I prefer a world in which people read the fine article and don't pose black vs white questions. The Greek Data Protection Agency doesn't want to stop Google Street View from doing its thing in Greece; they merely temporarily suspended their operations and asked for some clarifications, most important being the precise security measures taken by Google to ensure that photographs taken by their vehicles will not be leaked before the processing for face blurring, wether they plan to keep or destroy the original (unblurred) images after that and what particlar steps they undertook to avoid photographing possibly sensitive locations (like military bases etc).
They also asked for an independent auditor to check those measures before they're allowed to continue.
Once they satisfy those reasonable demands (which are there to ensure that images with unblurred faces don't get leaked), they'll be allowed to go on.
If you think this requirements are unreasonable, I, and the Greek law apparently, disagrees.
A little googling would also tell you that Greece has problems with neighbouring country Turkey, despite both countries being NATO allies. The Greek Air Force is nearly at a state of war 24/7, frequently intercepting Turkish F-16s (often fully armed) and F-4s (mostly reconnaissance) which refuse to submit flight plans to the Greek FIR in violation of ICAO regulations. They sometimes even intrude into Greek air space, which would be an act of war for most other sovereign countries, however Greek authorities seem to try to be civil about it, even though there were fatal accidents during interception manoeuvres in the past (most recent was in 2006!)
Also keep in mind that spies would probably do anything to go unnoticed and that does not exclude acting like part of a group of tourists with their wives practicing a silly, but useful for military intelligence, hobby. The local police department isn't qualified to distinguish between stupid tourists and MI6 agents, that's up to the National Intelligence Agency to decide. I'm sure that if you were caught by the police in the UK while photographing and cataloguing planes on a military airbase you'd be arrested and handed over to MI5 for interrogation as well.
Heck, from what I gather you can get harassed by the police in the UK even for photographing train stations, never mind military facilities...
When abroad, it doesn't hurt to ask, just to be safe - I know I always do... a few years ago I was in Tunisia and asked the local police at the airport when I arrived and I was told that photographing ANY state building (they all fly the Tunisian flag so it's easy to say) could get me arrested for espionage. That includes schools! Stupid? Perhaps. Illegal? Definitely.
A Libretto 100CT in fact, with the widescreen 7.1" TFT display (800x480), Intel Pentium 166Mhz MMX overclocked to 233Mhz, 32MB RAM upgraded to 64MB (couldn't handle more) and a 2.1GB HD which I replaced with a 20GB one. I later added a 802.11b WiFi and made quite a good web surfing machine with FreeBSD + Netscape and Firefox later on...
I've been using it regularly until 2004 and then on and off until 2006 or so. It's resting in a box down at the basement now.
Having used a small machine like that is what made me immune to the netbook craze while everybody around me thinks they're so cool and useful and have been buying small cheap machines and finding out how particularly useless they are...
IMNSHO they're too small to be useful for most kinds of real work and to big to carry around or surf while, say in bed - I'm much better off now with a regular laptop that I can get real work done and an iPhone that I can surf the web casually wherever I may be.
You make it sound harder than it is... They did have to make that choice years ago when they were designing the iPhone 3G for worldwide distribution and they picked:
Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) for GPRS/EDGE
and
Tri-band UMTS/HSDPA (850/1900/2100)
it is possible that the next revision of the iPhone and any possible Wireless WAN enabled Macs will add support for LTE to that, but even if they stick to what the iPhone 3G supports, they've got most of the world market covered allready.
Apple has done it allready with the iPhone nearly 3 years ago!
My iPhone 3G prefers the available and configured WiFi connections at home and at work and falls back to 3G everywhere else.
I'm wondering why it took them so long to add this to their laptop range... it would be very useful to have connectivity everywhere.
In europe most 3G network operators have been oferring subsidised laptops (mostly 3G enabled netbooks from dell, hp etc) with 3G data contracts for over a year now.
Unfortunately said contracts usually come with low data caps (like 5 or 10GB) but the point of 3G is to complement WiFi access and not replace it -- meaning that they provide the reassurance that you will be connected anywhere, anytime, but you should plan to download gigs of stuff while on a WiFi network instead.
Thank you for letting me know I'm full of shit. Honestly I wasn't aware of that possibility.
Anyway, I'm talking about GSM, since that's all I know/care about, being Europe-based. On GSM, SMS fits 140 data bytes (160 7-bit characters) into a USSD packet atop a version of the SS7 protocol over the mobile network.
Messages originating from a cell phone are sent with the MAP mo-ForwardSM operation, a message that would NOT be sent if there was no SMS to deliver, so it is using signaling capacity and as such it can actually pre-empt calls on a standard GSM network (i.e., if there is too much SMS traffic in one location, calls will take longer to complete, decreasing revenue) and is generally a major capacity headache for operators.
Obviously the bandwidth between the serving msc and the sms gateway is not an issue...
One way around this is to send SMS over IP using SIGTRAN and an appropriate adaptation layer instead of the standard TDM based signalling, but I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this.
Easy, SMS uses up signalling bandwidth on the cell tower, which is a relatively scarce resource, and when the signalling bandwidth is congested, no calls can take place, thus the company looses money/customers.
This is my favorite game of all time... I've been playing it on and off for the past 10 years. Sure, I tried similar games, but I still prefer good old MOO.
Synaptic's software for their touchpads is awesome. I don't need any mouse buttons at all with it, never mind a middle one.
First of all, for scrolling, you define the width and height, of the vertical and horizontal scrolling area respectively, to your taste, and you simply lift your finger, put it at the right side and move it up and down to scroll the document, or at the bottom and move it left and right for horizontal scrolling.
Tapping is a mouse click, as you allready now, but lifting your finger and tapping at one of the four courners can be a seperate action.
My favorite combination is top left browse back, top right browse forward, botom left refresh bottom right middle click (so I can open a page in a new tab).
Configure it correctly for your usage, and you'll soon get to the point that you're more efficient with the touchpad than with the mouse. A year or so ago I wouldn't even think that I'd be saying this, since I've only ever owened IBM and Toshiba laptops with a trackpoint, and I hated the touchpads, but I'm enligthened now.
I still haven't found a help system more usable than that of VMS... Assuming really basic knowledge (it was typical back in the day for people to be familiar with basic DOS file managment concepts and commands) you could easily find ways to do what you wanted to do.
We have a libretto 50CT at work. Installing FreeBSD to it is no different than my Libretto 100CT. Boot the two floppies, install over ftp if you have a pcmcia ethernet adapter, or just like you did with debian, you can put the files (about 50Megs for the base system, much like debian) on a fat partition and install from there. Although there must have been a way to get the files there in the first place, so you either allready have a pcmcia ethernet or a usb cdrom, in which case, i don't see why you'd want to do it from a windows partition!
Since it is quite slow though, last time I swaped the disk to a new laptop and installed there.
I'm not surprised that Linux seemed faster than OpenBSD. Anything would be faster than OpenBSD - It just plain sucks performance wise. I don't care what they claim about security, the fact is that it is painfully slow. It is especially lacking in the VM and UFS department in my experience, and it is nearly useless for many tasks because of this compared to, say NetBSD or FreeBSD.
It is not an uncommon mistake for Linux users to think that all BSDs are alike, more or less like Linux distributions are, but believe me, they are definitely NOT. There are very important differences among them. Try FreeBSD on i386 and you will be pleasantly surprised - I seriously doubt that you'll find it slower than Linux for the desktop too - I've been using it for over 5 years now not only at production servers but on my home & work workstations too, in addition to my tiny old and slow laptop (Libretto CT100). I've tried Linux distros a few times but never made the switch because they seem bloated, slow and confusing in comparison. I say, give it a shot, try to live with it for a month or two, chances are you'll never go back too, and if you will, well, you'd have learned a few things in the process, which never hurts.
A quick glance at the linked article would be sufficient to figure out they're not LCD. I'd be very surprised if they made LCD displays that could be rolled like that!
Like you said, Sun *hardware* did this. Apparently XFree86 supports this, at least with Matrox hardware. Here's what mga(4) says:
"[the driver] provides support for the following framebuffer depths: 8, 15, 16, 24, and an 8+24 overlay mode.
All visual types are supported for depth 8, and both TrueColor and DirectColor visuals are supported for the other depths except 8+24 mode which supports PseudoColor, GrayScale and TrueColor."
I never needed something like that but I knew this because a colleague requested a G450 for a PC workstation he was to use alongside his trusty Octane, just for that feature... not that the G450 isn't an otherwise excellent choice for a workstation of course. I have one at home and it is the best thing I bought for my PC after that SMP motherboard...
Re:This is why I haven't upgraded in years
on
XP, Phone Home
·
· Score: 1
The ntp functionality in XP seems completely brain dead to me. It seems to me that there is no way to change the time sync interval from the default 'once per week'.
What's with that?
I used a small free of charge available app called AboutTime whenever I wanted time synchronization, perhaps you should give it a try.
Bah. Chances are they (the ISP) are using jail() to have *really* seperated virtual servers, and you obviously have to put some static binaries so that stuff like ftp works etc.
Of course, they could have a seperate document root, but that wouldn't add to security anyway, and it would confuse many morons^Wcustomers who'd prefer to just dump everything on their / and get done with it.
This is a "bug" in the webpage... someone forgot to update it apparently, since the 4.4BSD license has been updated years ago. Check the addendum here:
ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.L ic ense.Change
The removal of the advertising clause retroactively applies to any BSD licensed sources that Berkeley has the copyright of, including 4.4BSDLite which FreeBSD is based on, and since the FreeBSD additions are covered with the FreeBSD license which is the BSD license without the advertising clause and references to the "Berkeley Regents" replaced with "FreeBSD Project", this effectively means that there is absolutely no advertising clause issue.
There are of course some non-free (in the BSD sense, I am not trolling!) sources, most of them GPL, however if one is looking to release modified FreeBSD binaries without providing the source, he can simply rm -rf/usr/src/gnu or make sure he doesn't ship any of them, which for a lot of applications is not necessary anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
No thanks. I'll take youtube, flickr and wikipedia instead, and I was in the BBS scene back in the late '80s early '90s.
They forgot to mention that, jumped straight to PowerVR series 2.
The PCX2 based cards (from Matrox and Videologic) where quirky little cards that deserved a mention...
I prefer a world in which people read the fine article and don't pose black vs white questions. The Greek Data Protection Agency doesn't want to stop Google Street View from doing its thing in Greece; they merely temporarily suspended their operations and asked for some clarifications, most important being the precise security measures taken by Google to ensure that photographs taken by their vehicles will not be leaked before the processing for face blurring, wether they plan to keep or destroy the original (unblurred) images after that and what particlar steps they undertook to avoid photographing possibly sensitive locations (like military bases etc).
They also asked for an independent auditor to check those measures before they're allowed to continue.
Once they satisfy those reasonable demands (which are there to ensure that images with unblurred faces don't get leaked), they'll be allowed to go on.
If you think this requirements are unreasonable, I, and the Greek law apparently, disagrees.
A little googling would also tell you that Greece has problems with neighbouring country Turkey, despite both countries being NATO allies. The Greek Air Force is nearly at a state of war 24/7, frequently intercepting Turkish F-16s (often fully armed) and F-4s (mostly reconnaissance) which refuse to submit flight plans to the Greek FIR in violation of ICAO regulations. They sometimes even intrude into Greek air space, which would be an act of war for most other sovereign countries, however Greek authorities seem to try to be civil about it, even though there were fatal accidents during interception manoeuvres in the past (most recent was in 2006!)
Also keep in mind that spies would probably do anything to go unnoticed and that does not exclude acting like part of a group of tourists with their wives practicing a silly, but useful for military intelligence, hobby. The local police department isn't qualified to distinguish between stupid tourists and MI6 agents, that's up to the National Intelligence Agency to decide. I'm sure that if you were caught by the police in the UK while photographing and cataloguing planes on a military airbase you'd be arrested and handed over to MI5 for interrogation as well.
Heck, from what I gather you can get harassed by the police in the UK even for photographing train stations, never mind military facilities...
When abroad, it doesn't hurt to ask, just to be safe - I know I always do... a few years ago I was in Tunisia and asked the local police at the airport when I arrived and I was told that photographing ANY state building (they all fly the Tunisian flag so it's easy to say) could get me arrested for espionage. That includes schools! Stupid? Perhaps. Illegal? Definitely.
A Libretto 100CT in fact, with the widescreen 7.1" TFT display (800x480), Intel Pentium 166Mhz MMX overclocked to 233Mhz, 32MB RAM upgraded to 64MB (couldn't handle more) and a 2.1GB HD which I replaced with a 20GB one. I later added a 802.11b WiFi and made quite a good web surfing machine with FreeBSD + Netscape and Firefox later on...
I've been using it regularly until 2004 and then on and off until 2006 or so. It's resting in a box down at the basement now.
Having used a small machine like that is what made me immune to the netbook craze while everybody around me thinks they're so cool and useful and have been buying small cheap machines and finding out how particularly useless they are...
IMNSHO they're too small to be useful for most kinds of real work and to big to carry around or surf while, say in bed - I'm much better off now with a regular laptop that I can get real work done and an iPhone that I can surf the web casually wherever I may be.
You make it sound harder than it is... They did have to make that choice years ago when they were designing the iPhone 3G for worldwide distribution and they picked:
Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) for GPRS/EDGE
and
Tri-band UMTS/HSDPA (850/1900/2100)
it is possible that the next revision of the iPhone and any possible Wireless WAN enabled Macs will add support for LTE to that, but even if they stick to what the iPhone 3G supports, they've got most of the world market covered allready.
Apple has done it allready with the iPhone nearly 3 years ago!
My iPhone 3G prefers the available and configured WiFi connections at home and at work and falls back to 3G everywhere else.
I'm wondering why it took them so long to add this to their laptop range... it would be very useful to have connectivity everywhere.
In europe most 3G network operators have been oferring subsidised laptops (mostly 3G enabled netbooks from dell, hp etc) with 3G data contracts for over a year now.
Unfortunately said contracts usually come with low data caps (like 5 or 10GB) but the point of 3G is to complement WiFi access and not replace it -- meaning that they provide the reassurance that you will be connected anywhere, anytime, but you should plan to download gigs of stuff while on a WiFi network instead.
Launching an ICMP attack might get an ICBM response...
Time to update the RFCs.
Thank you for letting me know I'm full of shit. Honestly I wasn't aware of that possibility.
Anyway, I'm talking about GSM, since that's all I know/care about, being Europe-based. On GSM, SMS fits 140 data bytes (160 7-bit characters) into a USSD packet atop a version of the SS7 protocol over the mobile network.
Messages originating from a cell phone are sent with the MAP mo-ForwardSM operation, a message that would NOT be sent if there was no SMS to deliver, so it is using signaling capacity and as such it can actually pre-empt calls on a standard GSM network (i.e., if there is too much SMS traffic in one location, calls will take longer to complete, decreasing revenue) and is generally a major capacity headache for operators.
Obviously the bandwidth between the serving msc and the sms gateway is not an issue...
One way around this is to send SMS over IP using SIGTRAN and an appropriate adaptation layer instead of the standard TDM based signalling, but I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this.
Easy, SMS uses up signalling bandwidth on the cell tower, which is a relatively scarce resource, and when the signalling bandwidth is congested, no calls can take place, thus the company looses money/customers.
640 stream processors ought to be enough for anybody.
This is my favorite game of all time... I've been playing it on and off for the past 10 years. Sure, I tried similar games, but I still prefer good old MOO.
Synaptic's software for their touchpads is awesome. I don't need any mouse buttons at all with it, never mind a middle one.
First of all, for scrolling, you define the width and height, of the vertical and horizontal scrolling area respectively, to your taste, and you simply lift your finger, put it at the right side and move it up and down to scroll the document, or at the bottom and move it left and right for horizontal scrolling.
Tapping is a mouse click, as you allready now, but lifting your finger and tapping at one of the four courners can be a seperate action.
My favorite combination is top left browse back, top right browse forward, botom left refresh bottom right middle click (so I can open a page in a new tab).
Configure it correctly for your usage, and you'll soon get to the point that you're more efficient with the touchpad than with the mouse. A year or so ago I wouldn't even think that I'd be saying this, since I've only ever owened IBM and Toshiba laptops with a trackpoint, and I hated the touchpads, but I'm enligthened now.
I still haven't found a help system more usable than that of VMS... Assuming really basic knowledge (it was typical back in the day for people to be familiar with basic DOS file managment concepts and commands) you could easily find ways to do what you wanted to do.
You cannot write to ROM. ROM is Read Only Memory. It is manufactured with fixed contents, much like CD-ROMs. You're confusing ROM, PROM, EPROM etc.
Read this for more info!
</pedantic>
We have a libretto 50CT at work. Installing FreeBSD to it is no different than my Libretto 100CT. Boot the two floppies, install over ftp if you have a pcmcia ethernet adapter, or just like you did with debian, you can put the files (about 50Megs for the base system, much like debian) on a fat partition and install from there. Although there must have been a way to get the files there in the first place, so you either allready have a pcmcia ethernet or a usb cdrom, in which case, i don't see why you'd want to do it from a windows partition!
Since it is quite slow though, last time I swaped the disk to a new laptop and installed there.
I'm not surprised that Linux seemed faster than OpenBSD. Anything would be faster than OpenBSD - It just plain sucks performance wise. I don't care what they claim about security, the fact is that it is painfully slow. It is especially lacking in the VM and UFS department in my experience, and it is nearly useless for many tasks because of this compared to, say NetBSD or FreeBSD.
It is not an uncommon mistake for Linux users to think that all BSDs are alike, more or less like Linux distributions are, but believe me, they are definitely NOT. There are very important differences among them. Try FreeBSD on i386 and you will be pleasantly surprised - I seriously doubt that you'll find it slower than Linux for the desktop too - I've been using it for over 5 years now not only at production servers but on my home & work workstations too, in addition to my tiny old and slow laptop (Libretto CT100). I've tried Linux distros a few times but never made the switch because they seem bloated, slow and confusing in comparison. I say, give it a shot, try to live with it for a month or two, chances are you'll never go back too, and if you will, well, you'd have learned a few things in the process, which never hurts.
The XFree86 license is equivalent to the ammended 3-clause BSD license...
Let's see the GNU components of FreeBSD:
- binutils, gcc and gperf
- patch, diff, diff3, sdiff
- man, groff, texinfo
- cvs, rcs
- bc, dc, cpio, sort, tar, gzip
- grep, libregex,
The hardest bit to replace would be the C compiler, but not many consider getting rid of these GNU tools necessary...
A quick glance at the linked article would be sufficient to figure out they're not LCD. I'd be very surprised if they made LCD displays that could be rolled like that!
Like you said, Sun *hardware* did this. Apparently XFree86 supports this, at least with Matrox hardware. Here's what mga(4) says:
"[the driver] provides support for the following framebuffer depths: 8, 15, 16, 24, and an 8+24 overlay mode.
All visual types are supported for depth 8, and both TrueColor and DirectColor visuals are supported for the other depths except 8+24 mode which supports PseudoColor, GrayScale and TrueColor."
I never needed something like that but I knew this because a colleague requested a G450 for a PC workstation he was to use alongside his trusty Octane, just for that feature... not that the G450 isn't an otherwise excellent choice for a workstation of course. I have one at home and it is the best thing I bought for my PC after that SMP motherboard...
The ntp functionality in XP seems completely brain dead to me. It seems to me that there is no way to change the time sync interval from the default 'once per week'.
What's with that?
I used a small free of charge available app called AboutTime whenever I wanted time synchronization, perhaps you should give it a try.
I didn't check the NT box, it still resolved to the BSD box when I checked, so your scenario is probably what happened.
Anyway, I knew it was a FreeBSD binary - judging by the ident output btw it seemed like it was from sources after 4.1-RELEASE but before 4.4-RELEASE.
I was just pointing out that this wasn't really a serious configuration issue, although it certainly is not elegant.
Bah. Chances are they (the ISP) are using jail() to have *really* seperated virtual servers, and you obviously have to put some static binaries so that stuff like ftp works etc.
Of course, they could have a seperate document root, but that wouldn't add to security anyway, and it would confuse many morons^Wcustomers who'd prefer to just dump everything on their / and get done with it.
This is a "bug" in the webpage... someone forgot to update it apparently, since the 4.4BSD license has been updated years ago. Check the addendum here:
L ic ense.Change
/usr/src/gnu or make sure he doesn't ship any of them, which for a lot of applications is not necessary anyway.
ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.
The removal of the advertising clause retroactively applies to any BSD licensed sources that Berkeley has the copyright of, including 4.4BSDLite which FreeBSD is based on, and since the FreeBSD additions are covered with the FreeBSD license which is the BSD license without the advertising clause and references to the "Berkeley Regents" replaced with "FreeBSD Project", this effectively means that there is absolutely no advertising clause issue.
There are of course some non-free (in the BSD sense, I am not trolling!) sources, most of them GPL, however if one is looking to release modified FreeBSD binaries without providing the source, he can simply rm -rf
Those with good memory will remember that Microsoft was promising something like this about 10 years ago. Don't hold your breath.