I suspected from the very beginning that it was a Phising scam, but it took me quite a while to figure out how it was done.
They sent me an html email with a link that looked like it was going to my bank but actually went to an ip address in taiwan. The webpage they loaded created a popup window asking for login information and then used meta-refresh to load https://www.mybank.co.uk./
Their login popup was presented in a look and feel that was completely consistent with my bank, and behind it was my real banks homepage, complete with lock icon and real certificate. The popup itself had no address bar or status bar, so you couldn't see that it wasn't a secured page.
I was very impressed by the whole scam, especially since the original email even looked like an official one (in the usual style of my bank). Obviously I shouldn't have clicked the link in the html email, but apart from that and some viewing of html source, i'd never have picked up on it.
I certainly expect lay-people would have been duped.
Sun bought and open sourced both StarOffice and Netbeans, they've open sourced Solaris and the UltraSPARC processor core.
I'm sure there are plenty other projects, but Sun have donated what must amount to many millions of dollars of code to the community.
Sure they use other open source projects (in line with their licenses) and while they presumably aren't throwing money at Theo it seems unfair to brand them as anti-opensource when they've done a lot of good.
The grandparents is completely right, the amount of work a proc can do is, in absolute, the number of transistor it has times the number of times per second you can get them to do something.
In a way that's true, but most cpu's are nowhere near the bound of what you can get from the transistor count. The general purpose nature of them makes that true.
If you've ever used a hardware definition language like verilog, it becomes apparent that you can design silicon that can do FAR more per clock cycle than most CPUs. As a novice I was able to get a 100Mhz FPGA doing computations faster than I would have been able to get from an 800Mhz P3.
Now the challenge of course is getting a general purpose CPU to have that sort of efficiency which is not trivial. Azul seem to have the right general idea, they'll make a chip optimized to particular tasks and try to get a little closer to the ideal.
Java configuration and classpaths really aren't all that complicated once you get the hang of them.
On the flipside, I've never found native stuff to be all that easy. Sure if you are running Linux x86 then most stuff just compiles out of the box, but try compiling oss stuff on windows, or perhaps trying to get an oss library to run on an embedded platform - it can be a royal pain in the ass. My experience suggests that third party libraries are a pain in C unless you work with them at source level - try getting static output from gcc to be accepted by visual studio's linker.
Once you get your head round Java it just seems to work. I've developed web applications on a windows laptop and deployed them on a 32-way solaris box. I've developed swing apps on linux and ran them on mac. I've created mobile applications on solaris and deployed them on my cellphone.
Plus Java development seems to run faster, although i do a lot more java than I do C so i'm undoubtedly better at it.
That's a fair observation but i think that this sort of system would be benificial in the majority of cases and detrimental in a few.
As it is now, if 10 people call in a fire across the street at the same time as you so inconveniently choose to suffer cardiac arrest, then your call will likely be on hold for a minute or so (given my limited experience of this sort of situation).
However right now, you'll be equally disadvantaged if you are somewhere else in the city.
If we could geographically deprioritize calls then you might find yourself in the same situation with the fire across the street, but you'll be much better off if the fire is elsewhere, since you could jump in front of fire callers 2 through 9.
I'm absolutely not suggesting that 911 calls not be answered, and in an ideal world they'd all be answered by real humans on the first ring. But if that isn't realistic then we have to pick and choose the order when high call volume occurs.
I've called 911 in the US exactly once, and i was put on hold for about 2 minutes and then transferred to a non-local 911 department who didn't really know where i was or what i was reporting.
This was in what appeared to be a really serious accident. A full size van literally flew across a 6 lane intersection because the driver didn't notice his lane had ended. This was in the afternoon rush hour and it seems like a miracle that no-one was hit.
However i suspect about 50 vehicals saw the accident and i'm sure some decent percentage of them dialled 911 immediately. I'm not sure how many 911 operators are standing by, but i doubt it's enough to cope with the influx of calls in that situation. As a result, people with perhaps more legitimate emergencies would struggle to get through.
Maybe once the 911 locator stuff gets off the ground, the system could automatically deprioritize calls coming from the same location as those already being answered.
It depends on the situation. I was able to get the UK IR to refund the taxes i paid in the UK while working and living in the US and in turn paid much less to the US government.
I actually expected to be caught in the reverse situation since i met the standards for being a permanant colorado resident and a permanant uk resident at the same time.
The notion is that insurance can replace your house, it can replace your hard drive but it won't do anything about those pictures of your nephew from last xmas.
The initial bandwidth required to get a large quantity of data online is quite high, but the incremental cost is probably not.
Largely i'd want to back up my documents and my digital photos, and while i probably have about 15 gigs right now, i dont produce more than a couple of hundred megabytes a week. For $3 or $4/month i'd take that over pissing around with my own backups (or probably in addition to).
I'm of the belief that hard drives can be built into an excellent backup system. So long as you expect that they'll all fail and design around that then you can do fairly well.
I'm not really sure about the fire-safe issue. I know my old univerirsty (Edinburgh) had a catastrophic fire a few yaers ago and they pulled the backup tapes from the firesafe the following day and they were back up and running in no time.
The other problem with tape is that you need discipline. You need to actually go in each day/week and make a backup and do something with the tape. I'd prefer something that didn't require my interaction.
What sort of tape system would make good sense for a home user?
Well sure, hard drives are cheap why not just keep two of them.
But then what if your house burns down. You'd better make another set of your backup drives so that you can have one array live and one array off-site.
This seems like an amazingly good price for managed storage, if it's as reliable as amazon claim then there's certainly some data that i'll put on it.
You should really use some sort of redundant arrangement to make sure that a failure of your backup device wont result in data loss.
You then need to either offsite the drives or keep them in a firesafe, in which case you probably need two sets of them so that you can keep one live and the other somewhere safe.
And of course the amazon solution leaves your data accessiblwe from anywhere.
I wonder how long it'll take to build a backup solution that encrypts your data locally with a private key before sending it off to amazon. That way they wouldn't be able to look through it, and at 15c/month/gig it'd be pretty affordable for home backups
I think this is for phones with built in WiFi, so it does appear to cut out the telcos. Of course even getting the telcos to sell a phone with WiFi might be tricky.
I realise that wine in general is not cross-architecture because it runs the application on the native processor, but seeing as how google have the source code, will they be able to make it run on PPC and Sparc?
I don't expect it will actually deter determined pirates - nothing much will.
However it'd be a whole let less intrusive than DRM and would let normal law abiding users go about their business without having to make sure that all their hardware is completely compatible.
MP3's such a universally accepted format that i'd be able to purchase music online and be able to use it wherever i want - be it in the gym, on my ipod, on the tivo, and mac/pc/linux.
Watermarked MP3s would be a way that the music industry could say "look, we almost trust you!"
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm yeah the ultrasparc hdl has that pesky Gnu Public License.
l
http://opensparc-t1.sunsource.net/download_hw.htm
Well that's absolutely true, but virtually every non-technical person I know uses a mailer that opens html by default.
I knew one girl who was an english major who did read her mail in pine, but that's about it.
I suspected from the very beginning that it was a Phising scam, but it took me quite a while to figure out how it was done.
They sent me an html email with a link that looked like it was going to my bank but actually went to an ip address in taiwan. The webpage they loaded created a popup window asking for login information and then used meta-refresh to load https://www.mybank.co.uk./
Their login popup was presented in a look and feel that was completely consistent with my bank, and behind it was my real banks homepage, complete with lock icon and real certificate. The popup itself had no address bar or status bar, so you couldn't see that it wasn't a secured page.
I was very impressed by the whole scam, especially since the original email even looked like an official one (in the usual style of my bank). Obviously I shouldn't have clicked the link in the html email, but apart from that and some viewing of html source, i'd never have picked up on it.
I certainly expect lay-people would have been duped.
Sun bought and open sourced both StarOffice and Netbeans, they've open sourced Solaris and the UltraSPARC processor core.
I'm sure there are plenty other projects, but Sun have donated what must amount to many millions of dollars of code to the community.
Sure they use other open source projects (in line with their licenses) and while they presumably aren't throwing money at Theo it seems unfair to brand them as anti-opensource when they've done a lot of good.
The grandparents is completely right, the amount of work a proc can do is, in absolute, the number of transistor it has times the number of times per second you can get them to do something.
In a way that's true, but most cpu's are nowhere near the bound of what you can get from the transistor count. The general purpose nature of them makes that true.
If you've ever used a hardware definition language like verilog, it becomes apparent that you can design silicon that can do FAR more per clock cycle than most CPUs. As a novice I was able to get a 100Mhz FPGA doing computations faster than I would have been able to get from an 800Mhz P3.
Now the challenge of course is getting a general purpose CPU to have that sort of efficiency which is not trivial. Azul seem to have the right general idea, they'll make a chip optimized to particular tasks and try to get a little closer to the ideal.
Java configuration and classpaths really aren't all that complicated once you get the hang of them.
On the flipside, I've never found native stuff to be all that easy. Sure if you are running Linux x86 then most stuff just compiles out of the box, but try compiling oss stuff on windows, or perhaps trying to get an oss library to run on an embedded platform - it can be a royal pain in the ass. My experience suggests that third party libraries are a pain in C unless you work with them at source level - try getting static output from gcc to be accepted by visual studio's linker.
Once you get your head round Java it just seems to work. I've developed web applications on a windows laptop and deployed them on a 32-way solaris box. I've developed swing apps on linux and ran them on mac. I've created mobile applications on solaris and deployed them on my cellphone.
Plus Java development seems to run faster, although i do a lot more java than I do C so i'm undoubtedly better at it.
That's a fair observation but i think that this sort of system would be benificial in the majority of cases and detrimental in a few.
As it is now, if 10 people call in a fire across the street at the same time as you so inconveniently choose to suffer cardiac arrest, then your call will likely be on hold for a minute or so (given my limited experience of this sort of situation).
However right now, you'll be equally disadvantaged if you are somewhere else in the city.
If we could geographically deprioritize calls then you might find yourself in the same situation with the fire across the street, but you'll be much better off if the fire is elsewhere, since you could jump in front of fire callers 2 through 9.
I'm absolutely not suggesting that 911 calls not be answered, and in an ideal world they'd all be answered by real humans on the first ring. But if that isn't realistic then we have to pick and choose the order when high call volume occurs.
I've called 911 in the US exactly once, and i was put on hold for about 2 minutes and then transferred to a non-local 911 department who didn't really know where i was or what i was reporting.
This was in what appeared to be a really serious accident. A full size van literally flew across a 6 lane intersection because the driver didn't notice his lane had ended. This was in the afternoon rush hour and it seems like a miracle that no-one was hit.
However i suspect about 50 vehicals saw the accident and i'm sure some decent percentage of them dialled 911 immediately. I'm not sure how many 911 operators are standing by, but i doubt it's enough to cope with the influx of calls in that situation. As a result, people with perhaps more legitimate emergencies would struggle to get through.
Maybe once the 911 locator stuff gets off the ground, the system could automatically deprioritize calls coming from the same location as those already being answered.
It depends on the situation. I was able to get the UK IR to refund the taxes i paid in the UK while working and living in the US and in turn paid much less to the US government.
I actually expected to be caught in the reverse situation since i met the standards for being a permanant colorado resident and a permanant uk resident at the same time.
Given that i'd really only backup content that i create, then it's bounded by how fast i can create it.
Surely when we kick off it'd be a little expensive, but on a month to month basis i doubt i'd upload much more than a gigabyte.
The notion is that insurance can replace your house, it can replace your hard drive but it won't do anything about those pictures of your nephew from last xmas.
The initial bandwidth required to get a large quantity of data online is quite high, but the incremental cost is probably not.
Largely i'd want to back up my documents and my digital photos, and while i probably have about 15 gigs right now, i dont produce more than a couple of hundred megabytes a week. For $3 or $4/month i'd take that over pissing around with my own backups (or probably in addition to).
I'm of the belief that hard drives can be built into an excellent backup system. So long as you expect that they'll all fail and design around that then you can do fairly well.
I'm not really sure about the fire-safe issue. I know my old univerirsty (Edinburgh) had a catastrophic fire a few yaers ago and they pulled the backup tapes from the firesafe the following day and they were back up and running in no time.
The other problem with tape is that you need discipline. You need to actually go in each day/week and make a backup and do something with the tape. I'd prefer something that didn't require my interaction.
What sort of tape system would make good sense for a home user?
But what if that hard drive fails.
Well sure, hard drives are cheap why not just keep two of them.
But then what if your house burns down. You'd better make another set of your backup drives so that you can have one array live and one array off-site.
This seems like an amazingly good price for managed storage, if it's as reliable as amazon claim then there's certainly some data that i'll put on it.
But hard disks present their own challenges.
You should really use some sort of redundant arrangement to make sure that a failure of your backup device wont result in data loss.
You then need to either offsite the drives or keep them in a firesafe, in which case you probably need two sets of them so that you can keep one live and the other somewhere safe.
And of course the amazon solution leaves your data accessiblwe from anywhere.
I wonder how long it'll take to build a backup solution that encrypts your data locally with a private key before sending it off to amazon. That way they wouldn't be able to look through it, and at 15c/month/gig it'd be pretty affordable for home backups
I run firefox on 1 windows machine, 1 mac, and 1 linux box (and i used to do solaris too).
I've probably downloaded firefox 4 or 5 times on each of those platforms, yet I only have three active installs.
Games like DOTT, Monkey Island and Sam and Max were so much fun, and I never felt that Doom came close to providing that level of enjoyment.
I realise that many people prefer FPS but are there really so few Sam and Max (resisting the opportunity to abbreviate it) fans out there?
http://www.emigrantdirect.com/?source=google
You should be easily able to get that rate in a 12 month cd also.
Consider you bought 100 cds, at an average of $15 each - that's $1500.
Now consider you put that $1500 in a savings account and collect 4% on it. You'll get back $60/year which is exactly what yahoo music costs.
So assuming prices/rates dont change, it costs the same to buy 100 cds outright or to lease unlimited music for the rest of your life.
My tastes change pretty frequently, so it's a better deal for me to lease my music. That may not be true for you.
I think this is for phones with built in WiFi, so it does appear to cut out the telcos. Of course even getting the telcos to sell a phone with WiFi might be tricky.
since the editurs are to busy doing important editorial stuff!
Like checking for dupes
I realise that wine in general is not cross-architecture because it runs the application on the native processor, but seeing as how google have the source code, will they be able to make it run on PPC and Sparc?
I don't expect it will actually deter determined pirates - nothing much will.
However it'd be a whole let less intrusive than DRM and would let normal law abiding users go about their business without having to make sure that all their hardware is completely compatible.
MP3's such a universally accepted format that i'd be able to purchase music online and be able to use it wherever i want - be it in the gym, on my ipod, on the tivo, and mac/pc/linux.
Watermarked MP3s would be a way that the music industry could say "look, we almost trust you!"