I have an old P133 laptop booting to a Knoppix image copied to its hard drive sitting on my kitchen counter. I have a linksys wireless card that Knoppix recognizes providing the network link. I also started a Recipants database (google it) so we could save our favorite recipes and look them up from the laptop.
It is slow, but I've recently found a way to significantly boost its speed -- VNC to the 1.4 GHz machine upstairs. Running mozilla on the 133 MHz processor is painful, but the old processor runs a VNC client just fine. Launch the client in full screen mode and it's just like a 10x processor upgrade!
Because it is an old laptop and I got it for next to nothing (with a non-functional spare to cannibalize parts from), I've got no problem if there is a kitchen disaster such as "P133 al forno" or "Toshiba surprise".
Often, the IP is changing between requesting each graphic from the index.html page.
This is probably just simple load-balancing taking place, but the results are very similar to this so-called "new technology" for hiding the source IP.
Even with a sufficiently large and diverse IP pool, this would essentially be only as secure as the random number generator that picks your next IP address. And we all know how robust and un-crackable random number algorithms are. . .
"Actually, though, how is this different (or less complicated) than, say, using PGP and an IRC client (with DCC) to effect the same sort of transfer?"
In the same way Gnutella and Napster are different than ftp and USENET. The knowledgeable have always been able to trade files, but these new smart-clients have lowered the common denomiator making file trading a lot easier for the neophyte.
I agree with your post on all but one point - have you installed NT lately? Have you installed RedHat Linux lately?
I have installed both within the past week. NT took me the better part of an afternoon to install, and RedHat Linux took 20 minutes.
That's the base OS, mind you. In NT you still need to install additional software if you want to make the thing do real work. RedHat has much of the fuctionality you need - right out of the box.
As far as my experience level with both OS's - I have probably installed each the same number of times, so I know the "easy route" through their installations.
thanks,
kristau
It seems that people are confusing, or more precisely, interchanging the terms supercomputer and cluster recently. The link to NOAA's public affairs page mentions cluster only once, but supercomputer is mentioned six times. Are clusters really becoming powerful enough to be classified as supercomputers yet?
The Iowa Legislature recently passed a law to nullify and protect Iowa residents from the DMCA.
Move to/. to Iowa and post with impunity!
Alternatively, copy all the "offending" posts and email them using your Hotmail account. Then Microsoft will have to sue itself for violation of the DMCA!
The fact that there already is a cure for AIDS doesn't seem to thwart the charity-mongers any. There are actually two cures:
1) Natural Selection - nasty but true. The epidemic will eventually play itself out, much as the Black Plauge did in the Middle Ages. Sure, it may take more than half the poplulation, but it will play out.
2) Social Change - not likely until a *real* epidemic ensues, then it will be too late. However, if education efforts were successful in changing the culture. . . theoretically you could stamp it out. And we all know the difference between theory and reality.
Cancer, on the other hand, strikes anyone and everyone regardless of lifestyle. Sure, there are high risk groups and ways of decreasing your risk (i.e. reduce your exposure to cancer-causing chems), but I feel that most cancers today can be attributed to many environmental hazards such as an increase in radiation, chemical and radio frequency exposure.
So, to recap:
AIDS == avoidable CANCER == !avoidable
later, kristau
P.S. - Yes, I personally knew three people who died of cancer. No, I have not personally known someone who has died of AIDS. Perhaps that would make a good/. poll?
I agree with your assessment of the advantages of a "real" store over an Internet store, but I will differ on the shipping issue. The end consumer *does* pay shipping on goods purchased in a retail outlet. This is transparent to the customer, as it is part of the mark-up the retailer tacks on to the cost of his goods. After all, the goods have to be shipped to his store, and they may sit on the shelves as inventory for months earning no revenue at all. An Internet business, like a mail-order catalog, shows their price (plus a bit of profit) in the catalog, then tacks on S&H at the end. The customer perceives a cheaper price while shopping, and rarely calculates the S&H into their comparison with local retail outlets. Heck, even I don't and I know I should!
I think that the legislators see Internet business much the same they see catalog businesses, and it is a good analogy. Many states already have taxes on mail-ordered goods, so they will probably just extend or modify those taxes to cover Internet sales as well.
Returning to the ideal of Object Oriented Programming and data ecapsulation wouldn't be a bad idea in this case. Encapsulate the data with the algorithm that reads it.
If the algorithm could be converted to a fairly generic, assembly-like format, a preprocessor could be developed that would read the algorithm and convert the instructions into whatever hardware/software platform is being used at the time.
Preserve at least an algorithm capable of "viewing" the data with each copy of the data.
First, I'll point out my newspaper using habits for the few newspaper executives that may be reading. I pick up a newspaper about once a year at best. Usually it is just to find movie listings.
Many of the points made in the original post are valid for the media industry as a whole. The newspaper industry is merely a subset of what is going on. Emphasis on surface over substance, sensasionalism over rationalism has been invading the media for quite some time. Newspapers are only suffering because they are saying the same thing the TV and Internet media are saying - only 24 to 48 hours behind.
For the newsprint media to really distiguish itself, it should stop following the trend of dumbing down media with flashy graphics and sensational stories. I stopped reading the newspaper when the stories began insulting my intelligence.
I agree that the newsprint media has a virtual monopoly on local events. However, it is a monopoly that they rarely exercise. This is due, in part, to big conglomerate media organizations that own news presses across the country (Gannett owns the paper here in Des Moines, IA). These large corporations beam in their stories via satellite to their various holdings each day where they are regurgitated onto print. A good local paper should be 99% local news and only 1% National/International.
It would be interesting to see how much print space is devoted to the Holland, Michigan debate on installing censorware in the libraries versus how much print is used up covering the Presidential hopefuls in their local paper. I doubt the censorship issue gets even gets 1/3rd the coverage. However, if the article linked above were printed in the local paper in Holland, MI, I'm sure it would spark new arguments in the debate.
I have already emailed this one in. On altavista, do a search for:
sinful chocolate chip cookies
Any good christian girl or boy has heard the phrase, "those cookies were absolutely sinful." Therefore, it would be extremely likely that she would search for sinful cookies.
Just want to add support to this comment. As a support technician, I have had customers vehemently insist that they are running Windows 97, despite the fact that I explained the difference. They just don't understand that the big splash screen is for Office and not for their OS. Year versioning is evil.
Their analysts probably pointed out that last year X% of their revenue was lost to etoy.com. This lead to the formulation of a strategy to bring etoy.com down over this year's Christmas season. Wheels turn, cogs rotate, and the lawyers get called.
The laywers, of course, pointed out immediately that Etoys.com didn't have a leg to stand on in court, but proffered the same results without a court visit: injunction. Now that the shopping season is through, they can backpedal to avoid setting a precedence on this issue - a precedence that most likely would prevent them from pulling the same trick next year!
My bet is that Etoys.com will still work on etoy.com to try and get them to change, and if they don't do it by next Christmas shopping season, we will be seeing more injuctions. If etoy.com had the backing, the should try to get this into the courts and get the precedence set. However, I doubt they do, so we may see this tactic tried by others until it "slips unintentionally" into the courts.
You are putting faith in another party that may have written faulty code, or may have inserted "back door" code without your knowledge. With Open Source, you have the source code in your hands and on your system. You can modify the source to suit your needs and, more importantly, audit the source for back door code and other security compromises.
Granted, it is easier to for the average company or user to trust that Closed Source solutions are secure - or at least that the owner of the source will alert it's users to security breeches and provide timely patches. Auditing source code takes many well-trained man hours (read: is extremely expensive) but for matters of national security, this is a neccessity! Just imagine DoD computers infected with Back Orifice or another remote-control back door and the importance of source-auditing becomes self-evident -- regardless of the OS.
As the stakes get higher in the corporate world, the realization that true security can't be trusted to a Closed Source solution will sink in and Open Source will become the gold standard for securing their boxes.
"Log in as root for one last time. Savor the feeling, as you will be logging in as administrator from now on"
"The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible - because we haven't bothered to try to add compatability, why bother, we rule."
Well, at least they advised to back up your Linux files in case you ever want to go back.
But mostly laughed. This article reads like a chapter out of a Douglas Adams novel. Therein lies the sorrow, as this isn't fiction where things are larger than life itself and words are frequently discovered that didn't exist before. No, this is the state of corporate America, further alienating itself from the common man by paying focus groups and consultants to create a fiction that will be their nameplate - thier face to the world. Sad indeed. kristau
Slashdot Mirror
I have an old P133 laptop booting to a Knoppix image copied to its hard drive sitting on my kitchen counter. I have a linksys wireless card that Knoppix recognizes providing the network link. I also started a Recipants database (google it) so we could save our favorite recipes and look them up from the laptop.
It is slow, but I've recently found a way to significantly boost its speed -- VNC to the 1.4 GHz machine upstairs. Running mozilla on the 133 MHz processor is painful, but the old processor runs a VNC client just fine. Launch the client in full screen mode and it's just like a 10x processor upgrade!
Because it is an old laptop and I got it for next to nothing (with a non-functional spare to cannibalize parts from), I've got no problem if there is a kitchen disaster such as "P133 al forno" or "Toshiba surprise".
That's because someone cracked their way into your brain, obtained all your password ans wiped them to cover their tracks.
Wear the tinfoi hat, dude!
Hmm, perhaps someone should inform the Repo Man when he comes for your stuff?
I run a low-traffic web server, and have witnessed connections from AOL in my server logs that follow the pattern:
152.163.188.1
152.163.188.35
152.163.188.65
152.163.188.37
. . .
Often, the IP is changing between requesting each graphic from the index.html page.
This is probably just simple load-balancing taking place, but the results are very similar to this so-called "new technology" for hiding the source IP.
Even with a sufficiently large and diverse IP pool, this would essentially be only as secure as the random number generator that picks your next IP address. And we all know how robust and un-crackable random number algorithms are. . .
later,
kristau
"Actually, though, how is this different (or less complicated) than, say, using PGP and an IRC client (with DCC) to effect the same sort of transfer?"
In the same way Gnutella and Napster are different than ftp and USENET. The knowledgeable have always been able to trade files, but these new smart-clients have lowered the common denomiator making file trading a lot easier for the neophyte.
later,
kristau
I agree with your post on all but one point - have you installed NT lately? Have you installed RedHat Linux lately? I have installed both within the past week. NT took me the better part of an afternoon to install, and RedHat Linux took 20 minutes. That's the base OS, mind you. In NT you still need to install additional software if you want to make the thing do real work. RedHat has much of the fuctionality you need - right out of the box. As far as my experience level with both OS's - I have probably installed each the same number of times, so I know the "easy route" through their installations. thanks, kristau
thanks, kristau
The Iowa Legislature recently passed a law to nullify and protect Iowa residents from the DMCA.
/. to Iowa and post with impunity!
Move to
Alternatively, copy all the "offending" posts and email them using your Hotmail account. Then Microsoft will have to sue itself for violation of the DMCA!
later,
kristau
Hear hear!
/. poll?
The fact that there already is a cure for AIDS doesn't seem to thwart the charity-mongers any. There are actually two cures:
1) Natural Selection - nasty but true. The epidemic will eventually play itself out, much as the Black Plauge did in the Middle Ages. Sure, it may take more than half the poplulation, but it will play out.
2) Social Change - not likely until a *real* epidemic ensues, then it will be too late. However, if education efforts were successful in changing the culture. . . theoretically you could stamp it out. And we all know the difference between theory and reality.
Cancer, on the other hand, strikes anyone and everyone regardless of lifestyle. Sure, there are high risk groups and ways of decreasing your risk (i.e. reduce your exposure to cancer-causing chems), but I feel that most cancers today can be attributed to many environmental hazards such as an increase in radiation, chemical and radio frequency exposure.
So, to recap:
AIDS == avoidable
CANCER == !avoidable
later,
kristau
P.S. - Yes, I personally knew three people who died of cancer. No, I have not personally known someone who has died of AIDS. Perhaps that would make a good
I agree with your assessment of the advantages of a "real" store over an Internet store, but I will differ on the shipping issue. The end consumer *does* pay shipping on goods purchased in a retail outlet. This is transparent to the customer, as it is part of the mark-up the retailer tacks on to the cost of his goods. After all, the goods have to be shipped to his store, and they may sit on the shelves as inventory for months earning no revenue at all. An Internet business, like a mail-order catalog, shows their price (plus a bit of profit) in the catalog, then tacks on S&H at the end. The customer perceives a cheaper price while shopping, and rarely calculates the S&H into their comparison with local retail outlets. Heck, even I don't and I know I should!
I think that the legislators see Internet business much the same they see catalog businesses, and it is a good analogy. Many states already have taxes on mail-ordered goods, so they will probably just extend or modify those taxes to cover Internet sales as well.
later,
kristau
Returning to the ideal of Object Oriented Programming and data ecapsulation wouldn't be a bad idea in this case. Encapsulate the data with the algorithm that reads it.
If the algorithm could be converted to a fairly generic, assembly-like format, a preprocessor could be developed that would read the algorithm and convert the instructions into whatever hardware/software platform is being used at the time.
Preserve at least an algorithm capable of "viewing" the data with each copy of the data.
later,
kristau
Many of the points made in the original post are valid for the media industry as a whole. The newspaper industry is merely a subset of what is going on. Emphasis on surface over substance, sensasionalism over rationalism has been invading the media for quite some time. Newspapers are only suffering because they are saying the same thing the TV and Internet media are saying - only 24 to 48 hours behind.
For the newsprint media to really distiguish itself, it should stop following the trend of dumbing down media with flashy graphics and sensational stories. I stopped reading the newspaper when the stories began insulting my intelligence.
I agree that the newsprint media has a virtual monopoly on local events. However, it is a monopoly that they rarely exercise. This is due, in part, to big conglomerate media organizations that own news presses across the country (Gannett owns the paper here in Des Moines, IA). These large corporations beam in their stories via satellite to their various holdings each day where they are regurgitated onto print. A good local paper should be 99% local news and only 1% National/International.
It would be interesting to see how much print space is devoted to the Holland, Michigan debate on installing censorware in the libraries versus how much print is used up covering the Presidential hopefuls in their local paper. I doubt the censorship issue gets even gets 1/3rd the coverage. However, if the article linked above were printed in the local paper in Holland, MI, I'm sure it would spark new arguments in the debate.
Well, I've ranted long enough.
later,
kristau
I have already emailed this one in. On altavista, do a search for:
sinful chocolate chip cookies
Any good christian girl or boy has heard the phrase, "those cookies were absolutely sinful." Therefore, it would be extremely likely that she would search for sinful cookies.
later,
kristau
Just want to add support to this comment. As a support technician, I have had customers vehemently insist that they are running Windows 97, despite the fact that I explained the difference. They just don't understand that the big splash screen is for Office and not for their OS. Year versioning is evil.
thanks,
kristau
Of course it has.
Their analysts probably pointed out that last year X% of their revenue was lost to etoy.com. This lead to the formulation of a strategy to bring etoy.com down over this year's Christmas season. Wheels turn, cogs rotate, and the lawyers get called.
The laywers, of course, pointed out immediately that Etoys.com didn't have a leg to stand on in court, but proffered the same results without a court visit: injunction. Now that the shopping season is through, they can backpedal to avoid setting a precedence on this issue - a precedence that most likely would prevent them from pulling the same trick next year!
My bet is that Etoys.com will still work on etoy.com to try and get them to change, and if they don't do it by next Christmas shopping season, we will be seeing more injuctions. If etoy.com had the backing, the should try to get this into the courts and get the precedence set. However, I doubt they do, so we may see this tactic tried by others until it "slips unintentionally" into the courts.
later,
kristau
You are putting faith in another party that may have written faulty code, or may have inserted "back door" code without your knowledge. With Open Source, you have the source code in your hands and on your system. You can modify the source to suit your needs and, more importantly, audit the source for back door code and other security compromises.
Granted, it is easier to for the average company or user to trust that Closed Source solutions are secure - or at least that the owner of the source will alert it's users to security breeches and provide timely patches. Auditing source code takes many well-trained man hours (read: is extremely expensive) but for matters of national security, this is a neccessity! Just imagine DoD computers infected with Back Orifice or another remote-control back door and the importance of source-auditing becomes self-evident -- regardless of the OS.
As the stakes get higher in the corporate world, the realization that true security can't be trusted to a Closed Source solution will sink in and Open Source will become the gold standard for securing their boxes.
later,
kristau
"Log in as root for one last time. Savor the feeling, as you will be logging in as administrator from now on"
"The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible - because we haven't bothered to try to add compatability, why bother, we rule."
Well, at least they advised to back up your Linux files in case you ever want to go back.
later,
kristau
But mostly laughed. This article reads like a chapter out of a Douglas Adams novel. Therein lies the sorrow, as this isn't fiction where things are larger than life itself and words are frequently discovered that didn't exist before. No, this is the state of corporate America, further alienating itself from the common man by paying focus groups and consultants to create a fiction that will be their nameplate - thier face to the world. Sad indeed. kristau