* Her mother Carol is a waitress * Pamela Anderson's mother wishes she was gay * Pamela Anderson's mother doesn't mind the Playboy pictures * Pamela Anderson's mother was so distraught about her daughter's wedding to rocker TOMMY LEE - she starved herself * Pamela Anderson's controlling mother is driving her crazy
Just based on TFA, it looks like Wolfram could be a fun search tool, if you're looking for facts and trivia. Seems like most of the searches turned up facts as opposed to Google, which returns links to pages.
At the very least it might help in the "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader" part..
biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows
Well, at least Mr. Ballmer has a clue. Too bad this this contest is over and done with in most third world countries. Where pirated Windows is worth less than a pirated DVD copy of Faster and Furiouser part 13.
We were on the verge of fall break, and someone on campus had found out a 'catch-all' email address which was aliased to _all_ the university email addresses. So some dickwad started sending a weird email saying something like "Hey joe, where are you?", which everyone got, and everyone replied "Hey, I'm not joe -- who are you?" Which was then sent to everyone else.
The thing basically kept feeding back to itself and was threatening to get out of hand. Literally hundreds of emails started popping up. Of course, this was waaay back then, before the days of spam, so it was 'abnormal', 'weird' and annoying all at once. Since it was a friday evening, and knowing that at the rate it was going everyone's inbox would be flooded when they returned from the week-long holidays, I -- perhaps naively -- thought I'd put a stop to it.
I attached a large binary file to an email and sent it to that catch-all address, hoping that it would jam up the works enough that the network admins would notice.
Notice they did, and eventually I got called up to see the ombudsman -- who promptly said he was considering kicking me out of campus.
So yeah, one can have good intentions -- like what I did -- but the means to achieve that end may not be acceptable to everyone, even though it did get the job done.
Since the researchers have already published their work on the infiltration process, I'm sure by the time you read this piece of news the botnet owners and/or authors have already put an action plan in place to mitigate, or at least lessen, the effect.
Plus, if you read their published work, they readily admit that they are always one step behind the worm, and have to react whenever the attacker changes his tactics. The work mentions that "the attacker can easily change [a function of the Stormnet communication technique]... and then we need to analyze [our] binary again."
Criminals usually work faster than the good guys because they have more to lose.
Unless there's a problem with the command you send out and it completely wipes the end users hard drive and all their personal data or does something else destructive to the infected user. True, but who's to say the resident malware isn't already doing that? Although I'm sure the bot manufacturer will take quite strong measures to stop this from happening, as it would really result in a non-productive bot. So the anti-bot programmer would just have to take similar steps I suppose.
It would be far better to monitor the botnet, find the computers involved and then help them clean their computer and prevent another infection. TFA says the researchers "saw between 5,000 and 40,000 machines online at a time." Who, other than a NATO-type international task force, would have the resources to reach out to those 40k users and help them clean their machines? All you IT admins and helpdesk staff are already cringing at the thought of handling tens or hundreds of users -- can you even begin to imagine trying to explain to thousands of clueless users what's happened to their PC, and what steps to take to clean it?
I don't see why this is really big news. In fact, this really has got _nothing_ to do with DRM per se. For those who can't see the forest for the trees:
* Company X makes product Y and sells to the public * Company X does not make enough profit selling product Y and decides to discontinue selling it * Company X decides to stop supporting product Y (e.g. by making spare parts etc)
How is this any different than, say, Ford discontinuing its Aerostar minivan line?
To me, this self-tuning guitar is to guitarists what script kiddies are to hackers, no? And I sure as hell would bet that Jimi Hendrix wouldn't sound like how he did if this type of thing was around.
I don't know about you, but the minute "out-of-tune-ness" and things of that nature is what makes a musical performance sound more human. Similar analogy: quantizing and how that makes things so.. robotic..
...you'll need to make an apple-to-apple (no pun intended) comparison. Get a reference platform on which to do the test -- be it the $1300 5.1 system setup, or your ordinary home stereo with CD player that can play back MP3 files.
1) Rip a couple of songs from your favorite artist, and burn the MP3 files into another CD. 2) Play the original CD on your reference system 3) Play the MP3 CD on your reference system
Then you'll be able to tell if there's any difference, either in your perception or appreciation of the music.
My favorite reference CD for these type of things is by Silje Nergaard, specifically the Brevet album. Awesome fidelity on that recording!
TFA says the goal of the project is nice, but cost is a big barrier. "A so-called hot rock well three miles deep in the United States would cost $7 million to $8 million, according to the MIT study. The average cost of drilling an oil well in the U.S. in 2004 was $1.44 million, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration."
Yea, so that's about six times more expensive. But wouldn't the savings be much more in the long run? And more "environmentally friendly"? After all, according to http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/ Spending.asp#USMilitarySpending US military spending was over $570 Billion in 2006. So why not spend, oh, say one percent of that figure to go towards coming up with clean energy?
(a) Fonality. That a big ape like Nortel sits up and notices what they did, is testament to how well they handled the job of installing a viable alternative to Nortel's own equipment. This simply proves that Fonality and its products are justfiable expenditure. (b) Asterisk. That a big ape like Nortel is frightened enough of it brings another feather in Asterisk and Digium's hat.
Nortel has embarassed itself on two accounts: (a) Its own subsidiary refuses to use its products (b) It's trying to force-feed its product on others -- how bad does that make it look?
With VoIP, a lot of resources are dedicated to make two or more endpoints (usually VoIP phones) talk to each other, especially when each device is talking a different codec. A lot of codecs exist - G.729, G.726, GSM, WAV, Speex et al. And so there's stuff in the middle that's required to translate from one codec to another (this is called transcoding), and at the same time take care of other audio quality issues such as echo cancellation, comfort noise generation, DTMF etc. Usually some sort of PABX takes care of this, but at the expense of CPU processing power.
What I'd like to see is for Intel to come up with a specialized chip that is good at the computation and bit-moving required to do these kinds of transcoding and DSP-type functionality. I've heard from someone in the know that when these things are done in software on generic Intel Pentium/Xeon/whatever type chips, they're not that good at doing it (how accurate that is I don't know, maybe its hearsay).
Now if Intel can throw their resources into creating something like this, that would be very nice for the VoIP space.
You know, when you're the richest person on earth, it's not that difficult to make what you say become fact. I mean, if Gates had really wanted spam eliminated, he could spend some of the $56 billion he has to put out hit contracts on the world's most wanted spammers. Or, more realistically, fund something like the X-prize, but for spam elimination instead.
It would be interesting if a wireless carrier introduced PBX-esque switching and operation.
I think most providers are reluctant to do this because with traditional PBX setups, there are no issues when a staff leaves or is fired, other than reprogramming his/her extension, deleting stale voicemail etc. With a carrier-based solution (a-la centrex services), wouldn't it be a nightmare for them to have to do this all the time? Especially with the larger-scale corporations?
I've been contemplating for a long time to cut off the landline at home. Right now we're only using it for our broadband connection. We hardly ever get or make any phone calls using the line.
As celcos here in Malaysia are starting to provide more and better broadband options, I've recently been thinking about also terminating that broadband connection, and to go with what the celco is providing. There's one provider that has a 3G-based broadband service, which has double advantage for me -- on the go, I can surf/email on my mobile phone, and at home I can use the mobile as a modem connected via bluetooth/IR/whatever.
Right now I've heard great things about the service, but that's probably due to lack of uptake. Once more and more people jump on the bandwagon, it'd be interesting to see how the increase in usage affects connectivity speed.
Well, TFA was really more ocncerned about securing the GSM voice channel rather than the data stored on your Blackberries, or data trasmission to/from those devices. Totally different thing.
Plus, if the carrier were providing the scrambling services, both endpoints would still be vulnerable from its physical location up to wherever the nearest base station is -- and that's typically where you'd really want to tap the conversation, especially if you knew the cellco was encrypting it from base station onwards.
Basically, for any decent level of security it must be embedded in the phone itself. Maybe some sort of hardware encryption unit, with some firmware setting to toggle off/on based on who you're calling.
Even on those "secure" phones that you see on TV/movies, there's still a point of vulnerability -- typically it's the phone itself that has the scrambling feature, not the receiver. To defeat that, you'd just hack the cord from the phone to the receiver, and tap it via those wires. Same concept as my endpoint/basestation example above.
TFA quotes that a "low-risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis."
However, This page, specifically this diagram from Wikipedia, shows that there really isn't any way to avoid the so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire", as the PRF is essentially a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, island arcs, and volcanic mountain ranges and/or plate movements. And the countries to be connected - Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines - sit neatly in this zone. So there really _isn't_ any mitigating natural disasters. Unless they're just talking about the type of tsunamis that recently hit the Indian Ocean areas.
As a side note, ninety percent of the world's earthquakes and 81% of the world's largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.
I for one think that this is a nice, new path for other musicians to explore. Put out a couple of tracks as teasers for the album, and if the audience likes it more likely than not they're going to end up buying the album. It doesn't cost much for him to promote the album this way (other than paying for bandwith/hosting I suppose); it sure does his "street cred" a world of good anyways.
It feels to me like he's taking a very honest approach about it; after all if the tracks suck then the no-one's going to buy the music. But if they're great, I'm sure we'd want to listen to the rest of the album. He's putting his music/reputation/karma on the line, and in turn indirectly he's looking for your support to buy the album.
I'd really like to see other enlightened artistes try this. That'd really flip ole Jack in his grave eh?
Slashdot Mirror
How about this one:
Who is Pamela Anderson's mother?
Some results:
* Her mother Carol is a waitress
* Pamela Anderson's mother wishes she was gay
* Pamela Anderson's mother doesn't mind the Playboy pictures
* Pamela Anderson's mother was so distraught about her daughter's wedding to rocker TOMMY LEE - she starved herself
* Pamela Anderson's controlling mother is driving her crazy
Just based on TFA, it looks like Wolfram could be a fun search tool, if you're looking for facts and trivia. Seems like most of the searches turned up facts as opposed to Google, which returns links to pages.
At the very least it might help in the "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader" part..
biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows
Well, at least Mr. Ballmer has a clue. Too bad this this contest is over and done with in most third world countries. Where pirated Windows is worth less than a pirated DVD copy of Faster and Furiouser part 13.
...and nearly paid for it.
We were on the verge of fall break, and someone on campus had found out a 'catch-all' email address which was aliased to _all_ the university email addresses. So some dickwad started sending a weird email saying something like "Hey joe, where are you?", which everyone got, and everyone replied "Hey, I'm not joe -- who are you?" Which was then sent to everyone else.
The thing basically kept feeding back to itself and was threatening to get out of hand. Literally hundreds of emails started popping up. Of course, this was waaay back then, before the days of spam, so it was 'abnormal', 'weird' and annoying all at once. Since it was a friday evening, and knowing that at the rate it was going everyone's inbox would be flooded when they returned from the week-long holidays, I -- perhaps naively -- thought I'd put a stop to it.
I attached a large binary file to an email and sent it to that catch-all address, hoping that it would jam up the works enough that the network admins would notice.
Notice they did, and eventually I got called up to see the ombudsman -- who promptly said he was considering kicking me out of campus.
So yeah, one can have good intentions -- like what I did -- but the means to achieve that end may not be acceptable to everyone, even though it did get the job done.
My 2 cents anyway.
And I would like to add my prediction: the botnet will implement captchas or kittens to detect the fake bots.
Since the researchers have already published their work on the infiltration process, I'm sure by the time you read this piece of news the botnet owners and/or authors have already put an action plan in place to mitigate, or at least lessen, the effect.
Plus, if you read their published work, they readily admit that they are always one step behind the worm, and have to react whenever the attacker changes his tactics. The work mentions that "the attacker can easily change [a function of the Stormnet communication technique]... and then we need to analyze [our] binary again."
Criminals usually work faster than the good guys because they have more to lose.
Who, other than a NATO-type international task force, would have the resources to reach out to those 40k users and help them clean their machines? All you IT admins and helpdesk staff are already cringing at the thought of handling tens or hundreds of users -- can you even begin to imagine trying to explain to thousands of clueless users what's happened to their PC, and what steps to take to clean it?
Yes, all the replies to my original post have valid points. But then again, these are the _details_ of it, not the main gist of the story.
Sure, DRM is bad - I'll be the first to admit it - but MSFT shutting servers on products that it no longer supports? What's the big deal about that?
The main point is this, again using the (blast!) car analogy:
* Ford builds two new purpose-built factories to manufacture its Aerostar line
* Ford discontinues its Aerostar
* Ford shuts the two factories
What's the big deal?
I don't see why this is really big news. In fact, this really has got _nothing_ to do with DRM per se. For those who can't see the forest for the trees:
* Company X makes product Y and sells to the public
* Company X does not make enough profit selling product Y and decides to discontinue selling it
* Company X decides to stop supporting product Y (e.g. by making spare parts etc)
How is this any different than, say, Ford discontinuing its Aerostar minivan line?
The Gibson Pure Audio 500GB Hard Drive
The Signature Series Les Paul Standard 1GB Flash Drive
The Les Paul Standard Flash Drive
and finally...a mirror copy of this??
To me, this self-tuning guitar is to guitarists what script kiddies are to hackers, no? And I sure as hell would bet that Jimi Hendrix wouldn't sound like how he did if this type of thing was around.
I don't know about you, but the minute "out-of-tune-ness" and things of that nature is what makes a musical performance sound more human. Similar analogy: quantizing and how that makes things so.. robotic..
...before we see photos of the scanned documents in http://www.engrish.com/ ... What were they thinking of??
...you'll need to make an apple-to-apple (no pun intended) comparison. Get a reference platform on which to do the test -- be it the $1300 5.1 system setup, or your ordinary home stereo with CD player that can play back MP3 files.
1) Rip a couple of songs from your favorite artist, and burn the MP3 files into another CD.
2) Play the original CD on your reference system
3) Play the MP3 CD on your reference system
Then you'll be able to tell if there's any difference, either in your perception or appreciation of the music.
My favorite reference CD for these type of things is by Silje Nergaard, specifically the Brevet album. Awesome fidelity on that recording!
TFA says the goal of the project is nice, but cost is a big barrier. "A so-called hot rock well three miles deep in the United States would cost $7 million to $8 million, according to the MIT study. The average cost of drilling an oil well in the U.S. in 2004 was $1.44 million, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration."
/ Spending.asp#USMilitarySpending US military spending was over $570 Billion in 2006. So why not spend, oh, say one percent of that figure to go towards coming up with clean energy?
Yea, so that's about six times more expensive. But wouldn't the savings be much more in the long run? And more "environmentally friendly"? After all, according to http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade
Do they want compensation for those as well? Doesn't terrestrial radio/tv also "violate" their airspace in the same way that cellphone signals do?
There are two winners here:
(a) Fonality. That a big ape like Nortel sits up and notices what they did, is testament to how well they handled the job of installing a viable alternative to Nortel's own equipment. This simply proves that Fonality and its products are justfiable expenditure.
(b) Asterisk. That a big ape like Nortel is frightened enough of it brings another feather in Asterisk and Digium's hat.
Nortel has embarassed itself on two accounts:
(a) Its own subsidiary refuses to use its products
(b) It's trying to force-feed its product on others -- how bad does that make it look?
With VoIP, a lot of resources are dedicated to make two or more endpoints (usually VoIP phones) talk to each other, especially when each device is talking a different codec. A lot of codecs exist - G.729, G.726, GSM, WAV, Speex et al. And so there's stuff in the middle that's required to translate from one codec to another (this is called transcoding), and at the same time take care of other audio quality issues such as echo cancellation, comfort noise generation, DTMF etc. Usually some sort of PABX takes care of this, but at the expense of CPU processing power.
What I'd like to see is for Intel to come up with a specialized chip that is good at the computation and bit-moving required to do these kinds of transcoding and DSP-type functionality. I've heard from someone in the know that when these things are done in software on generic Intel Pentium/Xeon/whatever type chips, they're not that good at doing it (how accurate that is I don't know, maybe its hearsay).
Now if Intel can throw their resources into creating something like this, that would be very nice for the VoIP space.
You know, when you're the richest person on earth, it's not that difficult to make what you say become fact. I mean, if Gates had really wanted spam eliminated, he could spend some of the $56 billion he has to put out hit contracts on the world's most wanted spammers. Or, more realistically, fund something like the X-prize, but for spam elimination instead.
I think most providers are reluctant to do this because with traditional PBX setups, there are no issues when a staff leaves or is fired, other than reprogramming his/her extension, deleting stale voicemail etc. With a carrier-based solution (a-la centrex services), wouldn't it be a nightmare for them to have to do this all the time? Especially with the larger-scale corporations?
I've been contemplating for a long time to cut off the landline at home. Right now we're only using it for our broadband connection. We hardly ever get or make any phone calls using the line.
As celcos here in Malaysia are starting to provide more and better broadband options, I've recently been thinking about also terminating that broadband connection, and to go with what the celco is providing. There's one provider that has a 3G-based broadband service, which has double advantage for me -- on the go, I can surf/email on my mobile phone, and at home I can use the mobile as a modem connected via bluetooth/IR/whatever.
Right now I've heard great things about the service, but that's probably due to lack of uptake. Once more and more people jump on the bandwagon, it'd be interesting to see how the increase in usage affects connectivity speed.
Even the NSA doesn't have enough computing power to decrypt THAT
Yes, of course. Until you realize, at the end of the conversation, that the NSA's already bugged the room you're talking in.
Well, TFA was really more ocncerned about securing the GSM voice channel rather than the data stored on your Blackberries, or data trasmission to/from those devices. Totally different thing.
Plus, if the carrier were providing the scrambling services, both endpoints would still be vulnerable from its physical location up to wherever the nearest base station is -- and that's typically where you'd really want to tap the conversation, especially if you knew the cellco was encrypting it from base station onwards.
Basically, for any decent level of security it must be embedded in the phone itself. Maybe some sort of hardware encryption unit, with some firmware setting to toggle off/on based on who you're calling.
Even on those "secure" phones that you see on TV/movies, there's still a point of vulnerability -- typically it's the phone itself that has the scrambling feature, not the receiver. To defeat that, you'd just hack the cord from the phone to the receiver, and tap it via those wires. Same concept as my endpoint/basestation example above.
TFA quotes that a "low-risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis."
However, This page, specifically this diagram from Wikipedia, shows that there really isn't any way to avoid the so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire", as the PRF is essentially a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, island arcs, and volcanic mountain ranges and/or plate movements. And the countries to be connected - Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines - sit neatly in this zone. So there really _isn't_ any mitigating natural disasters. Unless they're just talking about the type of tsunamis that recently hit the Indian Ocean areas.
As a side note, ninety percent of the world's earthquakes and 81% of the world's largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.
The link, in TFA's list of businesses who've raised $12 million to fund open source software/services, points to Black Duck Inn and Properties..
Did he even check his references??
I for one think that this is a nice, new path for other musicians to explore. Put out a couple of tracks as teasers for the album, and if the audience likes it more likely than not they're going to end up buying the album. It doesn't cost much for him to promote the album this way (other than paying for bandwith/hosting I suppose); it sure does his "street cred" a world of good anyways.
It feels to me like he's taking a very honest approach about it; after all if the tracks suck then the no-one's going to buy the music. But if they're great, I'm sure we'd want to listen to the rest of the album. He's putting his music/reputation/karma on the line, and in turn indirectly he's looking for your support to buy the album.
I'd really like to see other enlightened artistes try this. That'd really flip ole Jack in his grave eh?