * use SD or CompactFlash flash memory to obtain the ballot data for the OS to display the voting issues and store results (32-64MB with a super efficient os should be enough for any voting situation you can possibly imagine let alone 128-512MB) * use a simple cheap and inexpensive black and white backlit touch screen LCD display * have an internal thermal printer to print a result that can later be interperted into a vote and if the paper runs out or an error occurs with the printer, it will disable the machine until the problem is fixed. * Optional, but design the syetm to drive multiple LCD screens or drive terminal based LCD systems through a Local area network (not internet or wireless, we're talking 10baseT here) to a local equally simple server to consolidate all the vote gathering terminals from one precinct into one box.
...Then the 1up machine in Super Mario Bros 2 was too, and a blatent one at that. I played that game constantly in the day and I dont have any urge whatsover to play a slot machine.
Q: Might you add anti-virus/spyware protection in Windows? Gates: It's not a thing you build in. You have to offer a service......Why is that Mr. Gates?
MS knows that the only way to truly stop this problem would be to install a virus/spyware scanner in their system and be done with it, but there's one slight problem.
If They did add a competitent Firewall/spyware/antivirus security package into windows, it would be in the best intrests of the public using Windows, but then Mr. Norton gets pissed because half of his business just got flushed by Microsoft, and NAI gets pissed because 80% of their business got flushed, ETC. Then, all of these Pissed off companies start to complain about how Microsoft bundling is destroying their business just like Netscape and they are using their monopoly position blah blah blah, MS Gets Sued, Loses because they were already proved to be a monopoly and violated it's settlement, and all sorts of hell breaks loose.
They can offer it as a service because at that point there selling it boxed seperatly in a store and competing against their competitors. The second they bundle it for free into windows, even if you had to pay a service charge per year to update it, the courtroom fun begins.
Bush acted on data that was considered at the time truthful. And it wasn't just the US.
Russia, Germany and the UK all affirmed our intelligence. All three of these countries (as well as our own) have some of the best intelligence gathering agencies in the world, and every one of them was wrong.
Generally speaking, If he was summoned in a court of law they would not put the blame on Bush. Worst case scenerio would be that they would put the blame on the CIA, who would then site all the other intellignece findings of the world and it would be laid to rest as a total failure of intelligence, and the worst thing they could pin on Bush would be the lack of gathering more information to verify the claims, which could have resulted in Saddam doing something that no one would have enjoyed.
If Bush is Guilty of anything, it is not for getting rid of Saddam as much as not being prepared for rebuilding the nation of Iraq. Saddam was nuts and had to go. His sons were much worse and bordered on full blown Terrorism. You had mass genocide and WMD in the form of Anthrax, which we knew he had because we sold it to him in the 80s. There is no doubt that getting rid of him was a good thing, but to do it without any planing or prepardiness of the outcome was really stupid. It was like he thought we would get rid of Saddam and Poof! Instant Freedom and Democracy!
Kerry was dead on in the debates when he said that he agreed with getting rid of Saddam but not how we handled the aftermath. what drives me nuts about the whole debate however was when they asked them what the single biggest threat was from the terrorists was and the first thing both said was Nuclear Poliferation. Nuclear Poliferation is a major threat when countries like North Korea and Iran are involved, but when it comes to terrorists it's second to Biochem. Biochem is much MUCH more easier to produce, to hide, to smuggle and to release then any nuclear device ever could, and there are viruses out there that can level entire metro areas in days. and hell, we had a guy mailing anthrax all over the place after 9/11 but we just fluffed it off as nothing and focused on the WTC towers when we had a nutcase running loose with WMD. Just because a weapon doesn't make a big boom doesn't mean it can't cause mass destruction.
What Bush did and what Clinton Did are two different things.
Bush lied based on misguided, exaggerated, or flat out false information that was given to him to make a case for war. As far as Bush knew, or as far as Bush wanted to know, all the information given to him was true and he acted upon it. Either that, or someone was pulling the strings to make him make that decision or he knew it was all bs and lied anyway.
Clinton Lied under oath in a Grand Jury Civil case, which is Perjury. For those of you not in the know, Perjury is a Felony in the US and is punishable by fines and jail time and the like.
So in a nutshell, Clinton could have called for a press conference to be shown primetime and started it by saying "My fellow americians, Right now, in this very room, under this very desk, I am currently getting the best head of my life from my oral lover Monica Lewinski", and outside of the Americian public being "outraged" they couldn't do anything about it (as long as it didn't break any indecency laws) becasue it wasn't against the law.
He could go on the TV the next day after this conference and say to the americian people "I did not have sexual relations...blah blah blah" and they couldn't do anything about it cause he didn't break the law by lying on TV.
Now if he went to a court of law the next day, and swore on a bible to tell the truth, and the attorney walks up to him and askes if he had sex with Monica, he better damn well either take the fifth or say yes, because if he says no, then he just commited a felony. And thats exactly what Clinton did and thats why they tried to hang him high.
Basicially, if you can find a point in time where Bush "Knowinegly" Lied under oath in a court of law while in office, then hang him just as high as Clinton was, but until then he hasn't done anything wrong legally. The absolute worst case scenerio thing that bush did was lie to the american people, and since thats not a felony then he's still in charge.
IBM has had these Security chips available in their machines since 1999. I remember PII's with them built in.
All these are designed to do is interface with an IBM software product to encrypt files using a Hardware chip, do on the fly disk and network encryption and other security related protections that you couldn't do practically with just a CPU software solution.
Specificially, If you have a Thinkpad there's a good chance it has one of these right now. This was one of their selling points that if the System was ever stolen they couldn't get access to any of the data because it's all encrypted to the physicial hardware itself and only the original laptop could access it.
Their site for the current data on their security chip is here
This new chip definetly looks more advanced, and could possibly be used for DRM purposes, but in the end its going to do the same things as the older hardware and the older hardware could be used for the same thing.
Did I ever directly mention the article in my post? If you would have read it instead of glancing it and assuming that I was out to bash the residents in this housing complex and be as insulting as possible while proving your dead end point you would have realized that I was talking about how the article can possibly effect overall network security in other situations rather than who was right or wrong here.
Basicially this article deals with whether or not you can tell people they cannot have a Wireless AP in their building they reside in using their own network in their own home using equipment and bandwidth they bought, when you don't even own the building.
I'm dealing with whether or not an IT body can legally regulate rogue WAP traffic directly connected to their network because of an FCC regulation.
Honestly If they are using outside ISP's, and are using their own equipment and not the Univ Network, the Univeristy cant do a damn thing to them, and shouldn't because it's their network. Now lets say one of their REAL dorms, which UTD owns now, with True Lan Lines, which UTD now owns, has problems with rogue Wireless AP's connecting to their network, if this stands They cant do a damn thing there because of this and now they have to take a risk of getting hacked, or someone using their network to hack someone else outside of UTD
Assuming that I dont know the issue without even understanding what I'm talking about is probably the stupidest thing your doing right now. I work for a college. We have a Laptop program of 1200 Laptops, ALL Wireless. We have to Block rogue Wireless AP all over our Dorm buildings because every dorm room has a Physical link to our network and it has the potential to open our network Wide if they are not secure. Outsiders of our campus WILL come in and steal bandwidth like crazy, and when your measuring bandwidth in the thousdans of dollars per month, not to mention that we have a duty to offer students the fastest, safest connection we can possibly offer, you start to care what is and whats not connected to our network, Especially when we spend thousdands of dollars just on the security implementation of our wireless implementation alone.
And yes, we had problems with Wireless AP's with some local resident houses near our dorms, and you know how we dealt with it, we sent everyone within 500 yards of our campus a courtesy mailing that basicially said that all of our students are getting Wireless laptops and could possibly leech your bandwitdh and hack your network usless you secure your wireless network, and gave some basic instruction on what to do to secure them. It worked on over 90% of the Rogue AP's out there.
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Dont get me wrong. I want to see Eolas crash and burn, but frankly Eolas winning the case is the only way you'll see MS fix their plugin holes. That's why it would be the best thing to happen to IE if they did lose.
They have to completely trash the way they handle plugins and just about everything ActiveX with something else more secure and bound to either a sandbox or a specific file restricted guest user, and since thats not going to happen anytime soon, an Eolas win would be the next best thing since it forces them to remove plugins altogether.
Before I got a job at the Current College I work for I worked for one of Penn State's Satellite Campuses.
The IT director that works there is a good friend of mine. when he took the IT position I helped him out for awile and eventually worked there while I was still in college.
Security was priority one there. We didn't screw around when it came to protection of the network. We also understood that our PC's had to be rock solid since they had direct static IP connections to the internet.
Virus wise, I can remember one machine in the 2 years I was there getting infected once we took over, and it was a machine that was setup before we showed up and was so mission critical that PSU main did not let us touch it until we forced them to let us take it over. Hacking wise the only problem we had was outside the network with a particular virus spamming the JetDirect cards with garbled data sothat they would print constantly, which we soon fixed with firmware updates, and this is coming from a place that ran Windows 2000 2 weeks after it went RTM.
Security is only as good as the initial setup of the lab PC. If it is set up correctly no virus can infect it. Basicially you have to handle protection similar to a layer system. that way if the browser protections are compromised then the virus scanner takes over, all the way to user access and the os core itself. Frankly. I can guarantee that the reason their sending that to the students is because it's easier to tell them to switch to something that the spyware people haven't directly targeted yet then give them a five page lesson it how to secure their OS.
MS isn't blame free on this. The best thing on earth that could ever happen to IE is that they lose the Eolas Case, Cause thats the reason their in this hole in the first place. 90% of the exploits in IE occur becuase of their stupid ActiveX plugin automatic download and install garbage that they developed to beat Java. If ActiveX install went away IE would be as secure as any other browser out there. MS knows it and and they know they screwed up and could fix it by removing activeX altogether and replacing it with something that makes some sense, but they will never do that cause they dont want Sun to start pointing the finger saying "see I told you so" or have millions of ActiveX programmers drive to redmond with their pitchforks and torches looking for blood.
If this is going into a cold building, go with the least amount of fans possible. less fans is less points of failure.
A Case fan for a 733 in freezing temps should be pretty much unnessary. The power supply fan should be more than enough to handle venting the case. in fact, If you can find an older ATX power supply that blows air from the power supply onto the cpu that would be better cause it would elimate the fan for the cpu if you use a zalman like cooler.
Hard drive needs to be on all the time. it will generate enough heat to be ok. Especially the large drives. if your going to use raid, in a cold environment keep the drives close together so they will transfer heat to each of the drives.
Protect all the vent holes with high strength screen. you will be amazed what you will find trying to get in there.
I work for a Thinkpad University. We just became one this year and this came up in our meeting Monday.
Basicially, With the official announcement now out, what was a done deal for who we were going to buy from next year has instantly became a toss up all over again. At this point, relibility and customer service (the biggest selling points for IBM) is now questionable, and we don't need the students (who are already ticked off that their paying more because they had to pay for a laptop now) to start pointing the finger and shouting "Dude! you should have bought a Dell!" all day.
Frankly, Thinkpad's are Rocks. We've seen pop, flash floods and even a candle spilled in these things and they still keep going. I cant imagine a comparibly priced competitor holding up to this much abuse. Frankly they should have sold everything else but the Thinkpads. Those were worth every penny hands down.
Or maybe they agree with the message and don't see a reason to remove it?...
Actually, if you pre ordered it through steam it was pretty much painless. Basicially I had to wait 20 minutes while HL2 unpacked and it was ready to go.
Basicially, the only reason you should have bought HL2 CD's was if you were on dialup or restricted broadband (IE 1GB and then your screwed) and didn't want to download 6GB worth of data over your Internet connection. Either that or you dodn't have a credit card, which could be easily fixed by selling Steam HL2 cards (similar to what MMORPG's use for 1 month subscriptions) at local retailers.
What valve could of done that would have greatly diminished this would have been to distrubute pre order cards when you pre ordered HL2. That way, it would have spread the authentication load across the month or two they were taking pre orders. Then Steam would just ask for your CD key and steam would report the CD key to the server whenever it could and you could still play HL2 because your steam account already has been ok'ed by the pre order card.
Playing around with it, Google Definetly trounces it, but it's got some interesting features to it that are nice.
The Search Builder is something I'm liking so far. Specificially the "results ranking" adjuster that allows you to adjust the search based on match, popularity, and update frequency.
The Near Me function, although it has some issues like not knowing exactly where you are (it says im in cincinnati, ohio and Im in PA) could be something useful. At least I'd use it more than "Im Feeling Lucky"
It's not bad, but it's got a long way before it takes google on.
I just installed Firefox today, and being a Mozilla user there's one thing that firefox doesn't do that mozilla does that I've grown accustomed with.
In Mozilla, you could hide the sidebar by clicking in the middle of the edge of the sidebar. In Firefox they removed that and now to close the bar you have to click on the X
similar to how IE handles them. It also seems that you cannot merge sidebars, such as the history and favorites, so you can't view them both at the same time.
Is there a theme or a way to return that functionality in firefox short of rewriting the whole thing?
I have to agree on this.
seeing the trailer it looks like this movie was made on the same hardware to render the original Toy Story, but without the same rendering staff so it looks worse.
Maybe my expectations are much higher now since square pictures is doing such a great job with their renderings, but frankly The Polar Express characters look emotionless and puppetlike where Advent Children's characters look almost photorealistic and sometimes hard to believe their rendered.
Just got off the phone from Verizon. and the nice lady gave me some details of availibility.
1) First off, the Number that the script tells you to call (the (888) 662-8275 one) is wrong according to the person that I got on that line. She directed me to (888) 991-4999. Whether or not that's the right number for overall rollout I dont know, but it had all the answers I got. Not that you'll need to call after reading this.
2) From what she was seeing, it's still only available in the Texas area where it was deployed for it's Pilot Program. She wouldn't confirm where they were expanding the service, but she did confirm that it is going to expand in the coming months because it was very successful in the pilot program apparently.
3) She said that availability will be announced in your Verizon bill (If you get one) as soon as it's available in your area (probably to cover the costs of the equipment). the web site also will tell you about availibility whenever it's updated, but for right now it's Texas only.
Here
We have a Sony store in a factory outlet mall, and it's been there for over five years now. Granted its not dealing with new merchendise, and usually sells refubrished equipment, but it's one of the busiest stores in the outlet complex. In fact, it's where I bought my TV from and I got a heck of a deal on it. Saved $200 on it.
Most likely their going to expand these stores, sell new equipment in them, and see what happens.
I've owned an NForce1 and 2 and honestly, the audio was one of the big reasons I bought into it. I Skipped on the NForce3 becasue of this and most likely I'm going to be skipping on the NForce4 as well.
At this point I'm hoping that NVidia makes a Soundstorm chip and sells it to manufactures the same way they sell video chips, but it's not looking too good. Frankly after the living hell I had to put up with Creative and their crap drivers and hardware, I'm praying that this happens, although from what I'm reading NVidia disbanded the entire group, which was a big mistake in my opinon. They had a tech that made Creative sweat and still does even in it's old age, and could easily gain marketshare in the audio front, but they seem to refuse to compete in that market.
I understand that there is always going to be people that fear anything resembling a computer, but if you design the UI to be as easy to use as possible this shouldn't be an issue.
I've seen what our own districts systems look like that I talked about here and it seems to be simple enough. The big problems I saw during voting was the first year, because everyone not computer literate feared them, but once you got there the machine itself would walk you through everything and voters got more used to it over time.
Most of the voting problems your seeing is not voter user error but system error or pollster user error, and if it is voter user error, then the voting machine (or at least the UI) should be tossed and replaced with something that doesn't have a UI issue.
Basicially if you cant train a monkey to use it then it's not useable as a user interface.
Ill second that. If you turned on turbo on an NES advantage and set it to it's lowest turbo setting and held the button in you got a 1up just about every time.
I'm basing a lot of this on evoting system we use here. from what I saw of our box, it appears that one box can drive up to four LCD screens using a properitery connetion for video and power. This would keep the overall expenses down and would consolidate a lot of the votes as well as allow more voting stations to be available.
A LAN that is closed to outside traffic could add a reliability issue to the system, but if the OS and terminals were designed correctly, it would sense that a connection has been lost and either pause or cancel the voting sequence and lock itself out of availability until attention is given to it.
Also a LAN can be very secure. Pretty much what Im talking about here is a client/server relationship with a dumb terminal and a smart server similar to a mainframe setup, with the server sending screen data to the dumb clients and the terminals sending the entries to the server in real time and the server reponds with more screen data. Using a network on the internet is asking for corruption. using a standard connection and protocol is asking for problems too.
Of course, just driving four screens on one box directly is a good way of avoiding any network problems whatsoever.
Printer wise, the Flash card should be the primary way of counting votes and the paper should be used for verification and certification that the votes on the flash card are the same as on the paper. The idea of E-voting is to spped up the process of counting votes. Basicially all the paper is going to do is print off a barcode that has a number that corresponds to the vote count and a hash of how he voted, so when voter #342 vote for x y and z it will write that number to the flash and to the paper in barcode form and that can be interperted by someone or a machine that voter #342 voted for x y and z.
Encryption is a definite must on the card. CD's, although last longer and are permament, increase the chance of failure. A CF card that is write once could be developed that could result in more permanent storage of data, but with encryption like it is today a CF card could be made safe without major changes to hardware type.
thats a good point. Thermal printing is not a good choice for long term printing, but generally speaking, it's the best in the environment your dealing with and long term storage is not necessarially needed for the purpose of the paper.
Any impact printer is out of the question due to the noise and the fact you have to worry about changing ribbions in it. a specificially built laser or LED printer would work without noise, but then toner becomes a factor as well as more parts to fail. A Thermal printer doesn't have these problems and tend to be more reliable.
Basicially the paper is necessary to verify that the votes on the CF are the same as the ones on the paper, or if a catastrofic event occurs to the machine where a backup is necessary. Once the vote is verified then it could be put in a more permanment record keeping system, such as a CD or a redundant server or even reprinted in a more permament form and stored in a repository.
Also keep in mind that the printer would be absoletly transparent to the user. basicially it would be in a box accessable only to a pollster and would roll the printed on paper into another roll. many cash registers have this for verification purposes so it wouldnt be hard to adapt a printer for this purpose. since very little handling would be done to the paper during the process the chances of the paper becoming corrupted would be reduced.
Im parapraising "Trimuph of the Nerds" here so I'm probably missing something here, but basicially this is what it said.
IBM First went to MS asking for BASIC and if they could buy the OS that was built into Microsoft Softcards for the Apple II for the IBM PC. MS directed them to Digital Research saying that they didn't have the right to sell IBM the OS.
IBM goes to Digital Research, and basicially gets the cold shoulder.
IBM Goes back to MS asking for an alternative to CP\M.
Bill gates finds QDOS, buyes it for $50,000 dollars and sells the rights to it to IBM.
More infomation can be found on wikipedia Here
I dont even understand why they would even need a platform as powerful as this. they should be using the K.I.S.S. method when it comes to these things.
I live in Mercer Co. Pennsylvania, and we went from ancient 7 foot voting machines to a electronic system. The systems appear to be running some sort of simple low power propritery system on a simple and inexpensive black and white passive lcd display which most likely saves the vote data to flash memory. You basicially just walk up, press the screen and your done. afterwards it prints out the results on standard ribbon paper that an adding machine uses.
In fact they had a crash in 2003 with one of the boxes in one of the precincts, but the paper tape backup was more than adaquate to verify the results.
Basicially, a computer system equivelent to a first generation palmpilot could handle Evoting in a reliable manner.
All an evoting machine needs is:
* An inexpensive but mission critical reliable low speed system (ie: 386 class speed or even less if the OS is super efficient)
* a reliable, small, efficient, and simple mission critical OS dedicated only for evoting programmed in flash rom on the motherboard (almost BIOS like in design)
* use SD or CompactFlash flash memory to obtain the ballot data for the OS to display the voting issues and store results (32-64MB with a super efficient os should be enough for any voting situation you can possibly imagine let alone 128-512MB)
* use a simple cheap and inexpensive black and white backlit touch screen LCD display
* have an internal thermal printer to print a result that can later be interperted into a vote and if the paper runs out or an error occurs with the printer, it will disable the machine until the problem is fixed.
* Optional, but design the syetm to drive multiple LCD screens or drive terminal based LCD systems through a Local area network (not internet or wireless, we're talking 10baseT here) to a local equally simple server to consolidate all the vote gathering terminals from one precinct into one box.
...Then the 1up machine in Super Mario Bros 2 was too, and a blatent one at that. I played that game constantly in the day and I dont have any urge whatsover to play a slot machine.
Q: Might you add anti-virus/spyware protection in Windows? Gates: It's not a thing you build in. You have to offer a service......Why is that Mr. Gates?
MS knows that the only way to truly stop this problem would be to install a virus/spyware scanner in their system and be done with it, but there's one slight problem.
If They did add a competitent Firewall/spyware/antivirus security package into windows, it would be in the best intrests of the public using Windows, but then Mr. Norton gets pissed because half of his business just got flushed by Microsoft, and NAI gets pissed because 80% of their business got flushed, ETC. Then, all of these Pissed off companies start to complain about how Microsoft bundling is destroying their business just like Netscape and they are using their monopoly position blah blah blah, MS Gets Sued, Loses because they were already proved to be a monopoly and violated it's settlement, and all sorts of hell breaks loose.
They can offer it as a service because at that point there selling it boxed seperatly in a store and competing against their competitors. The second they bundle it for free into windows, even if you had to pay a service charge per year to update it, the courtroom fun begins.
Bush acted on data that was considered at the time truthful. And it wasn't just the US.
Russia, Germany and the UK all affirmed our intelligence. All three of these countries (as well as our own) have some of the best intelligence gathering agencies in the world, and every one of them was wrong.
Generally speaking, If he was summoned in a court of law they would not put the blame on Bush. Worst case scenerio would be that they would put the blame on the CIA, who would then site all the other intellignece findings of the world and it would be laid to rest as a total failure of intelligence, and the worst thing they could pin on Bush would be the lack of gathering more information to verify the claims, which could have resulted in Saddam doing something that no one would have enjoyed.
If Bush is Guilty of anything, it is not for getting rid of Saddam as much as not being prepared for rebuilding the nation of Iraq. Saddam was nuts and had to go. His sons were much worse and bordered on full blown Terrorism. You had mass genocide and WMD in the form of Anthrax, which we knew he had because we sold it to him in the 80s. There is no doubt that getting rid of him was a good thing, but to do it without any planing or prepardiness of the outcome was really stupid. It was like he thought we would get rid of Saddam and Poof! Instant Freedom and Democracy!
Kerry was dead on in the debates when he said that he agreed with getting rid of Saddam but not how we handled the aftermath. what drives me nuts about the whole debate however was when they asked them what the single biggest threat was from the terrorists was and the first thing both said was Nuclear Poliferation. Nuclear Poliferation is a major threat when countries like North Korea and Iran are involved, but when it comes to terrorists it's second to Biochem. Biochem is much MUCH more easier to produce, to hide, to smuggle and to release then any nuclear device ever could, and there are viruses out there that can level entire metro areas in days. and hell, we had a guy mailing anthrax all over the place after 9/11 but we just fluffed it off as nothing and focused on the WTC towers when we had a nutcase running loose with WMD. Just because a weapon doesn't make a big boom doesn't mean it can't cause mass destruction.
What Bush did and what Clinton Did are two different things.
Bush lied based on misguided, exaggerated, or flat out false information that was given to him to make a case for war. As far as Bush knew, or as far as Bush wanted to know, all the information given to him was true and he acted upon it. Either that, or someone was pulling the strings to make him make that decision or he knew it was all bs and lied anyway.
Clinton Lied under oath in a Grand Jury Civil case, which is Perjury. For those of you not in the know, Perjury is a Felony in the US and is punishable by fines and jail time and the like.
So in a nutshell, Clinton could have called for a press conference to be shown primetime and started it by saying "My fellow americians, Right now, in this very room, under this very desk, I am currently getting the best head of my life from my oral lover Monica Lewinski", and outside of the Americian public being "outraged" they couldn't do anything about it (as long as it didn't break any indecency laws) becasue it wasn't against the law.
He could go on the TV the next day after this conference and say to the americian people "I did not have sexual relations...blah blah blah" and they couldn't do anything about it cause he didn't break the law by lying on TV.
Now if he went to a court of law the next day, and swore on a bible to tell the truth, and the attorney walks up to him and askes if he had sex with Monica, he better damn well either take the fifth or say yes, because if he says no, then he just commited a felony. And thats exactly what Clinton did and thats why they tried to hang him high.
Basicially, if you can find a point in time where Bush "Knowinegly" Lied under oath in a court of law while in office, then hang him just as high as Clinton was, but until then he hasn't done anything wrong legally. The absolute worst case scenerio thing that bush did was lie to the american people, and since thats not a felony then he's still in charge.
IBM has had these Security chips available in their machines since 1999. I remember PII's with them built in.
All these are designed to do is interface with an IBM software product to encrypt files using a Hardware chip, do on the fly disk and network encryption and other security related protections that you couldn't do practically with just a CPU software solution.
Specificially, If you have a Thinkpad there's a good chance it has one of these right now. This was one of their selling points that if the System was ever stolen they couldn't get access to any of the data because it's all encrypted to the physicial hardware itself and only the original laptop could access it.
Their site for the current data on their security chip is here
This new chip definetly looks more advanced, and could possibly be used for DRM purposes, but in the end its going to do the same things as the older hardware and the older hardware could be used for the same thing.
Did I ever directly mention the article in my post? If you would have read it instead of glancing it and assuming that I was out to bash the residents in this housing complex and be as insulting as possible while proving your dead end point you would have realized that I was talking about how the article can possibly effect overall network security in other situations rather than who was right or wrong here.
Basicially this article deals with whether or not you can tell people they cannot have a Wireless AP in their building they reside in using their own network in their own home using equipment and bandwidth they bought, when you don't even own the building.
I'm dealing with whether or not an IT body can legally regulate rogue WAP traffic directly connected to their network because of an FCC regulation.
Honestly If they are using outside ISP's, and are using their own equipment and not the Univ Network, the Univeristy cant do a damn thing to them, and shouldn't because it's their network. Now lets say one of their REAL dorms, which UTD owns now, with True Lan Lines, which UTD now owns, has problems with rogue Wireless AP's connecting to their network, if this stands They cant do a damn thing there because of this and now they have to take a risk of getting hacked, or someone using their network to hack someone else outside of UTD
Assuming that I dont know the issue without even understanding what I'm talking about is probably the stupidest thing your doing right now. I work for a college. We have a Laptop program of 1200 Laptops, ALL Wireless. We have to Block rogue Wireless AP all over our Dorm buildings because every dorm room has a Physical link to our network and it has the potential to open our network Wide if they are not secure. Outsiders of our campus WILL come in and steal bandwidth like crazy, and when your measuring bandwidth in the thousdans of dollars per month, not to mention that we have a duty to offer students the fastest, safest connection we can possibly offer, you start to care what is and whats not connected to our network, Especially when we spend thousdands of dollars just on the security implementation of our wireless implementation alone.
And yes, we had problems with Wireless AP's with some local resident houses near our dorms, and you know how we dealt with it, we sent everyone within 500 yards of our campus a courtesy mailing that basicially said that all of our students are getting Wireless laptops and could possibly leech your bandwitdh and hack your network usless you secure your wireless network, and gave some basic instruction on what to do to secure them. It worked on over 90% of the Rogue AP's out there.