I ultimately believe in Kurtzweil's future... but unfortunately I'm afraid it isn't all that near. Yes, technology is assymptotically accellerating, but as of right now we've overshot the carrying capacity of our planet, the flexibility of our economic and financial systems, and the power of our political structures to make the right decissions.
The next step, just a bit short of the singularity, is collapse. The collapse has already begun, btw... it's not years away, it's in progress and becoming more and more obvious month by month. Wars, hurricanes, oil prices market crashes... it hasn't quite sunk in yet, but it's starting to, and panic will set in shortly.
If and when we recover, eventually we'll make it Kurtzweil's future. But how deep and wide the collapse is going to be we can't know right now.
Ok you're saying: a) it's too expensive to go after the criminals, and b) it's the victims own fault.
What kind of defeatist BS is that?
But what's more, this law addresses precisely those points... for a) it creates an economic incentive for someone to at least/try/ to go after the perps, and for b) it lets the intended victims (even if they were never actually stupid enough to fall for it) fight back.
Ok you're saying: a) it's too expensive to go after the criminals, and b) it's the victims own fault.
What kind of defeatist BS is that?
But what's more, this law addresses precisely those points... for a) it creates an economic incentive for someone to at least/try/ to go after the perps, and for b) it lets the intended victims (even if they were never actually stupid enough to fall for it) fight back.
You miss the point. It's fraud of course, but LE doesn't have the resources to go after it. This is a bounty law... it creates an incentive for private parties to do LE's work for them. I think that's a damn good idea, but we'll have to see if it works.
Tracing a phisher back can be pretty hard and you pretty much have to do illegal things yourself in the process since their webservers usually run on some hacked machine and the only way to trace them fast enough will be to hack into that machine yourself. But a half million bucks is enough money to make it worth it and some of the phishers may decide that it's more profitable to go after their own kind.
Of course collecting may be the most difficult part... you can sue someone who is located in Russia in a California court, but if you win how are you going to collect?
Btw., as I understand US law only it's probably enough if any one of the recipient, the email account that got the phishing email, the fake web server, or the company that was being spoofed are located in California for you to sue in a Cal court.
Anyway, it'll be really interesting to see what happens with this. I've long thought that the best way to combat all sorts of scum on the internet is to create a sufficient economic incentive for bounty hunters since LE is never going to put their resources in the right places. This is the first anit-internet-scum law that makes the (potential) reward high enough, so if it works expect to see more.
As the globalization advocates never tire of telling everyone, offshoring may cost some jobs in the US (or other corporate home country) in the short run, but in the long run creates more jobs because the cost reductions create more profits, hence more investment, hence more new economic activity, hence more jobs.
Similarly with Open Source... developing OS software may cost some jobs in the short run, but in the long run it will lower costs for all other industries which can now use cheaper, better software and will have lower costs in developing new software because of increased re-usability. Hence more profits for everyone (except MS, but in the big picture of economics even MS is only a drop in the bucket), hence more investment, hence more new economic activity, hence more jobs.
There is just not enough detail in your post to give any more specific advise. But a quick way to isolate one segment of the network from another would be with a pair of wireless bridges (i.e. 802.11 "access points"). Maybe outside your budget, but they can be had for $100 each. Just make sure they have a bridging mode.
The lack of formal revision control and source code management led many to suggest the use of a product called BitKeeper.
I grant that sometimes you have to simplify history to avoid digressing in an article, but this is a bit too inaccurate to let stand.
Bitkeeper wasn't suggested by anyone; it didn't have to be. It was developed from the ground up to Linus' requirements. Larry McVoy had a discussion about source control with Linus years ago, in which Linus said "none of the products are good enough" and Larry said, "ok, I'm going to write one that is". Apparently he had this on his mind anyway, and so he started Bitmover Co. As bitkeeper became a usable product Larry continued to take Linus feedback and improve it until it was good enough for Linus to use... at which point Linus started using it.
This is still a simplification of course, but it's closer... and as you can see, there were no third party suggestions involved.
What costs? You mean the $60/month for a DSL the DSL line that's shared by via 802.11 here? That's petty cash, not a cost.
It's so cheap it doesn't make sense to charge for it. The administrative overhead of charging will eat most of the income because not many people will pay. But a lot of people would use it and be appreciative if it's free generating far more valuable goodwill.
Democracy isn't about blindly trusting your officials. We don't give our President absolute power because we "trust" him. We have separation of powers, checks and balances, etc., built into the system because the founders of this republic knew that power corrupts and we have to continuously struggle to keep ourselves honest.
Anyone who says that mistrusting any part of the system, and/especially/ the part that deals with elections, is a "disservice" to Democracy is a complete nitwit who doesn't understand the first thing about Democracy. This person is an election official? Fire them immediately!!!
There have been stories in the news about how MS is developing their own search engine to compete with Google, including quotes from MS people about how their "algorithmic search" was so much better than the competition. It would appear that MS top execs think that this project has failed, else why would they be looking to buy a search engine?
Are printer and network card drivers going to become, over time, a commodity with Win32 drivers one day the 'de-facto standard' run via wrappers?
First off as we all know from painful experience, a lot of windows drivers quite buggy. Since we have zero chance at fixing them (closed source), the only time anyone will use them is if they absolutely have to. Even with Windows drivers available and sort-of-linux-compatible, most people will continue to buy hardware that's directly supported under Linux... they will rightly expect it to work better.
Secondly, this is becoming less and less of an issue. More and more add-on hardware is built on standardized models of hardware interaction, such as the USB driver classes, and thus works with the generic drivers in the Linux kernel. Of the remainder, more and more hardware companies are seeing the value in cooperating with Open Source and opening up their specs. The probability that a random piece of peripheral hardware you bought at CompUSA or some such will work with Linux out of the box has been steadily increasing and is now quite high.
The non-delegation records in those zones are crap records to various registrars's websites, just like the ones Verisign was publishing. Why would anyone care? Filter them all, I say.
TThe solution is trivial. Require workers to shrink-wrap or vacuum wrap their phone when they come in... provide a vacuum or shrink wrap machine (available for a couple of hundred bucks) for the purpose. The phone will work fine inside the shrink-wrap, and you just rip it off before leaving the hospital. Voila.:j
No! Secrecy and democracy are incompatible. We have far too much secrecy already (especially under the Bush administration). We need more open government---closed government leads to the deterioration of democracy.:j
When was life found in Lake Vostok?
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 1
> life has been found on Earth in environments > similar to these icy oceans at Antarctica's Lake > Vostok.
I have not seen any news that life was found in Lake Vostok... if there was such news, could someone post a link please?:j
Ok, so the naive user buys a Lindows PC and finds that some of software just won't install on it or if it does unexpected things might happen.
Compare that to the naive user buying a Windows PC... they will find that some software just won't install on it, or if it does, unexpected things happen.;-)
True, in the second scenario the probability of things working reasonably well is higher. But the reality is that in the naive user's perception computers today are a hit-or-miss thing... it might work or it might not, whether it does might as well be black magic.
We all know that you can't meassure Linux's success by revenue.
But I would add that you can't meassure Microsoft's success by revenue... their obscenely high revenue only shows how good they are at robbery, nothing about what value they provide.:j
"C Traps and Pitfalls" by Andrew Koenig is a little Gem that goes on the shelf next to K&R. Together those two books are both the perfect introduction for the C beginner and a timeless reference for the expert.
Although this is not exactly "deep" CS literature, I offer it as an answer to "computer books for smart people" because I've never understood why there are so many books on C... why would anyone want to learn C from a book other than K&R? It's a fine tutorial/and/ reference from the ultimate authority; the language's authors. If you need K&R dumbed down, you probably shouldn't be programming in C. But C has its traps and pitfalls, so if you learn/only/ from K&R there are a lot of mistakes you'll have to make yourself before you really master the language... Koenig's book will help you get through that process/much/ faster.
Most of the other books on my shelf that I consider really outstanding have already been mentioned, but one that deserves to be seconded is Abelson and Sussman's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". This one MIT textbook is worth more than an entire 4-year CS education at most lesser institutions.
Here's another thing journalists (and a lot of other people) don't get: more RAM is the best way to get more out of your computer! For their "specs of your PC in 2004" they list...
Desktop: 512MB RAM
Laptop: 256MB RAM
Huh? I have more than that in both today. My desktop has 1GB and my laptop 384MB.
On the other hand they see a 4-5GHz CPU in the desktop and a 2-3GHz CPU in the laptop. Who needs that? 1-2GHz is very fast... the main reason even todays 1GHz PCs often "feel slow" to their users is that they don't have enough RAM! I hear it all the time... "my PC is slow" (brand new PC with 1GHz CPU)... turns out they only have 128MB RAM and every time they switch between their Word processor and their browser half of the other gets paged out. Duh.
I doubt that the default laptop will go much beyond a 1GHz CPU in the next few years anyway... what we need much more now in laptops (other than RAM;-) is lower power consumption, less heat output, etc.
And I doubt desktops will go much beyond 2GHz soon... servers, sure, some high-end workstations, sure, but a typical home/office PC? Who needs the speed? With what we have today you can process a live video stream while silumtaneously playing Quake at 60fps (with help from dedicated video/3D hardware) which are some of the most computing resource intensive apps anyone has come up with yet.
While IANAL, I would be suprised if there was not ample precedent saying that by placing your original work in a public forum you are releasing it to the public domain.
Not the public domain (a concept which has very little legal meaning in the USA anymore), but you're probably granting an implicit license to redistribute without restrictions. As for "expires:" headers, these are not a contract as they've always had merely an "advisory" role in the actual code that runs Netnews.
As for people complaining about Google making money of their postings... well, Google doesn't, at least not directly. Note that there are no ads on Google Groups. Anyway, you could level the same complaint against web search engines in general... who are they to make money of my homepage?
This article is more like an advertisement for the things than a review... sure, it's a cute idea, but the guy starts the article out by claiming this would save you tons of money, and he keeps emphasizing that. Basically that's total BS.
First of all they sure are nicer than lose mini-hubs at the end-points, but I doubt they are cheaper... I'd be very surprised if 3Com sold these things for less than say $50 a piece and you can get a mini-hub for less than that. And if you want to get the full benefit of this thing you have to set up your wires for POE (power of ethernet) and that's non-trivial... if the other end of the wires goes into a big switch, where does the POE come from? You have to put something in between the switch and EACH wire to supply the power, unless you have a switch that supports POE natively (which you don't, but I'm sure 3Com will sell you for rather more money than most competing equipment). He hints that 3Com will sell you some equipment to add POE to existing infrastructure, but that'll be significant additional cost.
Secondly he outright lies when he says the following: "Normally, if you need four network ports in an area, you have to pull four cables. Cable installers are not stupid. It takes them the same amount of time to pull four ports as it does to pull one. The interesting part is that when the installation is billed to you, you are charged the same amout as if they had pulled all four cables separately, rather than all four at one time."
Now that's total BS. I've never seen an installer who didn't bill based on time and materials... so, yes, you have to pay for 4 cables, but the materials aren't the expensive part... the installer time is, and like he says himself it doesn't take more time to pull 4 than to pull 1.
So in short, yes it's a cool product that could be very useful when you want to expand the ports in an existing infrastructure without pulling new wire and you don't want lots of lose mini-hubs lying around... but you'll pay extra to do it nicely, you're not going to save money.
Slashdot Mirror
The next step, just a bit short of the singularity, is collapse. The collapse has already begun, btw... it's not years away, it's in progress and becoming more and more obvious month by month. Wars, hurricanes, oil prices market crashes... it hasn't quite sunk in yet, but it's starting to, and panic will set in shortly.
If and when we recover, eventually we'll make it Kurtzweil's future. But how deep and wide the collapse is going to be we can't know right now.
Ok you're saying: a) it's too expensive to go after the criminals, and b) it's the victims own fault.
What kind of defeatist BS is that?
But what's more, this law addresses precisely those points... for a) it creates an economic incentive for someone to at least
Seems like you should agree with those goals.
Ok you're saying: a) it's too expensive to go after the criminals, and b) it's the victims own fault.
What kind of defeatist BS is that?
But what's more, this law addresses precisely those points... for a) it creates an economic incentive for someone to at least
Seems like you should agree with those goals.
Will this start a new age of bounty hunters?
:j
Tracing a phisher back can be pretty hard and you pretty much have to do illegal things yourself in the process since their webservers usually run on some hacked machine and the only way to trace them fast enough will be to hack into that machine yourself. But a half million bucks is enough money to make it worth it and some of the phishers may decide that it's more profitable to go after their own kind.
Of course collecting may be the most difficult part... you can sue someone who is located in Russia in a California court, but if you win how are you going to collect?
Btw., as I understand US law only it's probably enough if any one of the recipient, the email account that got the phishing email, the fake web server, or the company that was being spoofed are located in California for you to sue in a Cal court.
Anyway, it'll be really interesting to see what happens with this. I've long thought that the best way to combat all sorts of scum on the internet is to create a sufficient economic incentive for bounty hunters since LE is never going to put their resources in the right places. This is the first anit-internet-scum law that makes the (potential) reward high enough, so if it works expect to see more.
And good hunting!
This is stale. They've already found the data again...
See here.
In any case it's not newsworthy.
Tongue only slightly in cheek:
Open Source is like offshoring of jobs:
As the globalization advocates never tire of telling everyone, offshoring may cost some jobs in the US (or other corporate home country) in the short run, but in the long run creates more jobs because the cost reductions create more profits, hence more investment, hence more new economic activity, hence more jobs.
Similarly with Open Source... developing OS software may cost some jobs in the short run, but in the long run it will lower costs for all other industries which can now use cheaper, better software and will have lower costs in developing new software because of increased re-usability. Hence more profits for everyone (except MS, but in the big picture of economics even MS is only a drop in the bucket), hence more investment, hence more new economic activity, hence more jobs.
There is just not enough detail in your post to give any more specific advise. But a quick way to isolate one segment of the network from another would be with a pair of wireless bridges (i.e. 802.11 "access points"). Maybe outside your budget, but they can be had for $100 each. Just make sure they have a bridging mode.
[the author] wrote:
I grant that sometimes you have to simplify history to avoid digressing in an article, but this is a bit too inaccurate to let stand.Bitkeeper wasn't suggested by anyone; it didn't have to be. It was developed from the ground up to Linus' requirements. Larry McVoy had a discussion about source control with Linus years ago, in which Linus said "none of the products are good enough" and Larry said, "ok, I'm going to write one that is". Apparently he had this on his mind anyway, and so he started Bitmover Co. As bitkeeper became a usable product Larry continued to take Linus feedback and improve it until it was good enough for Linus to use... at which point Linus started using it.
This is still a simplification of course, but it's closer... and as you can see, there were no third party suggestions involved.
What costs? You mean the $60/month for a DSL the DSL line that's shared by via 802.11 here? That's petty cash, not a cost.
It's so cheap it doesn't make sense to charge for it. The administrative overhead of charging will eat most of the income because not many people will pay. But a lot of people would use it and be appreciative if it's free generating far more valuable goodwill.
Democracy isn't about blindly trusting your officials. We don't give our President absolute power because we "trust" him. We have separation of powers, checks and balances, etc., built into the system because the founders of this republic knew that power corrupts and we have to continuously struggle to keep ourselves honest.
/especially/ the part that deals with elections, is a "disservice" to Democracy is a complete nitwit who doesn't understand the first thing about Democracy. This person is an election official? Fire them immediately!!!
Anyone who says that mistrusting any part of the system, and
There have been stories in the news about how MS is developing their own search engine to compete with Google, including quotes from MS people about how their "algorithmic search" was so much better than the competition. It would appear that MS top execs think that this project has failed, else why would they be looking to buy a search engine?
Secondly, this is becoming less and less of an issue. More and more add-on hardware is built on standardized models of hardware interaction, such as the USB driver classes, and thus works with the generic drivers in the Linux kernel. Of the remainder, more and more hardware companies are seeing the value in cooperating with Open Source and opening up their specs. The probability that a random piece of peripheral hardware you bought at CompUSA or some such will work with Linux out of the box has been steadily increasing and is now quite high.
In short, this is a non-issue.
The non-delegation records in those zones are crap records to various registrars's websites, just like the ones Verisign was publishing. Why would anyone care? Filter them all, I say.
TThe solution is trivial. Require workers to shrink-wrap or vacuum wrap their phone when they come in... provide a vacuum or shrink wrap machine (available for a couple of hundred bucks) for the purpose. The phone will work fine inside the shrink-wrap, and you just rip it off before leaving the hospital. Voila. :j
This does not appear to be true. :j
> should some of this information be classified?
:j
No! Secrecy and democracy are incompatible. We have far too much secrecy already (especially under the Bush administration). We need more open government---closed government leads to the deterioration of democracy.
> life has been found on Earth in environments
:j
> similar to these icy oceans at Antarctica's Lake
> Vostok.
I have not seen any news that life was found in Lake Vostok... if there was such news, could someone post a link please?
Ok, so the naive user buys a Lindows PC and finds that some of software just won't install on it or if it does unexpected things might happen.
;-)
Compare that to the naive user buying a Windows PC... they will find that some software just won't install on it, or if it does, unexpected things happen.
True, in the second scenario the probability of things working reasonably well is higher. But the reality is that in the naive user's perception computers today are a hit-or-miss thing... it might work or it might not, whether it does might as well be black magic.
We all know that you can't meassure Linux's success by revenue.
:j
But I would add that you can't meassure Microsoft's success by revenue... their obscenely high revenue only shows how good they are at robbery, nothing about what value they provide.
"C Traps and Pitfalls" by Andrew Koenig is a little Gem that goes on the shelf next to K&R. Together those two books are both the perfect introduction for the C beginner and a timeless reference for the expert.
/and/ reference from the ultimate authority; the language's authors. If you need K&R dumbed down, you probably shouldn't be programming in C. But C has its traps and pitfalls, so if you learn /only/ from K&R there are a lot of mistakes you'll have to make yourself before you really master the language... Koenig's book will help you get through that process /much/ faster.
Although this is not exactly "deep" CS literature, I offer it as an answer to "computer books for smart people" because I've never understood why there are so many books on C... why would anyone want to learn C from a book other than K&R? It's a fine tutorial
Most of the other books on my shelf that I consider really outstanding have already been mentioned, but one that deserves to be seconded is Abelson and Sussman's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". This one MIT textbook is worth more than an entire 4-year CS education at most lesser institutions.
He said in the article that he ran some of the "betas"... maybe some of what he saw is a result of leftover setting from older development versions.
Here's another thing journalists (and a lot of other people) don't get: more RAM is the best way to get more out of your computer! For their "specs of your PC in 2004" they list...
;-) is lower power consumption, less heat output, etc.
Desktop: 512MB RAM
Laptop: 256MB RAM
Huh? I have more than that in both today. My desktop has 1GB and my laptop 384MB.
On the other hand they see a 4-5GHz CPU in the desktop and a 2-3GHz CPU in the laptop. Who needs that? 1-2GHz is very fast... the main reason even todays 1GHz PCs often "feel slow" to their users is that they don't have enough RAM! I hear it all the time... "my PC is slow" (brand new PC with 1GHz CPU)... turns out they only have 128MB RAM and every time they switch between their Word processor and their browser half of the other gets paged out. Duh.
I doubt that the default laptop will go much beyond a 1GHz CPU in the next few years anyway... what we need much more now in laptops (other than RAM
And I doubt desktops will go much beyond 2GHz soon... servers, sure, some high-end workstations, sure, but a typical home/office PC? Who needs the speed? With what we have today you can process a live video stream while silumtaneously playing Quake at 60fps (with help from dedicated video/3D hardware) which are some of the most computing resource intensive apps anyone has come up with yet.
:j
Not the public domain (a concept which has very little legal meaning in the USA anymore), but you're probably granting an implicit license to redistribute without restrictions. As for "expires:" headers, these are not a contract as they've always had merely an "advisory" role in the actual code that runs Netnews.
As for people complaining about Google making money of their postings... well, Google doesn't, at least not directly. Note that there are no ads on Google Groups. Anyway, you could level the same complaint against web search engines in general... who are they to make money of my homepage?
This article is more like an advertisement for the things than a review... sure, it's a cute idea, but the guy starts the article out by claiming this would save you tons of money, and he keeps emphasizing that. Basically that's total BS.
First of all they sure are nicer than lose mini-hubs at the end-points, but I doubt they are cheaper... I'd be very surprised if 3Com sold these things for less than say $50 a piece and you can get a mini-hub for less than that. And if you want to get the full benefit of this thing you have to set up your wires for POE (power of ethernet) and that's non-trivial... if the other end of the wires goes into a big switch, where does the POE come from? You have to put something in between the switch and EACH wire to supply the power, unless you have a switch that supports POE natively (which you don't, but I'm sure 3Com will sell you for rather more money than most competing equipment). He hints that 3Com will sell you some equipment to add POE to existing infrastructure, but that'll be significant additional cost.
Secondly he outright lies when he says the following: "Normally, if you need four network ports in an area, you have to pull four cables. Cable installers are not stupid. It takes them the same amount of time to pull four ports as it does to pull one. The interesting part is that when the installation is billed to you, you are charged the same amout as if they had pulled all four cables separately, rather than all four at one time."
Now that's total BS. I've never seen an installer who didn't bill based on time and materials... so, yes, you have to pay for 4 cables, but the materials aren't the expensive part... the installer time is, and like he says himself it doesn't take more time to pull 4 than to pull 1.
So in short, yes it's a cool product that could be very useful when you want to expand the ports in an existing infrastructure without pulling new wire and you don't want lots of lose mini-hubs lying around... but you'll pay extra to do it nicely, you're not going to save money.
:j