That's an interesting collection of quotes about nuclear power and genetic engineering, but how does that relate to VIA reducing the amount of lead in motherboards?
Are you trying to say that we shouldn't care and dumping lead in our waste is OK?
so basically they, through extremely stupid decisions have significantly weakened the network and computer security here to the point that it is a gigantic joke.
yay for MIS directors that have no clue!
On the contrary, I do think they have a clue. Let me give you one:
They have shifted the blame for the computer security breaches that will occur anyway from themselves to the users. The security system is safe enough. The blame for any breach lies with the employers that don't follow the corporate standards.
It isn't about increasing security. It's about having your ass covered.:-(
If you really are just using those DVDs for "personal use", then you have absolutely zero need to make more than one backup
I don't agree. I'd like to have one rip of my purchased DVD to the hard disk of my portable laptop (it has an external DVD to reduce the weight during traveling), and another low-quality rip to the flash on my pocket PC. And maybe yet another rip to the HD of my home cinema media jukebox so I don't have to fool around with plastic disks when browsing my purchased films.
And, so fuck the DMCA/DRM, I believe that this is fair use of the material that I purchased. I'm not giving those copies away.
Please explain how pocket, portable computing would have been possible even ten years ago.
While Americans might think that Palm (or Apple/Newton) invented pocket computing, I suggest you take a look at Psion. This company made several successful pocket computers more than ten years ago. They released the Psio series 3 in 1991. In the later models they managed to include word-processors, spread-sheets, graphical software, games, web browsers, in a tiny ROM. The computers were truly innovative.
Sadly, they recently decided to get rid of their innovative technology (Symbian) and focus on WinCE devices instead. No more innovation from Psion. From the leading edge to a me-too M$ slave.:-(
A 100-ft diameter asteroid will make the closest (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters)
If "feet" or "earth diameters" are not your preferred units of measurement, what the article is trying to say is that the asteroid is about 90m in diameter and will pass the earth at a distance of about 42600 km.
A good way for CA to distance themselves from SCO is to publically donate money to the OSDL defence fund. Issue press releases that you do so and that you don't approve of the SCO intimidation tactic.
Re:Fun with Fingerprints: Chamelon Card
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 1
Be sure to wipe your Chamelon Card system from your own fingerprints before losing it. For best security, always wear gloves!
The site is not slashdotted. The text you copied is annotated with ESRs remarks in green. But the green tags were lost when you copied the text into this reply. So your text is complete gibberish! The original mail and ESRs comments are mixed up.
I am a scuba diver and I always wanted to have a small camera when i dive. The ones you can buy now are quite expensive and fragile. Most models use a underwater housing for a standard digital camera that is quite fragile. There is a rubber O-ring around the enclosure to keep the thing water tight. But sometimes you get some dirt on the rubber and the camera leaks when you are 30m below the surface, spoiling your camera.
So I have always dreamt of a hermetically closed camera. You could fill it with a liquid (oil?) to reduce the pressure stress on the enclosing. (This is what current scuba computers do.) By using a digital camera, you don't have to open the camera to access the film. The problem so far has been how to construct a zoom lens since these vary in volume. This kind of lens seems to fix that problem!
He says he that it merely was a "business decision" to buy a "don't-sue-me" license from SCO. From a purely business bottom-line risk-analysis calculation, he might have made a good decision.
But morally? He has made a business with more than 10,000 Linux servers. He got that software free thanks to the GPL. And now he finances the SCO litigation and becomes a poster child for both SCO and Microsoft. He pays millions of $$$ to fund the destruction the GPL and free software that he exploited to create his business.
So in my eyes, this move makes him a filthy scumbag. I think he should remember where he got his Linux source from originally. If he insists that paying $$$ to SCO is a wise business decision, I think he should pay a equally large sum to the SCO defence fund (whatever it is called). That would make him honourable again in my eyes.
They feel threatened by that Linux is free as in beer. So they talk about TCO. And burger meals. And how you can segment the market. The marketeers at MS tries all the tricks a marketeer knows about.
They totally miss "free as in freedom". The FOSS development model is commoditizing software faster than MS can develop itself out of. And gives the control back to the users. That's why Linux will win.
I guess it does. From the FAQ, it seems easy to install your favorite software. Since this is an announced feature I think that if there should be any problems, FlipStart support will happily help you;-)
How do I install my favorite software?
You can install software one of four ways: 1. Download the software from the Internet 2. Install the software from your home or office network 3. Attach FlipStart to the mini dock and install the software from the CD-ROM drive, and 4. Attach a USB drive.
But I have seen several discussions about how the Opteron is not REALLY a 64-bit architecture (while Itanium or Alpha supposedly are), and a lot of confusion amongst people around the fact that the chip only exhibits 40-something address bits.
So I tend to react against people that starts to talk about how many adress bits a particular chip has. It is not an interesting fact and it confuses most people.
It really isn't a FULL 64 bit implementation. In it's current incarnation it supports 40 bit physical and 48 bit virtual address spaces, as I recall. Even the Itanium has only a 44 bit address bus.
Please don't propagate this kind of FUD.
The ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) is fully 64 bits. The pointers really are 64 bits wide. The programs you compile now will be able to fully use a 64-bit wide virtual and physical (will we ever see one?) memory architecture.
This is similar to nearly all previous 64 bit architectures such as Alpha and Sparc (and maybe Power and HP-PA and MIPS?). Most of the actual machines used don't really have 64 bit physical adresses.
You have to distinguish between a ISA and a physical implementation of it. Most motherboards can't host more than a couple of GB memory anyway. But the ISA of the processor is still a true 64 bit architecture.
the real reason that 64-bit is better is that software should be able to move data around more quickly, typically twice as fast as 32-bit given a well-designed data bus external to the chip.
No.
You can move data around fast if you have a good memory architecture. A wide data bus to external memory. And a bus clocked at high speed. And larger caches.
You can have all of that with both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. The 64-bittness doesn't help here. If everything else is equal (in the memory architecture), I would expect the 64-bit processor to lose slightly since it has wider pointers. That puts more pressure on the caches and uses more memory bandwidth.
64 bit processors are good because they can easily adress more than 4GB virtual memory.
Re:Scooby Snacks: Think of the butter
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 5, Funny
You see, Linux is like a cake, with lots of ingredients contributed by different people. The SCO group claim that some of their butter was used to make the cake, perhaps to grease the baking tray the cake was baked on, perhaps it was ground into the flour mix by hand. Without the butter, the cake could not have been made. And it isn't possible to take the butter out of the cake now, the damage has been done. Q.E.D. the SCO company are perfectly justified in demanding recompense for their stolen butter.
But when IBM asks SCO exactly where in SySV this butter comes from, SCO answers that it it stupid to ask this question. And they can't tell exactly where the butter is from unless they get full access to all the fridges IBM have.
Their current theory seems to be that OK, there is no butter in SySV, but flour. IBM took flour from SySV, added its own special butter to bake an AIX cake. And IBM can't give the AIX cake to Linux because of the SCO flour. So it follows (they believe) that they can't use butter that have been used together with SCO flour in a Linux cake.
...new software developed at University of Southern California's Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory.
So now we only need some new software from the University of Northen California's Speech Synthesis and Invectification Laboratory that can elevate your support calls at the push of a button!
What's happening with Bluetooth happened with wireless networks. What happened with wireless networks happened with anonymous ftp servers. What happened with anon ftp servers happened with telnet access (you remember the "guest" login provided by most hosts ?). Every time a new technology is used there are some flaws with it. No big deal.
BIG DEAL!
You could expect that someone that designs a new communication protocol today builds on past experience. It's not like viruses, spam, malware and and crackers are something unknown. Instead, you should make the security requirements absolutely central in your new protocols. With the bluetooth technology becoming the most widespread wireless communications protocol (if you believe its proponents) not having security as a top priority is absofuckinglutely brainlessly idiotical.
Some great new product opportunities
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There are some great new product opportunities in the new RFID-enabled world.
RFID Super Scanner - Scan your surroundings and your stuff for RFID tags. Pinpoints the location exactly.
RFID Mega Zapper - A high energy directed radio energy impulse designed to fry the electronics in your RFID tags. Great fun for vandals in stores! Smack your enemy's wallet!
RFID Spoofer - A programmable device that returns the RFID code of your choice. Great for making a copy of you luxury car key! Or your neighbours. Have fun in stores after Zapping (TM) a RFID tag and replacing it with a Spoof(TM)!
RFID Data Miner - Build your own database of RFID tasks. Now you can do your own surveillance and track people. Also good in parking lots when you want to know what RFID code to feed into your spoofer for easy access to that nice car.
RFID Jammer - A fun little DOS device that emits radio frequences to blind RFID readers.
RFID Database Feeder - This device emits thousands of new random RFID codes every second. Great for filling the databases of those eager RFID code collectors.
I think most of these tools can be built easily and are not science fiction. If they can be built, they will.
Seriously, do you think RFID techniques makes the society more or less vulnerable for attacks?
I'll admit right away that I know quite little about Africa in general, but hey! This is Slashdot!;-)
For many reasons this is not true in large parts of Africa. Heavy rain washes away entire roads, not to mention cables. Theft is an issue.......These are the reasons Africa is not already cabled
True, there are some unique problems with using cable in Africa. You can't use it everywhere. But Nigeria is already using cable. Just think about if they used fiber instead of coax! And you don't usually lay fiber in the jungle. You lay it near paved roads (60,068 km (including 1,194 km of expressways) ) or railways (3,557 km). And where that is not enough, you can use microwave radio links (which Nigeria already does). It's just that I don't think WiMax is a good substitute for all that.
Since Nigeria is the ninth most populous country in the world with more than 130 million people, I think the benefit of a good well-dimensioned communication infrastructure would be great. Even if the country is poor.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting collection of quotes about nuclear power and genetic engineering, but how does that relate to VIA reducing the amount of lead in motherboards?
Are you trying to say that we shouldn't care and dumping lead in our waste is OK?
so basically they, through extremely stupid decisions have significantly weakened the network and computer security here to the point that it is a gigantic joke.
:-(
yay for MIS directors that have no clue!
On the contrary, I do think they have a clue. Let me give you one:
They have shifted the blame for the computer security breaches that will occur anyway from themselves to the users. The security system is safe enough. The blame for any breach lies with the employers that don't follow the corporate standards.
It isn't about increasing security. It's about having your ass covered.
If you really are just using those DVDs for "personal use", then you have absolutely zero need to make more than one backup
I don't agree. I'd like to have one rip of my purchased DVD to the hard disk of my portable laptop (it has an external DVD to reduce the weight during traveling), and another low-quality rip to the flash on my pocket PC. And maybe yet another rip to the HD of my home cinema media jukebox so I don't have to fool around with plastic disks when browsing my purchased films.
And, so fuck the DMCA/DRM, I believe that this is fair use of the material that I purchased. I'm not giving those copies away.
Please explain how pocket, portable computing would have been possible even ten years ago.
:-(
While Americans might think that Palm (or Apple/Newton) invented pocket computing, I suggest you take a look at Psion. This company made several successful pocket computers more than ten years ago. They released the Psio series 3 in 1991. In the later models they managed to include word-processors, spread-sheets, graphical software, games, web browsers, in a tiny ROM. The computers were truly innovative.
Sadly, they recently decided to get rid of their innovative technology (Symbian) and focus on WinCE devices instead. No more innovation from Psion. From the leading edge to a me-too M$ slave.
Suse 9.1 is awesome. I even got my grandma to switch to it without whining too much.
Awesome! Considering what the FA says:
SUSE LINUX 9.1 will be available at http://store.suse.com and from bookstores and software suppliers on May 6.
Ouch! meant 30m in diameter. *blush*
A 100-ft diameter asteroid will make the closest (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters)
If "feet" or "earth diameters" are not your preferred units of measurement, what the article is trying to say is that the asteroid is about 90m in diameter and will pass the earth at a distance of about 42600 km.
A good way for CA to distance themselves from SCO is to publically donate money to the OSDL defence fund. Issue press releases that you do so and that you don't approve of the SCO intimidation tactic.
Be sure to wipe your Chamelon Card system from your own fingerprints before losing it. For best security, always wear gloves!
Fingerprint "security" systems are sooo dumb!
Please!
The site is not slashdotted. The text you copied is annotated with ESRs remarks in green. But the green tags were lost when you copied the text into this reply. So your text is complete gibberish! The original mail and ESRs comments are mixed up.
Please mod down!
I am a scuba diver and I always wanted to have a small camera when i dive. The ones you can buy now are quite expensive and fragile. Most models use a underwater housing for a standard digital camera that is quite fragile. There is a rubber O-ring around the enclosure to keep the thing water tight. But sometimes you get some dirt on the rubber and the camera leaks when you are 30m below the surface, spoiling your camera.
So I have always dreamt of a hermetically closed camera. You could fill it with a liquid (oil?) to reduce the pressure stress on the enclosing. (This is what current scuba computers do.) By using a digital camera, you don't have to open the camera to access the film. The problem so far has been how to construct a zoom lens since these vary in volume. This kind of lens seems to fix that problem!
He says he that it merely was a "business decision" to buy a "don't-sue-me" license from SCO. From a purely business bottom-line risk-analysis calculation, he might have made a good decision.
But morally? He has made a business with more than 10,000 Linux servers. He got that software free thanks to the GPL. And now he finances the SCO litigation and becomes a poster child for both SCO and Microsoft. He pays millions of $$$ to fund the destruction the GPL and free software that he exploited to create his business.
So in my eyes, this move makes him a filthy scumbag. I think he should remember where he got his Linux source from originally. If he insists that paying $$$ to SCO is a wise business decision, I think he should pay a equally large sum to the SCO defence fund (whatever it is called). That would make him honourable again in my eyes.
They feel threatened by that Linux is free as in beer. So they talk about TCO. And burger meals. And how you can segment the market. The marketeers at MS tries all the tricks a marketeer knows about.
They totally miss "free as in freedom". The FOSS development model is commoditizing software faster than MS can develop itself out of. And gives the control back to the users. That's why Linux will win.
I guess it does. From the FAQ, it seems easy to install your favorite software. Since this is an announced feature I think that if there should be any problems, FlipStart support will happily help you ;-)
How do I install my favorite software?
You can install software one of four ways:
1. Download the software from the Internet
2. Install the software from your home or office network
3. Attach FlipStart to the mini dock and install the software from the CD-ROM drive, and
4. Attach a USB drive.
Sorry about the knee-jerk! ;-)
/Per
But I have seen several discussions about how the Opteron is not REALLY a 64-bit architecture (while Itanium or Alpha supposedly are), and a lot of confusion amongst people around the fact that the chip only exhibits 40-something address bits.
So I tend to react against people that starts to talk about how many adress bits a particular chip has. It is not an interesting fact and it confuses most people.
Regards
It really isn't a FULL 64 bit implementation. In it's current incarnation it supports 40 bit physical and 48 bit virtual address spaces, as I recall. Even the Itanium has only a 44 bit address bus.
Please don't propagate this kind of FUD.
The ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) is fully 64 bits. The pointers really are 64 bits wide. The programs you compile now will be able to fully use a 64-bit wide virtual and physical (will we ever see one?) memory architecture.
This is similar to nearly all previous 64 bit architectures such as Alpha and Sparc (and maybe Power and HP-PA and MIPS?). Most of the actual machines used don't really have 64 bit physical adresses.
You have to distinguish between a ISA and a physical implementation of it. Most motherboards can't host more than a couple of GB memory anyway. But the ISA of the processor is still a true 64 bit architecture.
the real reason that 64-bit is better is that software should be able to move data around more quickly, typically twice as fast as 32-bit given a well-designed data bus external to the chip.
No.
You can move data around fast if you have a good memory architecture. A wide data bus to external memory. And a bus clocked at high speed. And larger caches.
You can have all of that with both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. The 64-bittness doesn't help here. If everything else is equal (in the memory architecture), I would expect the 64-bit processor to lose slightly since it has wider pointers. That puts more pressure on the caches and uses more memory bandwidth.
64 bit processors are good because they can easily adress more than 4GB virtual memory.
You see, Linux is like a cake, with lots of ingredients contributed by different people. The SCO group claim that some of their butter was used to make the cake, perhaps to grease the baking tray the cake was baked on, perhaps it was ground into the flour mix by hand. Without the butter, the cake could not have been made. And it isn't possible to take the butter out of the cake now, the damage has been done. Q.E.D. the SCO company are perfectly justified in demanding recompense for their stolen butter.
But when IBM asks SCO exactly where in SySV this butter comes from, SCO answers that it it stupid to ask this question. And they can't tell exactly where the butter is from unless they get full access to all the fridges IBM have.
Their current theory seems to be that OK, there is no butter in SySV, but flour. IBM took flour from SySV, added its own special butter to bake an AIX cake. And IBM can't give the AIX cake to Linux because of the SCO flour. So it follows (they believe) that they can't use butter that have been used together with SCO flour in a Linux cake.
Sorry, but I think that SCO are nutcakes.
...new software developed at University of Southern California's Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory.
So now we only need some new software from the University of Northen California's Speech Synthesis and Invectification Laboratory that can elevate your support calls at the push of a button!
What's happening with Bluetooth happened with wireless networks.
What happened with wireless networks happened with anonymous ftp servers.
What happened with anon ftp servers happened with telnet access (you remember the "guest" login provided by most hosts ?).
Every time a new technology is used there are some flaws with it. No big deal.
BIG DEAL!
You could expect that someone that designs a new communication protocol today builds on past experience. It's not like viruses, spam, malware and and crackers are something unknown. Instead, you should make the security requirements absolutely central in your new protocols. With the bluetooth technology becoming the most widespread wireless communications protocol (if you believe its proponents) not having security as a top priority is absofuckinglutely brainlessly idiotical.
There are some great new product opportunities in the new RFID-enabled world.
RFID Super Scanner - Scan your surroundings and your stuff for RFID tags. Pinpoints the location exactly.
RFID Mega Zapper - A high energy directed radio energy impulse designed to fry the electronics in your RFID tags. Great fun for vandals in stores! Smack your enemy's wallet!
RFID Spoofer - A programmable device that returns the RFID code of your choice. Great for making a copy of you luxury car key! Or your neighbours. Have fun in stores after Zapping (TM) a RFID tag and replacing it with a Spoof(TM)!
RFID Data Miner - Build your own database of RFID tasks. Now you can do your own surveillance and track people. Also good in parking lots when you want to know what RFID code to feed into your spoofer for easy access to that nice car.
RFID Jammer - A fun little DOS device that emits radio frequences to blind RFID readers.
RFID Database Feeder - This device emits thousands of new random RFID codes every second. Great for filling the databases of those eager RFID code collectors.
I think most of these tools can be built easily and are not science fiction. If they can be built, they will.
Seriously, do you think RFID techniques makes the society more or less vulnerable for attacks?
Be sure to check out other stuff by the author: The Unix haters Handbook. Quite fun (but somewhat old)!
I run 2 PPro 200 boxen. They are up 24/7/365.
I see this idiom 24*7*365 from time to time and I always wonder: What happens after the seven years? Why seven?
This is another take on it. A bit old perhaps. ;-)
I'll admit right away that I know quite little about Africa in general, but hey! This is Slashdot! ;-)
... ...These are the reasons Africa is not already cabled
For many reasons this is not true in large parts of Africa. Heavy rain washes away entire roads, not to mention cables. Theft is an issue.
True, there are some unique problems with using cable in Africa. You can't use it everywhere. But Nigeria is already using cable. Just think about if they used fiber instead of coax! And you don't usually lay fiber in the jungle. You lay it near paved roads (60,068 km (including 1,194 km of expressways) ) or railways (3,557 km). And where that is not enough, you can use microwave radio links (which Nigeria already does). It's just that I don't think WiMax is a good substitute for all that.
Since Nigeria is the ninth most populous country in the world with more than 130 million people, I think the benefit of a good well-dimensioned communication infrastructure would be great. Even if the country is poor.