Yes, that would be perfect to mount on a plane like this. It's a small electric plane, with something they call an "X Port". They use this to drop parachutes or little plastic "bombs", and to do combat with little sonic transmitter/receivers. It should be pretty easy to adapt the trigger mechanism to turn the camera on.
I totally agree with this concept.. In the age of the "shrink wrap license", the groups defining the terms and conditions need to take more responsibility to clarify the terms than they currently do. Who has the time, or the legal knowledge, to wade through 10 pages of legalese before installing some random program? I simply cancel the install when confronted with those licenses, but obviously many people don't.
The same concept should apply to many areas:
- DVD, and other future format, movies. The box should clearly state whether it has advertisements, if they play automatically, and if they can be bypassed. I get really pissed when my DVD player forces me to watch ads when I put a movie in. If I had known about it before purchasing, I would not have bought the movie. This should also include the bullshit FBI warning, and other remote control lockout functions.
- Satellite TV providers - DirecTV keeps talking about "downres'ing" HDTV output if not through copy protected interfaces (crippling most current HDTV's). They are also talking about disabling the Tivo 30 second skip function. Who knows what else they'll do -- remote control lockout on commercials? They need to declare these sorts of things at purchase time, so I'm not stuck with a $1,000 HD-Tivo that won't skip commercials, and a one year committment to DirecTV programming.
- ISP's - what monitoring can/will they do? Can they place any limits on inbound connections, etc.
Actually, it moved to PCI-X a couple years ago, at 64Bits and 133MHz. And, now it's going to PCI-Express which can offer even more bandwidth.
PCI-X is fine for servers, and PCI-Epress will be good for PC's in the future. But, the vast majority of PC's today still use 32bit 33MHz PCI. This is why removing a huge bandwidth hog from the PCI bus is a big advance.
The article mentioned a couple networking things, beside the firewall, which are very cool..
- Gig-E on the chipset. Most NIC's attach via the PCI bus. Even the integrated NIC's on the motherboard, they connect via the PCI bus. Since a standard 32bit/33MHz bus tops out at 1Gbps, you've got a bottleneck if you want to do anything else - like access the disk. They bypass that, and give it direct access to the system bus. Their performance results are impressive.
- The article claims that it supports "TCP and checksum offload". TCP offload to hardware has been talked about in high performance network services (iSCSI, SSL accelerators, SANs) for a couple years, but doing this in a PC is a big leap. It can have a huge benefit in CPU performance.
- Of course, the firewall in hardware is interesting. I'm curious to see how flexible it is, but to be able to do firewalling and TCP in hardware shows how much network intelligence they put into the chipset. A hardware firewall can have some benefits in DoS attacks. The system doesn't need to see the packets, service interrupts, etc.. the packets are dropped before they hit the OS (depending on how the firewall was implemented).
The big question for me is: How open will the spec's be for these developments? Even though they are done in hardware, they will rely heavily on software for setup and full functionality. Without open spec's we won't be able to take advantage of these things in Linux.
HD streams are ~ 20Mbps MPEG2. I save HDTV programs to a file server over a 100Mbps network. Two is no problem.. three or four streams could run into problems if other traffic hits the network.
Nothing that I've run into in multimedia streaming needs real high bandwidth. It's only the bulk transfers that will fill the pipe, like backing up a system over the network.
But, it's always good to have headroom. Gig-E is cheap enough now that it makes sense for the high-tech home.
That's what they tried to do, and it has resulted in them losing money for the last 12 quarters, as low end Linux servers moved up the food chain of what jobs Sun servers had always done.
"The high end" means a totally different thing today than it did 10 years ago. We used to buy $20K Sun machines to use around the network as everything from firewalls to mail servers to DNS servers. Now, all of those jobs are done by cheap Linux boxes.
The speed of cheap systems today is such that "high end" is only a small handful of corporate apps. This is simply not enough revenue to sustain a company the size of Sun.
In my own personal experience, the driver support on Linux has been better than on Windows.. The Linux drivers seem to be more generalized. I have two CompactFlash WiFi cards that I can use in my Zaurus or use in my laptop with a PCMCIA adapter. in Linux, I pop the card in, and the driver loads.. no problems. The dmesg output claims a different vendor than it actually says on the card, but it works fine.
Then, I put it in the laptop while booted into Win2K, and it goes through that damn hardware wizard. I try a half dozen drivers, from the card vendor, the chipset OEM, and other similar cards.. and none load. The cards are officially supported on WinCE devices, but there is no reason they shouldn't work on Win2K. I eventually get it working in one laptop, I'm still not sure how. But, I never did get it working in my Sony VAIO. Like most Windows things, I can't get any low level information about why it's failing.. it just doesn't work.
BUT.. Once a card is working in Windows, the software is generally pretty good. I can see available Access Points, configure them - and the software remembers WEP keys, etc.
On Linux, it's a highly manual process, entering WEP keys on the command line.. using seperate tools to scan for access points.. This part totally sucks in Linux today.
The Zaurus has some half decent GUI tools for setting keys & stuff like that, but it is nowhere near as good as WinXP, WinCE, or MacOS X. This is what's needed to have a usable wireless connection.
Sun's statements have been a bit more subtle than SCO's (that's not too tough), but they have certainly made no bones about throwing FUD towards Linux.
Check out this article from immediately after SCO announced the lawsuit. McNealy was immediately commenting on their licensing position, FUD about an audit committee, and another wonderful FUD inspiring comment: "We think open source is wonderful and good, but we also believe in copyright and the rule of law,".
Contrast that to the comments from HP: "HP is unaware of any intellectual property infringement within Linux." And, Larry Ellison was already connecting Microsoft to the effort..
Sun is now getting close to the world's largest vendor of a Linux distribution
I have seen this claim before, but I have not seen any statistics that support this. This article from a year ago has Sun at a tiny fraction of the Linux sales of IBM, Dell, or HP. This article reporting on Q4'03 sales has similat stats, with HP, IBM, and Dell way out in front of everyone else. The only articles I found that gave Sun a decent percentage were those reporting UNIX sales, where Sun's SPARC/Solaris systems were counted. I'm not sure what the China agreement will amount to, but Linux systems have been available from Walmart for a long time, and they have not sold well at all.
And, I agree with your assessment of Sun's sales over the internet bubble, and how it changed. But, I see that as the reason for their spewing FUD about Linux, not the reason they are embracing it.
Basically, Sun sees the trends, which have been building for years, and they see that they can try to embrace it or be steamrolled by it. But, like Sun's previous Linux efforts over the years, it's half assed. They say "buy our Linux desktop" in one breath, then spread anti-Linux FUD in the next.. I don't see that as a recipe for success.
There were a lot of articles on various news sites saying that Sun and Microsoft had buried the hatchet, in order to concentrate on their common enemy: Linux.
I looked through the articles, but did not see any Sun quotes that were clearly hostile towards Linux. Although, that has been true all along, in public Sun always said Linux was a good thing, but in private Sun employees I know were not exactly Linux fans.
Were there any Sun statements made against Linux? Or were the journalists just connecting the dots?
Then, there are the Sun involvement in SCO issues. From the beginning, Sun has only touted their fully licensed Unix, they have not ever offered any support of the Linux position. Many people think they are one of the main parties behind the SCO lawsuit.
Well, that's certainly an intelligent retort. I hesitate to reply to such, but what the hell.
Even without any foreign databases, this information can be used to establish a record of international travels. You don't necessarily need to authenticate them against their home country's records. There is value in authenticating a person as the same individual who enterred two months ago from Canada, using a different name.
Want to hide those trips to Libya? Well, just use your other passport when entering the U.S.. Want to obfuscate any travel records? Just use a new one each time you come & go. With fingerprint records, they can much more easily catch passport fraud.
And, what makes you think that foreign governments will not share fingerprint databases? Other countries have immigration related fingerprint databases: France, EU, EU, Australia, considers a system similar to the U.S.,
The U.S. already has immigration controls tighly integrated with Canada, and it would not be surprising at all to see the EU, Australia, Japan, and others cooperating on this.
If somebody is going to commit something illegal, he'll probably enter the country illegally. Probably through the porous mexican border or the huge coastline that the US has.
Of course, this is not the way that ANY of the 9/11 terrorists entered the country. I believe most enterred legally. Some/most of them enterred with student visas.
I can imagine the border patrol guys catching a middle eastern man trying to cross from Mexico.. He's going straight to Guantanamo for some pretty intense interrogations.
That is, if he can be identified as Middle Eastern. I picture something like that Cheech Marin movie, was it "Born in East L.A."?, where he's teaching the Mexicans to speak enough English-like phrases to get by... "Whaaah Sappenin?"
The same could be said for any security measure that you come up with.
Nothing is 100% secure, but that doesn't mean it should not be implemented. We have always had a very open travel policies in the US, but that doesn't mean it's a human entitlement to travel here with absolute minimum security measures. Particularly at this time, when we are under foreign threat of a kind we're still very much struggling to deal with.
Assuming they have some decent procedures and technology, this doesn't need to be much more cumbersome than the current passport controls that have always been applied. Hopefully they have electronic fingerprint readers, and digital cameras that take the pics as part of the normal passport control procedure.
I'm a lot less disturbed by this "strong authentication" of foreign travellers to the U.S. than I am of all the policies applying to U.S. citizens with no oversight or public review. Those are the bad ones, when the gov't does things behind closed doors, without checks, balances, reviews and reports.. And, that's why I badly want Bush out of office in the upcoming election.
How many articles will it take before slashdot implements a simple mirror?? It could be automated as part of the publishing process.. just do a simple static mirroring of the image or page linked from a story. If a server becomes unavailable or otherwise in error, add the mirrored links.
Sure, some sites might love all the hits of a "slashdotting". But obviously there are many others that die under the load, or get disabled by bandwidth limiters, or various other problems.
If the site owners want to know the stats of how many hits they got, you could include stats for mirror hits.
This is not rocket science.. This problem occurs every day. In the current story, the server for the main article is barely responding, and the link for the image is responding with a "don't steal bandwidth" message.
There are several points in the Yahoo Finance article that are a bit off..
SCO is suing AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler in what could be the first of hundreds of suits against firms that don't pay SCO a $700-per-server license fee.
Those suits were regarding breach of previous license agreements when the companies moved off of SCO and onto Linux. They are not regarding a $699/server license.
Also, in an effort to more firmly establish Unix ownership rights, SCO is suing Novell, a big Linux vendor that sold Unix rights to SCO several years ago.
I don't remember the details of this one.. But, wasn't it a counter-suit, after Novell claimed SCO didn't have ownership rights? The article makes it sound like a proactive move be SCO to show how strong their claim was.
The stock plunge won't affect star lawyer David Boies' compensation.... Boies will get 400,000 shares from SCO.
Ummm... if the stock plunges, doesn't that mean that those 400K shares are worth a lot less?? I'd say that affects Mr. Boies. His share price may be fixed, but he has to sell those shares on the open market to get anything from them. He basically has stock options in SCOX, those shares plummetting definitely hurts him.
But, overall the article is very good.. I just found those points odd.
The submission said "but I'm afraid that this looks too scary".. I read through the three page summary, and I didn't see anything "scary". There was really nothing with any teeth.
It was a proposal to form a committee that would define a bunch of recommended procedures, best practices, etc..
The negative view would be that it's just another bunch of bureaucratic bullshit that won't amount to anything.
The positive view is that they will produce a bunch of recommendations to help us avoid security flaws when creating applications.
But, I couldn't find anything scary. What am I missing?
I think there is, or at least will be, a market for tablet devices. But the options thus far have been crap. A desktop OS, like XP, on a tablet form factor, just doesn't work.
First, portability is important. No, it doesn't need to fit in a shirt pocket. But, a two inch thick brick is not ganna work either. Lose the CD drive, it's not useful enough to waste the space for. Get the thickness down to that of a Palm V, while being lightweight and durable, and you've got something.
Even the hard drive is questionable.. Put enought flash memory in it to hold the OS and Apps. Include a could SD slots for expansion/removable media. Of course, Wifi and bluetooth are needed, along with a USB 2.0 port or two.
Can distcc model be used for other apps?
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Optimizing distcc
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Is distcc integrated into the compiler components, or is it another layer below gcc, which divides up tasks?
If it's generalized, it would be cool to see it used for other CPU intensive tasks.. Video processing comes to mind. I would love to have a cluster bring down the times needed to:
- Convert MiniDV home video to MPEG2 DVD's. There are professional tools to do this.. A hobbyist tool that could do clustering would be excellent. - Convert HDTV captures to MPEG2 for DVD archival. 1080i video processing involves some heavy number crunching.. downconverting a program for DVD archival takes hours of processing. Throw a few fast CPU's at it, and it could be done in real time.. This would make a nice back-end app for an HDTV PVR. You could take a 9GB HD program, and bring it down to 2GB.. making your PVR storage space last a lot longer.
I use Google constantly.. This works great for the huge amount of information available on the Internet.
Then, when I need to find some personal data.. something lost in the dark recesses of my hard drive, I realize just how much easier it is to find public data than personal data.
I need a personal google search engine that will run on my linux server, and index all my garbage, including:
- My gigabytes of mailbox files - Doc's from work, Word, PowerPoint, Excel. - Text files, PDF docs, HTML files. - C code.. maybe?
Orrin is helping out the RIAA, making sure that the current power structure of the labels & Clear Channel can keep bringing us such fine music.
While his son, Brent, is fighting the legal battles for SCO, to make sure their "IP" is protected. This article discussing the case mentions Brent, as have several subsequent articles and court submission documents.
Public health and safety are also directly threatened by business models that tempt children toward piracy and pornography and then use them as "human shields" against law enforcement.
Umm... Yeah.. P2P users are human shields.. so, this is a risk to public health and safety. Thank you Senator Hatch for bringing this to our attention.
Or, if you've already got an access point, the USR 8200 firewall/vpn/router has firewire and USB 2.0 ports for network storage use.
This device is quite cool.. it's based on an Intel Network Processor with crypto acceleration. So, it can support line speed routing on the 100Mbps interfaces, and also high speec IPSec.
There are slightly larger, but similar in concept, planes available in hobby shops. Such as this Firebird II.
Based on my experience flying that, I'm skeptical about a few things: - Flying conditions: The Firebird is quite a bit larger than that plane, but any winds above 5-10MPH or so make it difficult to control. That little plane would get tossed around even easier. - Duration: One hour flight time would be excellent, but with something so tiny I'm not sure how they pack that much battery power. My firebird is lucy to get 10 minutes of flying time before a recharge. - Flying through windows? - That seems unlikely with one of these units. That level of accuracy is very difficult, and at the speeds you need to keep it flying, you would not have much time to maneuver this thing. Also, in the article they describe plotting a destination on a map - like a GPS controlled craft. How the hell would you fly through windows in that scenario.
Anyway, the hobby store variety of these things are a blast.. I highly recommend picking a couple up ( a couple because you're sure to crater it several times when first learning ).
Okay, let me nit-pick the example on your otherwise correct statement..
> even if we're streaming HD video to or from the downstairs entertainment center
I'm currently streaming HD video from my entertainment center to/from my 450MHz G4 Cube using 100Mb Ethernet and el-cheapo $30 switches.
Broadcast HD video is an approximately 20Mbps MPEG2 stream. So, it is not a burden on even modest hardware. Other HD formats, like cable, satellite, and HD-DVD might be a bit faster in the future - like maybe 40Mbps. But, it won't go much beyond that.
The other option would be streaming uncompressed HD video (what would that be.. 1920(x) * 1080(y) * 32 (bpp) * 60 (fps) = 2.9Gbps for 1080p ). That's excessive even in a 10Gbps network, and it's unnecessary because all forms of HD will be transferred in a compressed format.
The other factor is whether our benevolent entertainment overlords will ALLOW us to xfer HD content around the house.. The broadcast flag, and all the security/crypto standards used for cable, satellite, and HD-DVD will stifle many of these really obvious uses of future home networks.
It's more like Wayne's World with computers.. But, it's funny as hell.
The video editing is pretty kick-ass too. It's amazing what you can do with a couple cheap camcorders and a decent PC.
There were a couple segments that were not obvious how they created. They might have access to some more professional tools. One short clip was a fly-through of a file hierarchy - when telling how to strengthen Windows authentication. Another was an animation of the laptop, for the segment on destroying your data.
But, overall it was damn funny stuff. The intro was great..
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that would be perfect to mount on a plane like this. It's a small electric plane, with something they call an "X Port". They use this to drop parachutes or little plastic "bombs", and to do combat with little sonic transmitter/receivers. It should be pretty easy to adapt the trigger mechanism to turn the camera on.
I totally agree with this concept.. In the age of the "shrink wrap license", the groups defining the terms and conditions need to take more responsibility to clarify the terms than they currently do. Who has the time, or the legal knowledge, to wade through 10 pages of legalese before installing some random program? I simply cancel the install when confronted with those licenses, but obviously many people don't.
The same concept should apply to many areas:
- DVD, and other future format, movies. The box should clearly state whether it has advertisements, if they play automatically, and if they can be bypassed. I get really pissed when my DVD player forces me to watch ads when I put a movie in. If I had known about it before purchasing, I would not have bought the movie. This should also include the bullshit FBI warning, and other remote control lockout functions.
- Satellite TV providers - DirecTV keeps talking about "downres'ing" HDTV output if not through copy protected interfaces (crippling most current HDTV's). They are also talking about disabling the Tivo 30 second skip function. Who knows what else they'll do -- remote control lockout on commercials? They need to declare these sorts of things at purchase time, so I'm not stuck with a $1,000 HD-Tivo that won't skip commercials, and a one year committment to DirecTV programming.
- ISP's - what monitoring can/will they do? Can they place any limits on inbound connections, etc.
I'm sure there are many others.
Actually, it moved to PCI-X a couple years ago, at 64Bits and 133MHz. And, now it's going to PCI-Express which can offer even more bandwidth.
PCI-X is fine for servers, and PCI-Epress will be good for PC's in the future. But, the vast majority of PC's today still use 32bit 33MHz PCI. This is why removing a huge bandwidth hog from the PCI bus is a big advance.
The article mentioned a couple networking things, beside the firewall, which are very cool..
- Gig-E on the chipset. Most NIC's attach via the PCI bus. Even the integrated NIC's on the motherboard, they connect via the PCI bus. Since a standard 32bit/33MHz bus tops out at 1Gbps, you've got a bottleneck if you want to do anything else - like access the disk. They bypass that, and give it direct access to the system bus. Their performance results are impressive.
- The article claims that it supports "TCP and checksum offload". TCP offload to hardware has been talked about in high performance network services (iSCSI, SSL accelerators, SANs) for a couple years, but doing this in a PC is a big leap. It can have a huge benefit in CPU performance.
- Of course, the firewall in hardware is interesting. I'm curious to see how flexible it is, but to be able to do firewalling and TCP in hardware shows how much network intelligence they put into the chipset. A hardware firewall can have some benefits in DoS attacks. The system doesn't need to see the packets, service interrupts, etc.. the packets are dropped before they hit the OS (depending on how the firewall was implemented).
The big question for me is: How open will the spec's be for these developments? Even though they are done in hardware, they will rely heavily on software for setup and full functionality. Without open spec's we won't be able to take advantage of these things in Linux.
HD streams are ~ 20Mbps MPEG2. I save HDTV programs to a file server over a 100Mbps network. Two is no problem.. three or four streams could run into problems if other traffic hits the network.
Nothing that I've run into in multimedia streaming needs real high bandwidth. It's only the bulk transfers that will fill the pipe, like backing up a system over the network.
But, it's always good to have headroom. Gig-E is cheap enough now that it makes sense for the high-tech home.
That's what they tried to do, and it has resulted in them losing money for the last 12 quarters, as low end Linux servers moved up the food chain of what jobs Sun servers had always done.
"The high end" means a totally different thing today than it did 10 years ago. We used to buy $20K Sun machines to use around the network as everything from firewalls to mail servers to DNS servers. Now, all of those jobs are done by cheap Linux boxes.
The speed of cheap systems today is such that "high end" is only a small handful of corporate apps. This is simply not enough revenue to sustain a company the size of Sun.
In my own personal experience, the driver support on Linux has been better than on Windows.. The Linux drivers seem to be more generalized. I have two CompactFlash WiFi cards that I can use in my Zaurus or use in my laptop with a PCMCIA adapter. in Linux, I pop the card in, and the driver loads.. no problems. The dmesg output claims a different vendor than it actually says on the card, but it works fine.
Then, I put it in the laptop while booted into Win2K, and it goes through that damn hardware wizard. I try a half dozen drivers, from the card vendor, the chipset OEM, and other similar cards.. and none load. The cards are officially supported on WinCE devices, but there is no reason they shouldn't work on Win2K. I eventually get it working in one laptop, I'm still not sure how. But, I never did get it working in my Sony VAIO. Like most Windows things, I can't get any low level information about why it's failing.. it just doesn't work.
BUT.. Once a card is working in Windows, the software is generally pretty good. I can see available Access Points, configure them - and the software remembers WEP keys, etc.
On Linux, it's a highly manual process, entering WEP keys on the command line.. using seperate tools to scan for access points.. This part totally sucks in Linux today.
The Zaurus has some half decent GUI tools for setting keys & stuff like that, but it is nowhere near as good as WinXP, WinCE, or MacOS X. This is what's needed to have a usable wireless connection.
Sun's statements have been a bit more subtle than SCO's (that's not too tough), but they have certainly made no bones about throwing FUD towards Linux.
Check out this article from immediately after SCO announced the lawsuit. McNealy was immediately commenting on their licensing position, FUD about an audit committee, and another wonderful FUD inspiring comment: "We think open source is wonderful and good, but we also believe in copyright and the rule of law,".
Contrast that to the comments from HP: "HP is unaware of any intellectual property infringement within Linux." And, Larry Ellison was already connecting Microsoft to the effort..
Sun is now getting close to the world's largest vendor of a Linux distribution
I have seen this claim before, but I have not seen any statistics that support this. This article from a year ago has Sun at a tiny fraction of the Linux sales of IBM, Dell, or HP. This article reporting on Q4'03 sales has similat stats, with HP, IBM, and Dell way out in front of everyone else. The only articles I found that gave Sun a decent percentage were those reporting UNIX sales, where Sun's SPARC/Solaris systems were counted. I'm not sure what the China agreement will amount to, but Linux systems have been available from Walmart for a long time, and they have not sold well at all.
And, I agree with your assessment of Sun's sales over the internet bubble, and how it changed. But, I see that as the reason for their spewing FUD about Linux, not the reason they are embracing it.
Basically, Sun sees the trends, which have been building for years, and they see that they can try to embrace it or be steamrolled by it. But, like Sun's previous Linux efforts over the years, it's half assed. They say "buy our Linux desktop" in one breath, then spread anti-Linux FUD in the next.. I don't see that as a recipe for success.
There were a lot of articles on various news sites saying that Sun and Microsoft had buried the hatchet, in order to concentrate on their common enemy: Linux.
I looked through the articles, but did not see any Sun quotes that were clearly hostile towards Linux. Although, that has been true all along, in public Sun always said Linux was a good thing, but in private Sun employees I know were not exactly Linux fans.
Were there any Sun statements made against Linux? Or were the journalists just connecting the dots?
Then, there are the Sun involvement in SCO issues. From the beginning, Sun has only touted their fully licensed Unix, they have not ever offered any support of the Linux position. Many people think they are one of the main parties behind the SCO lawsuit.
Authentication against what, you twat?
Well, that's certainly an intelligent retort. I hesitate to reply to such, but what the hell.
Even without any foreign databases, this information can be used to establish a record of international travels. You don't necessarily need to authenticate them against their home country's records. There is value in authenticating a person as the same individual who enterred two months ago from Canada, using a different name.
Want to hide those trips to Libya? Well, just use your other passport when entering the U.S.. Want to obfuscate any travel records? Just use a new one each time you come & go. With fingerprint records, they can much more easily catch passport fraud.
And, what makes you think that foreign governments will not share fingerprint databases? Other countries have immigration related fingerprint databases:
France, EU, EU, Australia, considers a system similar to the U.S.,
The U.S. already has immigration controls tighly integrated with Canada, and it would not be surprising at all to see the EU, Australia, Japan, and others cooperating on this.
If somebody is going to commit something illegal, he'll probably enter the country illegally. Probably through the porous mexican border or the huge coastline that the US has.
Of course, this is not the way that ANY of the 9/11 terrorists entered the country. I believe most enterred legally. Some/most of them enterred with student visas.
I can imagine the border patrol guys catching a middle eastern man trying to cross from Mexico.. He's going straight to Guantanamo for some pretty intense interrogations.
That is, if he can be identified as Middle Eastern. I picture something like that Cheech Marin movie, was it "Born in East L.A."?, where he's teaching the Mexicans to speak enough English-like phrases to get by... "Whaaah Sappenin?"
The same could be said for any security measure that you come up with.
Nothing is 100% secure, but that doesn't mean it should not be implemented. We have always had a very open travel policies in the US, but that doesn't mean it's a human entitlement to travel here with absolute minimum security measures. Particularly at this time, when we are under foreign threat of a kind we're still very much struggling to deal with.
Assuming they have some decent procedures and technology, this doesn't need to be much more cumbersome than the current passport controls that have always been applied. Hopefully they have electronic fingerprint readers, and digital cameras that take the pics as part of the normal passport control procedure.
I'm a lot less disturbed by this "strong authentication" of foreign travellers to the U.S. than I am of all the policies applying to U.S. citizens with no oversight or public review. Those are the bad ones, when the gov't does things behind closed doors, without checks, balances, reviews and reports.. And, that's why I badly want Bush out of office in the upcoming election.
How many articles will it take before slashdot implements a simple mirror?? It could be automated as part of the publishing process.. just do a simple static mirroring of the image or page linked from a story. If a server becomes unavailable or otherwise in error, add the mirrored links.
Sure, some sites might love all the hits of a "slashdotting". But obviously there are many others that die under the load, or get disabled by bandwidth limiters, or various other problems.
If the site owners want to know the stats of how many hits they got, you could include stats for mirror hits.
This is not rocket science.. This problem occurs every day. In the current story, the server for the main article is barely responding, and the link for the image is responding with a "don't steal bandwidth" message.
There are several points in the Yahoo Finance article that are a bit off..
.... Boies will get 400,000 shares from SCO.
SCO is suing AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler in what could be the first of hundreds of suits against firms that don't pay SCO a $700-per-server license fee.
Those suits were regarding breach of previous license agreements when the companies moved off of SCO and onto Linux. They are not regarding a $699/server license.
Also, in an effort to more firmly establish Unix ownership rights, SCO is suing Novell, a big Linux vendor that sold Unix rights to SCO several years ago.
I don't remember the details of this one.. But, wasn't it a counter-suit, after Novell claimed SCO didn't have ownership rights? The article makes it sound like a proactive move be SCO to show how strong their claim was.
The stock plunge won't affect star lawyer David Boies' compensation
Ummm... if the stock plunges, doesn't that mean that those 400K shares are worth a lot less?? I'd say that affects Mr. Boies. His share price may be fixed, but he has to sell those shares on the open market to get anything from them. He basically has stock options in SCOX, those shares plummetting definitely hurts him.
But, overall the article is very good.. I just found those points odd.
The submission said "but I'm afraid that this looks too scary".. I read through the three page summary, and I didn't see anything "scary". There was really nothing with any teeth.
It was a proposal to form a committee that would define a bunch of recommended procedures, best practices, etc..
The negative view would be that it's just another bunch of bureaucratic bullshit that won't amount to anything.
The positive view is that they will produce a bunch of recommendations to help us avoid security flaws when creating applications.
But, I couldn't find anything scary. What am I missing?
I think there is, or at least will be, a market for tablet devices. But the options thus far have been crap. A desktop OS, like XP, on a tablet form factor, just doesn't work.
First, portability is important. No, it doesn't need to fit in a shirt pocket. But, a two inch thick brick is not ganna work either. Lose the CD drive, it's not useful enough to waste the space for. Get the thickness down to that of a Palm V, while being lightweight and durable, and you've got something.
Even the hard drive is questionable.. Put enought flash memory in it to hold the OS and Apps. Include a could SD slots for expansion/removable media. Of course, Wifi and bluetooth are needed, along with a USB 2.0 port or two.
Is distcc integrated into the compiler components, or is it another layer below gcc, which divides up tasks?
If it's generalized, it would be cool to see it used for other CPU intensive tasks.. Video processing comes to mind. I would love to have a cluster bring down the times needed to:
- Convert MiniDV home video to MPEG2 DVD's. There are professional tools to do this.. A hobbyist tool that could do clustering would be excellent.
- Convert HDTV captures to MPEG2 for DVD archival. 1080i video processing involves some heavy number crunching.. downconverting a program for DVD archival takes hours of processing. Throw a few fast CPU's at it, and it could be done in real time.. This would make a nice back-end app for an HDTV PVR. You could take a 9GB HD program, and bring it down to 2GB.. making your PVR storage space last a lot longer.
I use Google constantly.. This works great for the huge amount of information available on the Internet.
Then, when I need to find some personal data.. something lost in the dark recesses of my hard drive, I realize just how much easier it is to find public data than personal data.
I need a personal google search engine that will run on my linux server, and index all my garbage, including:
- My gigabytes of mailbox files
- Doc's from work, Word, PowerPoint, Excel.
- Text files, PDF docs, HTML files.
- C code.. maybe?
Orrin is helping out the RIAA, making sure that the current power structure of the labels & Clear Channel can keep bringing us such fine music.
While his son, Brent, is fighting the legal battles for SCO, to make sure their "IP" is protected. This article discussing the case mentions Brent, as have several subsequent articles and court submission documents.
Thanks guys!
Public health and safety are also directly threatened by business models that tempt children toward piracy and pornography and then use them as "human shields" against law enforcement.
Umm... Yeah.. P2P users are human shields.. so, this is a risk to public health and safety. Thank you Senator Hatch for bringing this to our attention.
Or, if you've already got an access point, the USR 8200 firewall/vpn/router has firewire and USB 2.0 ports for network storage use.
This device is quite cool.. it's based on an Intel Network Processor with crypto acceleration. So, it can support line speed routing on the 100Mbps interfaces, and also high speec IPSec.
There are slightly larger, but similar in concept, planes available in hobby shops. Such as this Firebird II.
Based on my experience flying that, I'm skeptical about a few things:
- Flying conditions: The Firebird is quite a bit larger than that plane, but any winds above 5-10MPH or so make it difficult to control. That little plane would get tossed around even easier.
- Duration: One hour flight time would be excellent, but with something so tiny I'm not sure how they pack that much battery power. My firebird is lucy to get 10 minutes of flying time before a recharge.
- Flying through windows? - That seems unlikely with one of these units. That level of accuracy is very difficult, and at the speeds you need to keep it flying, you would not have much time to maneuver this thing. Also, in the article they describe plotting a destination on a map - like a GPS controlled craft. How the hell would you fly through windows in that scenario.
Anyway, the hobby store variety of these things are a blast.. I highly recommend picking a couple up ( a couple because you're sure to crater it several times when first learning ).
But that's Australian.. What's the Australian Peso valued at these days?
Okay, let me nit-pick the example on your otherwise correct statement..
> even if we're streaming HD video to or from the downstairs entertainment center
I'm currently streaming HD video from my entertainment center to/from my 450MHz G4 Cube using 100Mb Ethernet and el-cheapo $30 switches.
Broadcast HD video is an approximately 20Mbps MPEG2 stream. So, it is not a burden on even modest hardware. Other HD formats, like cable, satellite, and HD-DVD might be a bit faster in the future - like maybe 40Mbps. But, it won't go much beyond that.
The other option would be streaming uncompressed HD video (what would that be.. 1920(x) * 1080(y) * 32 (bpp) * 60 (fps) = 2.9Gbps for 1080p ). That's excessive even in a 10Gbps network, and it's unnecessary because all forms of HD will be transferred in a compressed format.
The other factor is whether our benevolent entertainment overlords will ALLOW us to xfer HD content around the house.. The broadcast flag, and all the security/crypto standards used for cable, satellite, and HD-DVD will stifle many of these really obvious uses of future home networks.
It's more like Wayne's World with computers.. But, it's funny as hell.
The video editing is pretty kick-ass too. It's amazing what you can do with a couple cheap camcorders and a decent PC.
There were a couple segments that were not obvious how they created. They might have access to some more professional tools. One short clip was a fly-through of a file hierarchy - when telling how to strengthen Windows authentication. Another was an animation of the laptop, for the segment on destroying your data.
But, overall it was damn funny stuff. The intro was great..