The white/black/grey lists are held in the EIR (Equipment Identity Register), which may or may not exist at all (it's optional, some providers don't have one) and is sometimes integrated within the HLR
This is an explanation (a bit dated, but still) of how to decode manufacturer code, country code, approval code etc from the IMEI: http://www.cellular.co.za/ieminumbers.htm
You must have GSM confused with CDMA2000. In GSM, as I understand it, carriers don't allow handsets on their network; they allow SIMs on their network.
Not quite. The phone has to be allowed as well, its maker and model are sort of embedded in its IMEI and there are blacklist (not just for stolen handsets, but also for models with critical radio flaws which would not work or even disrupt the network in their vicinity while operating).
Just randomize the keyboard every time, bam, smudges are now useless. Or use Apple's oleophobic display coating (http://iphoneindia.gyanin.com/2009/06/11/iphone-3gs-gets-oleophobic-coating-whats-this-oleophobic-coating/) assuming it's good enough to thwart this attack.
Why have people do this instead of developing a sufficiently accurate / sophisticated algorithm to spot these things in the first place. Not some simple code which monitors few obvious indicators and that anyone can work around - something which really correlates and analyzes all the available data. Plus, tools to make the human verification of the flagged accounts a lot faster and easier, so they can check thousands in a week.
Hell, anonymize data for 1000 past frauds and 49000 non-frauds, put the thing online and issue a public prize a la netflix challenge.
Would it be practical to just pump water in and out to achieve the desired buoyancy (add water as cargo and people are unloaded, lose water as cargo and people are loaded)?
For emergency landings at unprepared sites you just vent some helium / hydrogen
I didn't think an iPhone could hold a network connection long enough to post an entire comment.
Probably true in USA, you have to thank AT&T for that. I've used my 3G for 23 months now, on 3 operators, and any connection issues or dropped calls are something which I only read about on sites like/.
Yes the current iPhone4 antenna blues are so bad they'd be funny if they weren't kind of tragic, and Steve Jobs' response is... meh (seriously dude, how about "Sorry, we're working on a fix, meanwhile try holding it differently" ? )
But apart from that you really, really want to look at what causes connection problems - Apple is likely far less guilty than you think.
As for cost, I don't think wireless will ever be as fast or cheap as wired. There's only ONE radio spectrum and it has to be shared with everyone within the cell tower's zone. In contrast the wired internet has an infinite number of spectrums, limited only by the number of wires laid down.
Actually a huge number of initiatives, technologies and effort are thrown every day at the problem.
First of all, reclaiming chunks of spectrum previously allocated to other uses (analog TV being just one example. There are also chunks allocated for military usage and mostly unused since the '70's adnd stuff like this (note: talking mostly out of my ass here, since, living in Italy, I only have a vague idea, mostly from google news headlines and a few tech blogs, of what the USA spectrum allocation looks like and what is being done. I just know the most general details))
Then new, more robust and efficient data encodings are created, perfected and improved all the time (like the 64QAM in the latest HSDPA, not to mention next-gen standards like LTE
Finally, operators also split the network in ever-shrinking cells, esp. in crowded areas. The smaller the cell, the more often the same frequency can be reused, maybe just a few hundred meters away
All this without taking into account further improvements like MIMO which I'm not even qualified to assign a category other than "some kind of antenna black magic"
I do believe that wireless *will* eventually end up as fast and/or as cheap as wired given enough time and effort thrown at the problem. After all, running all those wires costs a lot, and the convenience of not being tethered (pun intended) transcends simple economic considerations.
(Yes, wires and fiber will *also* keep improving so at any given time they would technically be able to carry more data. Then again, our ISPs are not going to offer us anywhere near that capacity for a sane price:-) )
I guess I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.
This being Slashdot, I'd expect better of you:-) A 1km-tall stack of cards, which, according to Wikipedia are 0.178mm thick and can storage 64 bytes with the most efficient coding, results in a measly 342.89 megabytes (assuming 1 megabyte= 2^20, which is admittedly uncommon when quoting storage, esp when a vendor does it. They'd use the 10^6 version, so 359.55 megabytes (I'm aware of the kibibyte/mebibyte etc scale, but I don't like using it))
For a full terabyte you're looking at slighly over 3058km worth of stacked punch cards (or 2781.25 km if using the storage vendors' definition)
(Disappointingly, Wolfram Alpha was no help doing the above calculations)
Getting off this slowly dying rock, global warming and other man-made disasters aside, is not going to be a matter of survival for many thousands of years to come. During which we will hopefully acquire the technology to _actually_ pull it off, compared to the current situation in which, simply, we have nowhere near the skills to do such a thing.
so, in short: 1) We can't establish a permanent self sufficient extraterrestrial colony anywhere at the moment, and even an Apollo or Manhattan size project won't make this possible for quite a while. We really can't go anywhere at the moment, not even within the solar system, not even on the Moon. 2) We *will* eventually have the technology to do that in a not-so-near future. This Flagship Technology Demonstrations thing is a step in that direction.
Hi, my Karma's been at 50 for ages, long before this excellent thingy. The XKCD comic is perfectly in topic with the parent and I thought some people might have a good laugh seeing it.
Is this the XKCD hate season? Is it now trendy to bash people who post links to it? Cause I sure see that happening a lot lately.
There is a fixed minimum cost for building a hard drive. Spindle, motor, etc. It's about $70.
Not quite. A shop near my house (Rome, Italy) has 320GB drives on sale at 35.4 EUR (roughly $48) including 20% sales tax - and this is just the first I bothered to check, it's a street price, it includes their own profit, and it's a 3.5" unit. When 3.5" go obsolete once and for all, the 2.5" drives will stop costing a premium and actually become cheaper, most likely.
So - while there definitely is a price level where mechanical units stop making sense, it's nowhere near $70 and probably it will keep shrinking over time. Anyway - the entire point is moot. A sum of other factors (weight, power consumption, heat generation and tolerance, shock tolerance) will most likely push hard disks away in the lower capacity ranges.
It just looks into the NTFS Master File Table, so it always knows where stuff is (as long as the filesystem itself knows it), it has an absolutely tiny footprint and will load in a handful of seconds even on a multi-TB hd full of stuff. Its search speed is.... well, you have to see it in action to believe it. Oh and it understands regex.
Caveats: it doesn't look inside documents or inside zips (both of which are pluses for me, but ymmv), only works on local NTFS drives, if you set it to start automatically at boot on Vista/7 you'll have to click the usual pointless windows UAC window (there's a workaround for that though).
I have no relationship with Everything or any of its developers - I just happen to be in love with the program.
Analogy time: You can raise the tastiest pigs in the world, and cure the awesomest bacon ever known to man, but if I keep kosher, I can't eat it. See, Apple is rabbinical law, and the i~Device hardware is the bacon. Apple only wants you to eat Apple-cured bacon, which isn't made from pigs at all. It's made from hipsters in Apple's secret Cupertino rent-controlled hipster abbatoir. You can't have the regular bacon, which is unfettered hardware.
er, a little confusing:) Can we have a car analogy maybe? a bad analogy? PizzaAnalogyGuy can you help us?
My specific question is in the subject. They knowingly exacerbated a long-standing and extremely aggravating issue with a stupid decision whose consequences would have been foreseen by a 12year old. I'm aware of that blue post. Also, I'm on a server which was very recently upgraded (EU-Lightbringer) and where the queues are still very, very much an issue for everybody.
I've been righclicking->Report Spam since the day the feature came out. I see spam, I report. At that point I can't see that particular sender anymore until I relog. 25 minutes later I log a bank alt and I see the *same* spammer still happily spewing his crap in trade. I can't be the only one who reported him, every time. Repeated occurrences of this made me lose faith in that system and I stopped bothering, I installed SpamSentry and told him to never notify me of *anything*. Recently I had to disable it due to some LUA errors I traced back to it and which cause error windows to pop on my screen in the middle of a raid boss fight, so it's spam country again. At least give us a way to fight the little bastards(like the awesome magma totem -> logoff of over 1 year ago, or some more realistically effective reporting system. Or can I have my damn "ignore anything from characters under level X unless in party/raid/bg/guild/friendlist" option?).
The corpse spam is a non-issue to me. I actually find it creative and brilliant and, moreover, it's SILENT. It causes no trade channel shit.
Slashdot Mirror
The white/black/grey lists are held in the EIR (Equipment Identity Register), which may or may not exist at all (it's optional, some providers don't have one) and is sometimes integrated within the HLR
This is an explanation (a bit dated, but still) of how to decode manufacturer code, country code, approval code etc from the IMEI: http://www.cellular.co.za/ieminumbers.htm
More info (just relevant stuff which came up googling "imei hlr eir"):
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/wireless/TCH_WIR/612218-35166861
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/wireless/TCH_WIR/608687-35166861
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/HLR#EIR
Brief description of the (global?) IMEI DB at the gsmworld site: http://www.gsmworld.com/our-work/programmes-and-initiatives/fraud-and-security/imei_database.htm
Not quite. The phone has to be allowed as well, its maker and model are sort of embedded in its IMEI and there are blacklist (not just for stolen handsets, but also for models with critical radio flaws which would not work or even disrupt the network in their vicinity while operating).
Just randomize the keyboard every time, bam, smudges are now useless. Or use Apple's oleophobic display coating (http://iphoneindia.gyanin.com/2009/06/11/iphone-3gs-gets-oleophobic-coating-whats-this-oleophobic-coating/) assuming it's good enough to thwart this attack.
Nice, story published hours after it was revealed to be a hoax / stunt: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/elyse-porterfield/
Why have people do this instead of developing a sufficiently accurate / sophisticated algorithm to spot these things in the first place. Not some simple code which monitors few obvious indicators and that anyone can work around - something which really correlates and analyzes all the available data. Plus, tools to make the human verification of the flagged accounts a lot faster and easier, so they can check thousands in a week.
Hell, anonymize data for 1000 past frauds and 49000 non-frauds, put the thing online and issue a public prize a la netflix challenge.
The only thing I ever did for them was looking for Steve Fosset's plane / crash site. And that was quite obviously not for the money.
Would it be practical to just pump water in and out to achieve the desired buoyancy (add water as cargo and people are unloaded, lose water as cargo and people are loaded)?
For emergency landings at unprepared sites you just vent some helium / hydrogen
Well, considering I toyed with Torchlight in December 2009, we can at least agree a 2011 release is _not_ annual.
Probably true in USA, you have to thank AT&T for that. I've used my 3G for 23 months now, on 3 operators, and any connection issues or dropped calls are something which I only read about on sites like /.
Yes the current iPhone4 antenna blues are so bad they'd be funny if they weren't kind of tragic, and Steve Jobs' response is... meh (seriously dude, how about "Sorry, we're working on a fix, meanwhile try holding it differently" ? )
But apart from that you really, really want to look at what causes connection problems - Apple is likely far less guilty than you think.
powered by a supersonic combustion scramjet engine
guess what the S and C at the beginning of scramjet mean?
But then again, we routinely enter our PIN number into an ATM machine and Microsoft released an operating system based on NT technology....
As for cost, I don't think wireless will ever be as fast or cheap as wired. There's only ONE radio spectrum and it has to be shared with everyone within the cell tower's zone. In contrast the wired internet has an infinite number of spectrums, limited only by the number of wires laid down.
Actually a huge number of initiatives, technologies and effort are thrown every day at the problem.
First of all, reclaiming chunks of spectrum previously allocated to other uses (analog TV being just one example. There are also chunks allocated for military usage and mostly unused since the '70's adnd stuff like this (note: talking mostly out of my ass here, since, living in Italy, I only have a vague idea, mostly from google news headlines and a few tech blogs, of what the USA spectrum allocation looks like and what is being done. I just know the most general details))
Then new, more robust and efficient data encodings are created, perfected and improved all the time (like the 64QAM in the latest HSDPA, not to mention next-gen standards like LTE
Finally, operators also split the network in ever-shrinking cells, esp. in crowded areas. The smaller the cell, the more often the same frequency can be reused, maybe just a few hundred meters away
All this without taking into account further improvements like MIMO which I'm not even qualified to assign a category other than "some kind of antenna black magic"
I do believe that wireless *will* eventually end up as fast and/or as cheap as wired given enough time and effort thrown at the problem. After all, running all those wires costs a lot, and the convenience of not being tethered (pun intended) transcends simple economic considerations.
(Yes, wires and fiber will *also* keep improving so at any given time they would technically be able to carry more data. Then again, our ISPs are not going to offer us anywhere near that capacity for a sane price :-) )
I guess I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.
This being Slashdot, I'd expect better of you :-)
A 1km-tall stack of cards, which, according to Wikipedia are 0.178mm thick and can storage 64 bytes with the most efficient coding, results in a measly 342.89 megabytes (assuming 1 megabyte= 2^20, which is admittedly uncommon when quoting storage, esp when a vendor does it. They'd use the 10^6 version, so 359.55 megabytes (I'm aware of the kibibyte/mebibyte etc scale, but I don't like using it))
For a full terabyte you're looking at slighly over 3058km worth of stacked punch cards (or 2781.25 km if using the storage vendors' definition)
(Disappointingly, Wolfram Alpha was no help doing the above calculations)
Getting off this slowly dying rock, global warming and other man-made disasters aside, is not going to be a matter of survival for many thousands of years to come. During which we will hopefully acquire the technology to _actually_ pull it off, compared to the current situation in which, simply, we have nowhere near the skills to do such a thing.
so, in short:
1) We can't establish a permanent self sufficient extraterrestrial colony anywhere at the moment, and even an Apollo or Manhattan size project won't make this possible for quite a while. We really can't go anywhere at the moment, not even within the solar system, not even on the Moon.
2) We *will* eventually have the technology to do that in a not-so-near future. This Flagship Technology Demonstrations thing is a step in that direction.
Hi, my Karma's been at 50 for ages, long before this excellent thingy. The XKCD comic is perfectly in topic with the parent and I thought some people might have a good laugh seeing it.
Is this the XKCD hate season? Is it now trendy to bash people who post links to it? Cause I sure see that happening a lot lately.
It's a pity they never made any sequels to that movie.
It was really fantastic.
Obligatory XKCD reference
There is a fixed minimum cost for building a hard drive. Spindle, motor, etc. It's about $70.
Not quite. A shop near my house (Rome, Italy) has 320GB drives on sale at 35.4 EUR (roughly $48) including 20% sales tax - and this is just the first I bothered to check, it's a street price, it includes their own profit, and it's a 3.5" unit. When 3.5" go obsolete once and for all, the 2.5" drives will stop costing a premium and actually become cheaper, most likely.
So - while there definitely is a price level where mechanical units stop making sense, it's nowhere near $70 and probably it will keep shrinking over time.
Anyway - the entire point is moot. A sum of other factors (weight, power consumption, heat generation and tolerance, shock tolerance) will most likely push hard disks away in the lower capacity ranges.
tritium (with a half-life of around 5 days) is not.
Huh? 12.33 years is more like it.
Your point about it being scarce and bloody expensive holds, though.
1 word: Everything
It just looks into the NTFS Master File Table, so it always knows where stuff is (as long as the filesystem itself knows it), it has an absolutely tiny footprint and will load in a handful of seconds even on a multi-TB hd full of stuff.
Its search speed is.... well, you have to see it in action to believe it.
Oh and it understands regex.
Caveats: it doesn't look inside documents or inside zips (both of which are pluses for me, but ymmv), only works on local NTFS drives, if you set it to start automatically at boot on Vista/7 you'll have to click the usual pointless windows UAC window (there's a workaround for that though).
I have no relationship with Everything or any of its developers - I just happen to be in love with the program.
Analogy time: You can raise the tastiest pigs in the world, and cure the awesomest bacon ever known to man, but if I keep kosher, I can't eat it. See, Apple is rabbinical law, and the i~Device hardware is the bacon. Apple only wants you to eat Apple-cured bacon, which isn't made from pigs at all. It's made from hipsters in Apple's secret Cupertino rent-controlled hipster abbatoir. You can't have the regular bacon, which is unfettered hardware.
er, a little confusing :)
Can we have a car analogy maybe? a bad analogy? PizzaAnalogyGuy can you help us?
Did I miss a russian reversal joke somewhere? Chinese government suing over IP infringement?
Unfortunately, on the iPhone, Airplane mode == No GPS. At all.
Yes it's stupid.
They will be missed.
Just keep firing.
I had a high school english teacher who gave me a C+ on a book report
My high school english teacher gave me a C++ instead
Regards,
Bjarne Stroustrup
I'm a top-flight flint-knapper, you insensitive clod!
My specific question is in the subject. They knowingly exacerbated a long-standing and extremely aggravating issue with a stupid decision whose consequences would have been foreseen by a 12year old.
I'm aware of that blue post. Also, I'm on a server which was very recently upgraded (EU-Lightbringer) and where the queues are still very, very much an issue for everybody.
I've been righclicking->Report Spam since the day the feature came out. I see spam, I report. At that point I can't see that particular sender anymore until I relog. 25 minutes later I log a bank alt and I see the *same* spammer still happily spewing his crap in trade. I can't be the only one who reported him, every time. Repeated occurrences of this made me lose faith in that system and I stopped bothering, I installed SpamSentry and told him to never notify me of *anything*. Recently I had to disable it due to some LUA errors I traced back to it and which cause error windows to pop on my screen in the middle of a raid boss fight, so it's spam country again. At least give us a way to fight the little bastards(like the awesome magma totem -> logoff of over 1 year ago, or some more realistically effective reporting system. Or can I have my damn "ignore anything from characters under level X unless in party/raid/bg/guild/friendlist" option?).
The corpse spam is a non-issue to me. I actually find it creative and brilliant and, moreover, it's SILENT. It causes no trade channel shit.