You are were joking, but in fact not that far from the truth.
I did DSL installs in an ex-soviet block backwater which is not even in the EU yet in 1998. At that time UK and the rest of Europe (except Scandinavia) was still wetting themselves over a second ISDN channel and 56K modems. In the same country ethernet to the home in big cities is the norm, not the exemption. The cable operators built bandit networks using twisted pair as far back as 1999-2000. So on, so fourth.
Similarly, I had to design, deploy and build QoS aware networks in 1998. UK and the rest of Europe is just about getting there in the last 2 years. US is not even close (regardless of how much noises does ATT make about net neutrality).
Similarly, VOIP was all over the place by 2000 up to an connecting SMEs and it is just about getting there now in EU.
Similarly...
Do not underestimate the effect of an incumbent monopoly on business and technology. In most 3rd world countries the local incumbent has been bypassed and regulation has been ignored. A few bribes here and there have been sufficient to effectively kill off any attempts by the incumbent to prevent the usage of "unallowed" technologies. As a result the deployment of many technologies is 5-6 years ahead of the "civilised world" where the incumbent can use the regulator and police to strangle any technological progress.
And as the subject of the article is TCO in terms of TCO customised per-site Windows automation costs much more then similar Unix automation. As a result it is worth it and justified financially only for very large installations. Everything else aside the tools (VB, ActivePerl and friends) cost money and you need a reasonable number of servers to get return on investment.
Custom Unix automation as means of reducing your TCO starts making sense from one server onwards. Tools are part of the platform and cost nothing.
So yes, selfrespecting windows sysadmins may automate custom tasks on Windows as well, but this for anything but very large sites may actually increase your TCO instead of reducing it due to cost of tools and cost of prototyping.
This is the exact f*** problem. Technology has nothing to do with it. Cretinous parents (and grandpatents like in this case) do at least in the UK.
If you ferry your child around till the age of 4 in a buggy he will quite obviously be fatigued in school. Children are children, they will always try to run and play in every free moment. If they have been ferried till the age of 4 like a disabled or retarded even that little play will make them fatigued and absolutely knackered.
In fact the primary school teachers in the UK base their working methods that children are physically unfit. For example the entire daily schedule in a reception class is designed so that you tire the children first by running them in the playground for half an hour. After that they more or less sit for 30 minutes while the teacher "works" with them while they are splattered around her (not that they absorb anything). If a child is fit he does not get tired enough to sit still and is constantly in trouble (as my son is).
The primary reason for "fatigue" is the abissmal level of physical fitness which applies to 99% of the British kids. Nearly all are ferried in buggies till school age and kept tied down so that they do not do something stupid (instead of teaching them not to do so). They are also kept as far away from exercise as possible and then some. If you go to a park in the UK on a cold or rainy day the only kids will be the foreigners'. You are going to hear French, Polish, Spanish or other European speech in the playground. English will be a rarity. If you go and ask a British parent if your son can play with his son football outside on a typical "British Weather(TM)" day you are likely to hear "Why don't they play football on his playstation?". Best case scenario - you can negotiate 15 minutes worth of play time and after that the british kid will be locked back indoors just in case so he does not catch a cold.
As far as the cancer - obesity and tons of junk food are a well known cause cancer as well (just search for chips and acrilamide).
Studies like this actually take into account the fact that the Unix/Linux sysadmin on the average is 20%+ more expensive.
They are wrong elsewhere.
They do not take into account that a selfrespecting Unix/Linux sysadmin will automate everything he/she can and will not repeat everyday mundane tasks. Instead of this they still count the time which is essential to maintain and patch the systems towards the TCO bill and multiply it by their number (correcting only for vendor tools to assist rollout where applicable). There is no correction for ad-hoc scripting and no correction for productising ad-hoc tools for internal rollout. Further to this many places go into the idiocy of prohibiting such internal software development. In fact I know one or two places where such activities are a sackable offence.
I have stopped counting how many times over the years I have heard the "We are not software developers" mantra from PHB wannabies. That is the damn difference between a high level Unix sysadmin and a Windows sysadmin in the first place. The Unix sysadmin can write in at least 2-3 rapid development languages - (k)shell, perl and/or python and the reason why he/she gets more money is exactly this. Paying him this money and not using this ability is stupid, but this is what many places do as a matter of policy. It is no wonder that places like this have better TCO under Windows compared to Unix/Linux. That is to be expected and that will continue to be the case until they start to automate mundane operations in-house, formally maintain the automation and productise/package it for internal use.
In fact the TCO numbers for systems like the one in the article (1000+ of slightly customized commodity software on commodity OS) come out in favour of Linux/Unix even if this activity is subcontracted out. They do not come out right only when it is prohibited and the work is done solely via vendor supplied tools.
Disagree. I will tag this as "Logical Development".
This study perfectly describes the problem with many Linux/Unix deployments out there. They are done by people who take the approach which they have grown accustomed to on Windows, Novell and the like and try to transfer it to Linux/Unix. This approach is best described as "everything you cannot do with the vendor tools must be done manually" and "we only use commercial/vendor software". When using this approach Linux/Unix invariably results in higher TCO because the price of labour is higher and level of one-click moron-friendly automation is lower for most cases.
When doing Linux/Unix work writing your own tools and assisting yourself in automating tasks is a part of the job and Sysadmins who do not possess the skills should not allow themselves to claim that they are Linux/Unix Sysadmins. From there on, if you estimate the costs of running and deploying systems without taking this into account you invariable come up with Windows being cheaper.
That is the reality, face it move along and ignore the study. While it was using the right analysis methods it was analysing deployments which do not use the correct design and process for either system. If you use design and processes which are wrong for one system it is not particularly surprising that you get bad TCO for it.
You got half the way to the right point without making it. I hope you do not mind if I do it for you.
It is quite appalling that a news site which is oriented towards geeks publishes links to newspaper pseudonews bollocks without publishing links to the original articles and original peer reviewed research. Frankly, that is not news for nerds. It is news for Sun readers (and the like).
Is it that damn difficult to do some digging before publishing on Slashdot?
Re:Paris Hilton or Madame Curie... hmmm
on
Top Ten Geek Girls
·
· Score: 1
I would second that.
A list that is missing Sofia Kovalevskaya and puts Paris Hilton instead...
Paris Hilton as a geek... Puke... Double puke... Quadruple puke... and puke again...
I suggest that you will have to learn from American Government approach to peacefull protest.
The standard scenario goes like this: US embassy sponsors the local Baseball League (at least several teams). It does it quietly for 2-3 years after which it gets a bunch of "democrats" (quotes on purpose) to demonstrate in front of the elected parlament on some issue. This is always done during the winter and it is done so for a reason.
Simply, the baseball teams are brought in to demonstrate as well. The demonstrations are mostly peacefull except a few snowballs thrown at the police. Now, there is a world of difference between a snowball thrown by an average kid and a snowball with a chunk of ice inside thrown by a baseball player (even a lousy one). In the first case the police shrugs it off. In the second a policeman is down with a very satisfying clunk and carried out on a stretcher straight to the hospital. Jolly good approach actually. The crowd is "unarmed" and if police opens fire the USA screams loudly about violations of democracy and police brutality.
So next time you want to demonstrate against something make sure that it is during the winter and draft a baseball team. Works a treat. Worked great in Bulgaria in 1997, in the Chech Republic, Serbia, Poland and nearly worked in Belarus (where the police had none of it).
As far as the original topic of the article goes this is silly. The only reason for this silliness is that the police in the UK is afraid to prosecute based on policeman evidence and testimony and is trying to do with CCTV instead. Unfortunately that is where UK police is going. They now have vans with hidden cameras parked in key sections of roads (I see one every 2-3 days), they have it in their cars, it was only a matter of time until they mount it on their head (or arse).
If he really managed it, the real news will be when he manages to procreate. Those 14KeV fusion neutrons play very interesting games with DNA. That is if he really managed to get any fusion to succeed which I doubt.
No idea if it is quick enough (I just got 2 spanking new C7 MBs and was going to build some OpenVPN gateways from them while testing this in the process). It is definitely considerably quicker compared to software-only implementations and that is about as much as I know about it right now. Looking at what they did with AES and RNG it may as well be fast enough. No idea until I try.
1. Use a most recent Via CPUs (the ones released this year). The C7 has the time consuming parts of RSA accelerated on the CPU which makes this attack considerably less feasible. This is possibly the only cost effective method for limited budget cases where high speed is required. A full motherboard with CPU, SATA and all bells and whistles is around 150 pounds and IIRC is supported by OpenSSL 0.9.8 (and backport patches). 2. Use (to the full) TPM on your machine (if present). TPM chips can do RSA in hardware. Unfortunately most of them are extremely slow. Same goes for most RSA capable smartcards and tokens like eToken and eToken64. They are sooooooooo slooooooooooooow it is unreal. 3. Use a proper hardware RSA accelerator. There are several boards/chips which can do that and if you are really paranoid you are likely to be running one anyway.
They don't produce just that, they produce them at energies which can split U238 which "normal" or slowed down fission neutrons cannot split. In fact some of the tokamak outlines I have seen in articles 20 years ago (when they were saying that fusion is 20 years off) had an extra layer of U238 for a second stage fission reaction.
That is correct in two cases - if you have a RAID array and if you have purchased them from different batches in the first place.
If you do not have raid at today's disk prices - you are daft. If you have built it with disks from the same batch - you are even dafter as they have an increased probability to fail at the same time. To make things even worse if one of your drives die in a RAID1 or 5 scenario the rest get loaded more and the chance of them dieing increases significantly.
So if you have built a RAID array from disks which are from the same batch you should gradually replace disks after some time. The actual times of replacement can be calculated based on MTBF (adjusted for temperature).
By the way, the management software of some high end storage systems does this as this is the only way of guarding against non-surface type failures (heads, electronics, bearings, etc).
1. What does this have to do with a 2.4GHz band (it refers to 10GHz+)? 2. This is very close to a technique which is heavily used in CDMA. Wireless makes little use of it, while CDMA explicitly uses multipath for signal quality improvement. So if this patent is what I think it is they should be suing Nokia, Quallcomm, Samsung and the lot. Not Buffallo.
I suspect that you are not aware of what a year of probability actually encompasses in universities that teach that. May I suggest that you go and get a decent Probability Theory textbook for Math students used in a real university. Feller's "An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Application" v1 and v2 (each volume is a semester) is possibly the best example (one of my favourite books actually). There are a few more recent alternatives which I personally find inferior. Feller remains the best textbook out there and the only one which constitutes enjoyable reading (though rather expensive).
Beware that in order to understand the second volume which is the one you need to understand behaviour of systems like IP networks (especially QoS), transaction systems, OS under heavy load, etc you need at least a full calculus and possibly some algebra and functional analysis to boot.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to add QoS and QoS/Service control to the list of subjects where without knowledge of probability theory you will drawn in 10 minutes or less.
There are apparently some Channels and Stations which improve their profit margin by not buying newswire content and not doing original field reporting. They replace it by canned, pre-payed content which shows on their balance sheet as profit instead of the loss incurred by those pesky field crews (which you have to employ as well).
In my biased opinion, that is a course that MUST NOT be taught to CS students unless they have the full one year worth of Probability Theory before that. In fact it is a course that MUST NOT be taught to any scientific student who has not taken a full probability theory course first. Unfortunately, many universities especially in the US tend to do that - teaching stats without teaching the probability theory which makes them possible.
As far probability theory itself is concerned its knowledge is essential for nearly any task in CS starting from an OS and all the way to transaction systems especially if the system is operating under a resource constraint. The time your request traverses the system, the completion rate, etc are all described by Markov chains and there is a appallingly low percentage of CS people who actually know them and can understand how their systems behave. There is no way in hell you can optimise or even understand a complex system without this knowledge. Unfortunately most Unis now prefer to use this time to teach marketing buzzword bollocks also known as Unified Process, Agile, etc instead.
The second most important math area for a CS student is possibly optimal control. This one is also nowdays omitted from some university curicullae which IMO is an absolute madness.
And, for all practical purposes the fear of harvested mail addresses is silly, irrational and stupid. There is a very good method of dealing with harvesters. You combine greylisting with spambait driven blacklists and you get 99% of them right away.
Note - it is essential to use both grey and black in order for it to work. Using greylists allows to defer all mail until the spammer has fired its entire volley. If one of the addresses in the volley is a spambait you blacklist the source IP with a dynamic entry for let's say 24 hours and simulate that you are still greylisting. As a result the spammer does not know which addresses are bait and cannot prune its database. When (and if) the spammer comes around for a queue rerun you tell him to buzz off.
My email address is all over the internet from posts to mailing lists and such and it has been harvested thousands of times. If I do not use any server side antispam I get around 300+ SPAMs a day. After using grey+black+sorbs I get on the average under 2-3 spams a day. All I need to do to maintain the scheme, is to add some spambait from time to time here and there as well as pick up potential spambait from mail bounces. Most harvesters are badly written and will pick up Message-IDs as valid email addresses. These will bounce so picking them out of the error log and adding to the spamtrap triggers is a good way to populate it right away.
You can easily test that. Get yourself a bottle of original Russian "Pertsovka". It is a type of vodka, which has been left to stay above chilies. The drink has a reddish brown hue which depending on your level of capsacine addiction signifies either instant death or ultimate pleasure (or one through the other).
It is the closest thing in the real world to the Pangalactic Gargle Blaster. You definitely feel like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. In small quantities it is like getting them smashed with a "mere" hammer.
mtDNA is transferred strictly by maternal line. It provides no information about any male ancestors.
This study means that male Homo Sapiens did not shag female Neandertals or the offspring did not make it into the modern gene pool. Considering their looks and that they were most likely stronger than the Homo Sapiens male - nothing surprising here so far.
This study also means absolutely nothing as far as a female matriarch keeping a Neandertal toyboy due to better on-the-rug performance. Not particularly surprising either (I will intentionally restrain from any jokes about Gyms, American college football and the Governator).
The studies do not contradict between themselves and do not contradict with human behaviour.
That is true, but the exact nature of it being more difficult make editing a document by two people - one on Winhoze and one on Linux extremely painfull.
For example, I do not do it despite getting laptops and PCs via business channels which means that they come with proper CDs and licenses.
The reason for this is quite simple. If you return the license you are no longer entitled to use any of the Microsoft TrueType fonts. While the choice of free (as in speech and in beer) fonts has vastly improved lately, the set which comes with Windows remains essential for business use. Everything else aside, it is essential that your documents look the same as the documents of people who are still stuck with Windows.
So returning the CDs does not make business sense until the Microsoft TrueType fonts appear with a valid license from a valid retail source for less then the cost of an OEM license refund. This applies to everything but the very few 100% linux shops which never have to share a document in a DOC or PPT format with someone outside.
For every law he did not like he used a signing statement which basically said "I am not going to implement provisions A,B and C because I do not like 'em". Really smart actually. The congress can pass laws to their heart content, but the executive branch cannot implement them because the president has forbidden them to (so much for Bush being a stumbling moronic cretin by the way).
So there is only one law and one act which actually matters in the current congress. A few months ago someone on the democrat side has proposed a law which disallows the president to do this. AFAIK it did not get as far as voting in the current senate and it will be interesting to watch it in the next one.
Without it Bush will selectively pull all the teeth from any law voted in by the Congress and there will be noone capable to do anything about it unless someone manages to get the matter posed in a manner in which this will get in front of SCOTUS. Regardless of the party affiliations of SCOTUS this specific issue is something which they are not going to miss. In fact they should have been taking care of this long ago, but one great democratic president took care of it once upon a time. In the original US constitution and in the original form of balance of powers SCOTUS could act proactively on any law or presidential decision and judge it unconstitutional (this is still the case in all other democracies which follow the standard 3 powers model). FDR pulled their teeth and this has made the system inherently unstable. Granted it took many years for someone to be daring enough to use this, but it has happened. So there is the obvious question on how US will proceed from now on.
Anyway, it is definitely fun to watch (from at least one Atlantic Ocean worth of distance to there).
Screw the superstrength wires. The reason ringworld was held together was that it was symmetric and the solar wind and light pressure on it from all sides evenly balanced itself (which even had to be sorted out in the second [or third?] book of the series).
Any objects which are light enough to be put in orbit in such quantities will be blown to hell and gone off orbit by the light itself in 2-3 months. Nasa already did the experiment 20+ years back with an inflatable aluminium foil sphere and there was a similar experiment prepared by amateurs to be launched on a converted Russian ICBM lately (it failed at launch).
Frankly pestering your local politicscritters until they stop approving cretinous suburbia developments that are designed to make trees impossible is a much better idea. Just look at most recent suburbia in UK (Cambouorne, MK, etc) and US. The utility supply lines are run deliberately in a manner which prevents anyone from planting anything larger then a small cherry or apple. And this is intended that way, allowed and approved by the bastards sitting on city council planning committees.
One minor problem with your argument: 600 million years is a lot of time. It took less then 200 million years to erode the Pennines from a 8km high Himalaya like mountain to the gentle rolling hills of nowdays England. A glacier valley deep as the Grand Canyon will be unrecognisable in less then 50 million years. Same for lava beds. The only evidence from that far back is from chemical composition and crystallisation of rocks. Here the situation is even worse. Obsidian which the best marker for extreme cooling of lava is amorphous and it will slowly recrystallise of the course of thousands of years. There is no way for it to survive millions of years.
Frankly, I am extremely sceptic as far as the ice/slush/slimeball hypothesis are concerned. In the absence of photosynthesis the C02 alone should have been enough to greenhouse warm the Earth alone to a fairly high temperature. Not exactly Venus redux, but something not far from that.
Slashdot Mirror
You are were joking, but in fact not that far from the truth.
I did DSL installs in an ex-soviet block backwater which is not even in the EU yet in 1998. At that time UK and the rest of Europe (except Scandinavia) was still wetting themselves over a second ISDN channel and 56K modems. In the same country ethernet to the home in big cities is the norm, not the exemption. The cable operators built bandit networks using twisted pair as far back as 1999-2000. So on, so fourth.
Similarly, I had to design, deploy and build QoS aware networks in 1998. UK and the rest of Europe is just about getting there in the last 2 years. US is not even close (regardless of how much noises does ATT make about net neutrality).
Similarly, VOIP was all over the place by 2000 up to an connecting SMEs and it is just about getting there now in EU.
Similarly...
Do not underestimate the effect of an incumbent monopoly on business and technology. In most 3rd world countries the local incumbent has been bypassed and regulation has been ignored. A few bribes here and there have been sufficient to effectively kill off any attempts by the incumbent to prevent the usage of "unallowed" technologies. As a result the deployment of many technologies is 5-6 years ahead of the "civilised world" where the incumbent can use the regulator and police to strangle any technological progress.
Exactly.
And as the subject of the article is TCO in terms of TCO customised per-site Windows automation costs much more then similar Unix automation. As a result it is worth it and justified financially only for very large installations. Everything else aside the tools (VB, ActivePerl and friends) cost money and you need a reasonable number of servers to get return on investment.
Custom Unix automation as means of reducing your TCO starts making sense from one server onwards. Tools are part of the platform and cost nothing.
So yes, selfrespecting windows sysadmins may automate custom tasks on Windows as well, but this for anything but very large sites may actually increase your TCO instead of reducing it due to cost of tools and cost of prototyping.
This is the exact f*** problem. Technology has nothing to do with it. Cretinous parents (and grandpatents like in this case) do at least in the UK.
If you ferry your child around till the age of 4 in a buggy he will quite obviously be fatigued in school. Children are children, they will always try to run and play in every free moment. If they have been ferried till the age of 4 like a disabled or retarded even that little play will make them fatigued and absolutely knackered.
In fact the primary school teachers in the UK base their working methods that children are physically unfit. For example the entire daily schedule in a reception class is designed so that you tire the children first by running them in the playground for half an hour. After that they more or less sit for 30 minutes while the teacher "works" with them while they are splattered around her (not that they absorb anything). If a child is fit he does not get tired enough to sit still and is constantly in trouble (as my son is).
The primary reason for "fatigue" is the abissmal level of physical fitness which applies to 99% of the British kids. Nearly all are ferried in buggies till school age and kept tied down so that they do not do something stupid (instead of teaching them not to do so). They are also kept as far away from exercise as possible and then some. If you go to a park in the UK on a cold or rainy day the only kids will be the foreigners'. You are going to hear French, Polish, Spanish or other European speech in the playground. English will be a rarity. If you go and ask a British parent if your son can play with his son football outside on a typical "British Weather(TM)" day you are likely to hear "Why don't they play football on his playstation?". Best case scenario - you can negotiate 15 minutes worth of play time and after that the british kid will be locked back indoors just in case so he does not catch a cold.
As far as the cancer - obesity and tons of junk food are a well known cause cancer as well (just search for chips and acrilamide).
You are half the way there in your analysis.
Studies like this actually take into account the fact that the Unix/Linux sysadmin on the average is 20%+ more expensive.
They are wrong elsewhere.
They do not take into account that a selfrespecting Unix/Linux sysadmin will automate everything he/she can and will not repeat everyday mundane tasks. Instead of this they still count the time which is essential to maintain and patch the systems towards the TCO bill and multiply it by their number (correcting only for vendor tools to assist rollout where applicable). There is no correction for ad-hoc scripting and no correction for productising ad-hoc tools for internal rollout. Further to this many places go into the idiocy of prohibiting such internal software development. In fact I know one or two places where such activities are a sackable offence.
I have stopped counting how many times over the years I have heard the "We are not software developers" mantra from PHB wannabies. That is the damn difference between a high level Unix sysadmin and a Windows sysadmin in the first place. The Unix sysadmin can write in at least 2-3 rapid development languages - (k)shell, perl and/or python and the reason why he/she gets more money is exactly this. Paying him this money and not using this ability is stupid, but this is what many places do as a matter of policy. It is no wonder that places like this have better TCO under Windows compared to Unix/Linux. That is to be expected and that will continue to be the case until they start to automate mundane operations in-house, formally maintain the automation and productise/package it for internal use.
In fact the TCO numbers for systems like the one in the article (1000+ of slightly customized commodity software on commodity OS) come out in favour of Linux/Unix even if this activity is subcontracted out. They do not come out right only when it is prohibited and the work is done solely via vendor supplied tools.
Disagree. I will tag this as "Logical Development".
This study perfectly describes the problem with many Linux/Unix deployments out there. They are done by people who take the approach which they have grown accustomed to on Windows, Novell and the like and try to transfer it to Linux/Unix. This approach is best described as "everything you cannot do with the vendor tools must be done manually" and "we only use commercial/vendor software". When using this approach Linux/Unix invariably results in higher TCO because the price of labour is higher and level of one-click moron-friendly automation is lower for most cases.
When doing Linux/Unix work writing your own tools and assisting yourself in automating tasks is a part of the job and Sysadmins who do not possess the skills should not allow themselves to claim that they are Linux/Unix Sysadmins. From there on, if you estimate the costs of running and deploying systems without taking this into account you invariable come up with Windows being cheaper.
That is the reality, face it move along and ignore the study. While it was using the right analysis methods it was analysing deployments which do not use the correct design and process for either system. If you use design and processes which are wrong for one system it is not particularly surprising that you get bad TCO for it.
You got half the way to the right point without making it. I hope you do not mind if I do it for you.
It is quite appalling that a news site which is oriented towards geeks publishes links to newspaper pseudonews bollocks without publishing links to the original articles and original peer reviewed research. Frankly, that is not news for nerds. It is news for Sun readers (and the like).
Is it that damn difficult to do some digging before publishing on Slashdot?
I would second that.
A list that is missing Sofia Kovalevskaya and puts Paris Hilton instead...
Paris Hilton as a geek... Puke... Double puke... Quadruple puke... and puke again...
Well...
I suggest that you will have to learn from American Government approach to peacefull protest.
The standard scenario goes like this: US embassy sponsors the local Baseball League (at least several teams). It does it quietly for 2-3 years after which it gets a bunch of "democrats" (quotes on purpose) to demonstrate in front of the elected parlament on some issue. This is always done during the winter and it is done so for a reason.
Simply, the baseball teams are brought in to demonstrate as well. The demonstrations are mostly peacefull except a few snowballs thrown at the police. Now, there is a world of difference between a snowball thrown by an average kid and a snowball with a chunk of ice inside thrown by a baseball player (even a lousy one). In the first case the police shrugs it off. In the second a policeman is down with a very satisfying clunk and carried out on a stretcher straight to the hospital. Jolly good approach actually. The crowd is "unarmed" and if police opens fire the USA screams loudly about violations of democracy and police brutality.
So next time you want to demonstrate against something make sure that it is during the winter and draft a baseball team. Works a treat. Worked great in Bulgaria in 1997, in the Chech Republic, Serbia, Poland and nearly worked in Belarus (where the police had none of it).
As far as the original topic of the article goes this is silly. The only reason for this silliness is that the police in the UK is afraid to prosecute based on policeman evidence and testimony and is trying to do with CCTV instead. Unfortunately that is where UK police is going. They now have vans with hidden cameras parked in key sections of roads (I see one every 2-3 days), they have it in their cars, it was only a matter of time until they mount it on their head (or arse).
If he really managed it, the real news will be when he manages to procreate. Those 14KeV fusion neutrons play very interesting games with DNA. That is if he really managed to get any fusion to succeed which I doubt.
No idea if it is quick enough (I just got 2 spanking new C7 MBs and was going to build some OpenVPN gateways from them while testing this in the process). It is definitely considerably quicker compared to software-only implementations and that is about as much as I know about it right now. Looking at what they did with AES and RNG it may as well be fast enough. No idea until I try.
There are a few more alternatives:
1. Use a most recent Via CPUs (the ones released this year). The C7 has the time consuming parts of RSA accelerated on the CPU which makes this attack considerably less feasible. This is possibly the only cost effective method for limited budget cases where high speed is required. A full motherboard with CPU, SATA and all bells and whistles is around 150 pounds and IIRC is supported by OpenSSL 0.9.8 (and backport patches).
2. Use (to the full) TPM on your machine (if present). TPM chips can do RSA in hardware. Unfortunately most of them are extremely slow. Same goes for most RSA capable smartcards and tokens like eToken and eToken64. They are sooooooooo slooooooooooooow it is unreal.
3. Use a proper hardware RSA accelerator. There are several boards/chips which can do that and if you are really paranoid you are likely to be running one anyway.
They don't produce just that, they produce them at energies which can split U238 which "normal" or slowed down fission neutrons cannot split. In fact some of the tokamak outlines I have seen in articles 20 years ago (when they were saying that fusion is 20 years off) had an extra layer of U238 for a second stage fission reaction.
That is correct in two cases - if you have a RAID array and if you have purchased them from different batches in the first place.
If you do not have raid at today's disk prices - you are daft. If you have built it with disks from the same batch - you are even dafter as they have an increased probability to fail at the same time. To make things even worse if one of your drives die in a RAID1 or 5 scenario the rest get loaded more and the chance of them dieing increases significantly.
So if you have built a RAID array from disks which are from the same batch you should gradually replace disks after some time. The actual times of replacement can be calculated based on MTBF (adjusted for temperature).
By the way, the management software of some high end storage systems does this as this is the only way of guarding against non-surface type failures (heads, electronics, bearings, etc).
WTF... Does not compute...
1. What does this have to do with a 2.4GHz band (it refers to 10GHz+)?
2. This is very close to a technique which is heavily used in CDMA. Wireless makes little use of it, while CDMA explicitly uses multipath for signal quality improvement. So if this patent is what I think it is they should be suing Nokia, Quallcomm, Samsung and the lot. Not Buffallo.
Err...
I suspect that you are not aware of what a year of probability actually encompasses in universities that teach that. May I suggest that you go and get a decent Probability Theory textbook for Math students used in a real university. Feller's "An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Application" v1 and v2 (each volume is a semester) is possibly the best example (one of my favourite books actually). There are a few more recent alternatives which I personally find inferior. Feller remains the best textbook out there and the only one which constitutes enjoyable reading (though rather expensive).
Beware that in order to understand the second volume which is the one you need to understand behaviour of systems like IP networks (especially QoS), transaction systems, OS under heavy load, etc you need at least a full calculus and possibly some algebra and functional analysis to boot.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to add QoS and QoS/Service control to the list of subjects where without knowledge of probability theory you will drawn in 10 minutes or less.
The content of the news at 11:
There are apparently some Channels and Stations which improve their profit margin by not buying newswire content and not doing original field reporting. They replace it by canned, pre-payed content which shows on their balance sheet as profit instead of the loss incurred by those pesky field crews (which you have to employ as well).
In my biased opinion, that is a course that MUST NOT be taught to CS students unless they have the full one year worth of Probability Theory before that. In fact it is a course that MUST NOT be taught to any scientific student who has not taken a full probability theory course first. Unfortunately, many universities especially in the US tend to do that - teaching stats without teaching the probability theory which makes them possible.
As far probability theory itself is concerned its knowledge is essential for nearly any task in CS starting from an OS and all the way to transaction systems especially if the system is operating under a resource constraint. The time your request traverses the system, the completion rate, etc are all described by Markov chains and there is a appallingly low percentage of CS people who actually know them and can understand how their systems behave. There is no way in hell you can optimise or even understand a complex system without this knowledge. Unfortunately most Unis now prefer to use this time to teach marketing buzzword bollocks also known as Unified Process, Agile, etc instead.
The second most important math area for a CS student is possibly optimal control. This one is also nowdays omitted from some university curicullae which IMO is an absolute madness.
Absolutely.
And, for all practical purposes the fear of harvested mail addresses is silly, irrational and stupid. There is a very good method of dealing with harvesters. You combine greylisting with spambait driven blacklists and you get 99% of them right away.
Note - it is essential to use both grey and black in order for it to work. Using greylists allows to defer all mail until the spammer has fired its entire volley. If one of the addresses in the volley is a spambait you blacklist the source IP with a dynamic entry for let's say 24 hours and simulate that you are still greylisting. As a result the spammer does not know which addresses are bait and cannot prune its database. When (and if) the spammer comes around for a queue rerun you tell him to buzz off.
My email address is all over the internet from posts to mailing lists and such and it has been harvested thousands of times. If I do not use any server side antispam I get around 300+ SPAMs a day. After using grey+black+sorbs I get on the average under 2-3 spams a day. All I need to do to maintain the scheme, is to add some spambait from time to time here and there as well as pick up potential spambait from mail bounces. Most harvesters are badly written and will pick up Message-IDs as valid email addresses. These will bounce so picking them out of the error log and adding to the spamtrap triggers is a good way to populate it right away.
Works a treat : http://www.sigsegv.cx/exim-greylist-4.html
You can easily test that. Get yourself a bottle of original Russian "Pertsovka". It is a type of vodka, which has been left to stay above chilies. The drink has a reddish brown hue which depending on your level of capsacine addiction signifies either instant death or ultimate pleasure (or one through the other).
It is the closest thing in the real world to the Pangalactic Gargle Blaster. You definitely feel like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. In small quantities it is like getting them smashed with a "mere" hammer.
mtDNA is transferred strictly by maternal line. It provides no information about any male ancestors.
This study means that male Homo Sapiens did not shag female Neandertals or the offspring did not make it into the modern gene pool. Considering their looks and that they were most likely stronger than the Homo Sapiens male - nothing surprising here so far.
This study also means absolutely nothing as far as a female matriarch keeping a Neandertal toyboy due to better on-the-rug performance. Not particularly surprising either (I will intentionally restrain from any jokes about Gyms, American college football and the Governator).
The studies do not contradict between themselves and do not contradict with human behaviour.
That is true, but the exact nature of it being more difficult make editing a document by two people - one on Winhoze and one on Linux extremely painfull.
For example, I do not do it despite getting laptops and PCs via business channels which means that they come with proper CDs and licenses.
The reason for this is quite simple. If you return the license you are no longer entitled to use any of the Microsoft TrueType fonts. While the choice of free (as in speech and in beer) fonts has vastly improved lately, the set which comes with Windows remains essential for business use. Everything else aside, it is essential that your documents look the same as the documents of people who are still stuck with Windows.
So returning the CDs does not make business sense until the Microsoft TrueType fonts appear with a valid license from a valid retail source for less then the cost of an OEM license refund. This applies to everything but the very few 100% linux shops which never have to share a document in a DOC or PPT format with someone outside.
He has not used it for another reason.
For every law he did not like he used a signing statement which basically said "I am not going to implement provisions A,B and C because I do not like 'em". Really smart actually. The congress can pass laws to their heart content, but the executive branch cannot implement them because the president has forbidden them to (so much for Bush being a stumbling moronic cretin by the way).
So there is only one law and one act which actually matters in the current congress. A few months ago someone on the democrat side has proposed a law which disallows the president to do this. AFAIK it did not get as far as voting in the current senate and it will be interesting to watch it in the next one.
Without it Bush will selectively pull all the teeth from any law voted in by the Congress and there will be noone capable to do anything about it unless someone manages to get the matter posed in a manner in which this will get in front of SCOTUS. Regardless of the party affiliations of SCOTUS this specific issue is something which they are not going to miss. In fact they should have been taking care of this long ago, but one great democratic president took care of it once upon a time. In the original US constitution and in the original form of balance of powers SCOTUS could act proactively on any law or presidential decision and judge it unconstitutional (this is still the case in all other democracies which follow the standard 3 powers model). FDR pulled their teeth and this has made the system inherently unstable. Granted it took many years for someone to be daring enough to use this, but it has happened. So there is the obvious question on how US will proceed from now on.
Anyway, it is definitely fun to watch (from at least one Atlantic Ocean worth of distance to there).
Screw the superstrength wires. The reason ringworld was held together was that it was symmetric and the solar wind and light pressure on it from all sides evenly balanced itself (which even had to be sorted out in the second [or third?] book of the series).
Any objects which are light enough to be put in orbit in such quantities will be blown to hell and gone off orbit by the light itself in 2-3 months. Nasa already did the experiment 20+ years back with an inflatable aluminium foil sphere and there was a similar experiment prepared by amateurs to be launched on a converted Russian ICBM lately (it failed at launch).
Frankly pestering your local politicscritters until they stop approving cretinous suburbia developments that are designed to make trees impossible is a much better idea. Just look at most recent suburbia in UK (Cambouorne, MK, etc) and US. The utility supply lines are run deliberately in a manner which prevents anyone from planting anything larger then a small cherry or apple. And this is intended that way, allowed and approved by the bastards sitting on city council planning committees.
One minor problem with your argument: 600 million years is a lot of time. It took less then 200 million years to erode the Pennines from a 8km high Himalaya like mountain to the gentle rolling hills of nowdays England. A glacier valley deep as the Grand Canyon will be unrecognisable in less then 50 million years. Same for lava beds. The only evidence from that far back is from chemical composition and crystallisation of rocks. Here the situation is even worse. Obsidian which the best marker for extreme cooling of lava is amorphous and it will slowly recrystallise of the course of thousands of years. There is no way for it to survive millions of years.
Frankly, I am extremely sceptic as far as the ice/slush/slimeball hypothesis are concerned. In the absence of photosynthesis the C02 alone should have been enough to greenhouse warm the Earth alone to a fairly high temperature. Not exactly Venus redux, but something not far from that.