As long as you've got harddrive space, most older distro's work fine on hardware down to 100mhz.
Oh, the youth of today!
When I first started tinkering with Linux, it was on a 386-dx at 25MHz and with a whole 4 MB of memory. It was still working when the burglars had it. And that box was 5 years old when Linus started getting tee'd off with Minix.
From TFA : Companies may also choose to keep a low profile about projects to avoid a time-consuming sales visit from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft, according to Aaron Seigo, who works as a consultant with projects deploying the desktop environment KDE.
"I've seen it happen first hand," says Seigo. "Microsoft sees it as a lost sale, so you'll get a phone call and they'll try to send in one of their regional sales people. He'll ask 'why are you running Linux? How many machines are you running?' and so on. From a sales intelligence perspective it makes sense, but most companies find that invasive."
Won't take no for an answer It can be difficult to avoid such a visit, according to Seigo. "They will keep calling. Microsoft usually has very good sales people so they will be persistent -- they won't take the first 'no' for an answer," he says.
At last, I've found a use for that retarded moron son of the Boss, who we keep in the stationary cupboard ensuring that the paperclips are all stored in the correct orientation. We give him the job title "Senior Vice President for Co-ordination of Communications with Microsoft", put a sign to that effect on the door to the stationary cupboard, give him a phone without outgoing calls capabilty, give his telephone number and job title to Microsoft, and then lock the Microsoft visitor in the cupboard with him. As long as no-one who actually works at work talks to the SVPCCM (this is the cunning bit - that's why I specified the Boss's moron son), we can have the morale boost of being nasty to both MS and the Moron Son (another MS!, it's an emergent property. I didn't plan that. I feel the touch of the Noodly Appendage - this must be the One True Solution.), while getting on with doing our real work without disturbance.
Could we sell tickets? I think so! More fun than pulling the wings off flies, and much more morally defensible.
That's only a factor of "several" better resolution than you routinely get from film. Work it out - a 35mm negative (remember those?) is also about a square inch and is on the order of 10 million pixels. That's for off-the shelf film being processed off-the-shelf, then put into a routine scanning system. If you use high-resolution film, hypered and cold-processed, possibly in a medium format camera, you'll be pushing 100 Mpx. And then you could go up to the cutting edge of photographic technology and look at half-plate or full-plate negatives (that's emulsion spread onto sheets of glass before being put into the camera) and you'd be far over 100 Mpx. Digital technology is approaching the capabilities of film technology, but it's not there yet. Everyone knows that digital will eventually overtake film (look at when Kodak started to push technologies like PhotoCD as an image format), but it's still not routinely beating film. Maybe another 2 years. (Note that the scanned images you get with your film for the price of a beer are generally not very good quality. Then again, the quality of standard processing seems to be going down as well because people are getting used to not being able to enlarge their images to the equivalent of 3x5 metres wide. Did you never wonder why your enlarger's head could be tilted to point horizontally across the darkroom?)
To address point's raised in the discussion: Although grasses are dominant in habitats across the world today, they weren't thought to exist until some ten million years after the age of dinosaurs had ended. A significant change in the "first appearence" horizon of the grasses. Despite the parody that creationists present, real-world geologists (and palynologists in particular) are much more precise in the language they use. "Date of first appearence in the fossil record" is a concept that rapidly gets abbreviated in the popular press to "date of origin", but the two concepts are very distinct. Unfortunately, this gives unscrupulous people an opportunity to claim there is more dispute in the science of harth history than there actually is. There are disputes, but within the profession they're nowhere near as significant as the unscrupulous protray them to be.
The team collected 65-million-year-old droppings from the volcanic Deccan Traps of central India in order to study the diet of titanosaurs, the group of super-size dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus. The discovery of the coprolites between lava/ tuff deposits of the Deccan traps illuminates the "was it the asteroid at Chixulub or was it the Deccan eruptions" debate. There have long been people who used evidence like this to argue that the Chixulub impactor was not the only factor. Also, since the Deccan volcanicity was going on before the Chixulub impactor, the "Chixulub caused Deccan" arguement has never had appreciable support in the profession. (Note - Diplodocus was extinct long before this, though it's descendents or relatives were still around.)
Now it seems that dinosaurs or other early mammals may have been the early grazers that gave grass a head start. Dinosaurs probably contributed minimally to this, Stromberg says: they mainly had the wrong kind of teeth for ripping up grass, and the titanosaur coprolites indicate that grass was only a small part of their diet. RTFA is as over-used and under heard phrase as RTFM used to be.
(Note 2 - I should update my signature line to include the "FGS".)
Just run the entire thing off of a thumb drive or live distribution that they can use anywhere they go that mounts your netdrive;)
Are you nuts? Do you really think you're going to get a whole organization to run in that fashion? Do you think end users are going to keep up with thumb drives and live CDs?
More to the point, if the network security policy of the client organisation bans the use of "thumb" drives etc. you're stuffed. (As several of my client companies do. I often carry a hand-held computer with a serial cable and a terminal emulator because it's more reliable than floppies these days.) A good reason for doing this is to ensure that any data entering/ leaving the network goes through "sheepdip" computers. Another good reason is to stop the cow-orkers from downloading stuff on the work's internet charges and taking it home. Plenty of good reasons for doing it - see "diskless workstation" in the Jargon File. Where did I put that copy of Petter's NT electronic crowbar http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ ? Oh, it's in my briefcase where it should be.
I still haven't seen anything that's anything like as usable as my Psion 5mx, a 5 year old machine. Heretical as it may be to the Slashdoterati, this is a case where "innovations simply haven't been accepted by the masses, probably because of Psion's poor US marketing. Address book - yes, it does that ; phone numbers too of course ; sufficiently capable word processor for me to make quite copious notes in my day-to-day work ; sufficient comms for those occasions where I have need for comms ; moderately powerful spreadsheet which opens in a couple of seconds ; adequate calculator ; good typable keyboard plus a touch screen. But most important of all, several weeks on a couple of AA cells. That's really, really important. And absolutely NOTHING on the market even thinks about approaching that.
if this chip comes out you can be sure of the fact that people are going to break open their phone and pull that sucker out.
their phone ? But very often it isn't *their* phone, at least not until they've been connected to a particular tarrif plan for some years. Effectively a lot of people lease a telephone along with their line. Nothing wrong with that - it's a well-tried business plan - but many people forget that they're walking around with a bit of the phone company's property in their pocket.
Have you tried getting details on the 110N from Dell's UK site? I'm getting a number of "product unavailable", "your order requires further processing", etc messages that make it look as if Real World (TM) Dell (TM) are slightly confused. I'll have another try after work.
I am NOT going to watch quietly Quetzlcoatlus getting buried in oblivion! Don't worry over much about it. The cited articles appear to be re-reporting of a presentation of (as-yet) unpublished work. The discoverers of Quetzlcoatlus (is that spelling right?) will get to defend their beast in the lists of debate in due course. AIUI (from other reportage), the material under discussion originated from Spain and/ or Morocco, while Quetzl came from Texas (where else?) which was more-or-less adjacent at the time. Might be the same species, or a member of the same genus at least. Sexual dimorphism, anyone?
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
*grumble*historicalaccuracy*grumble*
Even if it were true (which it's not), it doesn't of course matter. Because the breaking of the Enigma codes relied on a combination of faulty operation of the code engine (the predictable weather reports for example) and sophisticated maths analyses. The operation was speeded up by getting the code books, but only until the next code book change ; the code books were in no sense essential. While we're talking about historical inaccuricies, let's quickly examine the success of British cryptographers in breaking Enigma. That's the Enigma code whose methodology for breaking was developed by the Polish secret service in the mid-late 1930s. Not belittleing the Bletchley Park work, but it was built on the work of other people.
From this I believe that just about anything can escape the galaxy, it would just take an extremely long time. You need to look at the concept of "escape velocity". There are two ways to approach this concept - as an expression of a time series of decreasing velocities, or on an energetics basis. The energy basis is simpler to explain - consider that an object moving in a gravitational field has a particular amount of kinetic energy as a consequence of it's motion. The same object would require a certain amount of energy to move out to an arbitrarily large distance from the centre of the gravitational field. If the kinetic energy due to motion is greater than the potential energy that would be needed to move to an arbitrarily large distance from the centre of the gravitational field, then the object is moving faster than the escape velocity from the gravitational field at it's starting position. (There are some considerations of direction that make the velocity time series approach more useful to study, but you'd need to get your ector maths up to scratch to benefit from them.)
It's my understanding that the Neanderthals lived in caves located below sea level. A big storm came and wiped them all out.
You're apparently referring to the paintings in the Grotte Cosquer http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/archeosm/en/fr- cosqu1.htm , which I think are actually dated to the Palaeolithic, and produced most likely by AMHs (Anatomically Modern Humans).
This site, and no doubt many others, had an entrance considerably below present day sea level - 40-odd metres for Cosquer - but the cave passages followed by the ancients led up to passages that have not (yet) been flooded. But at the time that the paintings were made, the sea level was below the cave entrance, as has been documented by fossils of land animals , drowned plants etc. Plus the fairly obvious issue of how the painters got their light sources into the cave. (The abundance of soot marks in the cave testifies that burning organic matter was used for illumination during the production of the paintings.) It's just about conceivable that an ancient could have carried illumination which he could have lit after doing a lung-powered cave dive (Norbert Casteret could do it, so why not Uggh the Caveman?)
Such policies are very enforceable, and hold up under the law for the dismissal of employees who violate them. Providing the workplace provides reasonably secure "locker-room" type areas where you can store your necessary bit and pieces, then a "violation=unemployment" policy is reasonable. Since I frequently work in such places, I know what I would consider "reasonably secure" : Firstly, I wouldn't trust any on the minimum-wage security guards who are used to avoid paying for wallpaper. If there's a human involved, then I don't trust the system. Secondly, I wouldn need to know that the security policy is in place before I am called to that site. This is, of course, impossible. I've been flown to sites before where no-one knows why I'm there, who I'm working for, or what I'm meant to be doing (turned out I should have flown to site A, not site D. Damned typists! ordering the wrong flight for me.) Of course it would be nice if the different companies in particular businesses had even vaguely similar policies, but that's just ludicrous to ask for. Thirdly, it might be interesting if the minimum-wage security people would actually recognise the various pieces of equipment under discussion. Cameras might be banned, but mobile phones - well they've only got to be turned off; memory sticks are banned, but if I've got an external hard drive in my pocket and a laptop in my bag... well it doesn't look like *the picture*, so go ahead. And as for the CF card in my left pocket and the CF-PCMCIA adaptor in my right pocket. What's that? "Stuff I need for my work. It's a calibrator for a poison gas sensor." Go ahead. Oh, and as proof of "reasonably secure" one would expect to see crows picking the eyes out of the last thief, who's chained into a gibbet-cage. Maybe they'd be dead already, but better if they're alive and moaning.
I don't think that place in Libya/Egypt that is below sea level is as big as the Mediterrean. It's more like as big as the Great Salt Lake or the Aral Sea. Quattara depression, or some spelling vaguely like that. 29.5N 26E to 30N 28.5E, approximately. Average is about 25m below sea level. I don't think it's even the scale of the Great Salt Lake, let alone the Aral Sea.
so now...what age do i put on earth's birthday card?
4.538 billion years if you're addressing it to the Jack Hills zircon cores. 4.564 billion if you're addressing it to the extinxt Hafnium radiogenic clock in meteorites. Up to 20 to 100 million years older if you're addressing it to the CAIs.
Ask a silly question, get a straight answer - now there's a slashdot first for you .
Illegal meaning the country being visited might consider a GPS to be "military equipment".
Very much agreed.
My first trip to the former Soviet bloc was to Azerbaijan, and I took my GPS and found it very useful for work out in the middle of some extremely flat nowhere. My second trip was just after the burglars had stolen my GPS so no toys with me that time. Which was just as well, because the area I was working in was a military restricted zone (I found this out when I got there; as normal) and there was already one Yankee doing hard time for being found in such an area with a handheld GPS as/prima facia/ indication of criminal intent.
He's lucky he didn't get shot (if he did get shot later, "Sorry" to the family, I didn't know. I was lucky, the dude wasn't. Or he was a spook and got his paycheck cancelled.)
Almost certainly the consulate will tell you that they don't know the local regulations for certain, and that your best course would not to take anything you consider may be suspect ; if you do actually need the device in question, then simply apply for an armaments importation license and see how far that gets you. [If they do it this way, they're not liable for you refusing their advice, OR they have to forward a known piece of bureaucracy to known people in their chain of command, and the responsibility for the decision goes back to the home country. Much safer. And easier.]
Trials are underway to stuff carbon back into the drilling holes instead of releasing it into the air. That shuld keep oil and natural gas CO2 emmission close to zero for power plants.
I take it that you refer to the CO2 reinjection on the Slepnir platform? It is the only commercially active one that I'm aware of (but I work for a living drilling holes in the ground, so what would I know?)
The Slepnir program has to separate CO2 from the gas at the wellhead for 2 reasons - the reservoir produces about 9% V/V CO2 (unusual in itself for a non-carbonate-hosted field - probably an indication of substantial bacterial degradation of the hydrocarbons. I'd be interested to get the MS sicced onto that); and the export lines mix in with other fields output before they make landfall. The CO2 production from the reservoir means that the CO2 must be reduced in the exported gas at some point, because gas with over 2% V/V CO2 attracts a seriously decreased price. (Americans reading this should reprogram themselves to read "gas" in the sense that the world does, not their local dialect) But almost universally, that processing would be cheaper and easier to do onshore (compared to offshore). The fact that other fields feed into the Slepnir export lines downstream from Slepnir however means that the fines for contaminating their output and the increased processing costs ashore bump the cost-benefit in favour of processing it at the rig.
How marginal this cost-benefit calculation is you can tell from the fact that the tax benefit from disposing of the CO2 down a cuttings re-injection well (instead of venting it to atmosphere) is only $140,000 per day. That would be in the region of 5 or 10% of daily costs. Appreciable, but not in itself urgently compelling. [I'll flesh those figures a bit : A conventional cuttings re-injection plant needs a running crew of 3 on day shift and 2 on nights, so for permanent plant you'd need to account for about 4 staff on the permanent crew of the rig (~$4000/day bed-night costs, plus ~$3000 a day wages); add in the costs of their onshore relief crews (Norway works 2+3+2+4; 2 weeks on-rig, 3 off-rig, 2 on, 4 off. If you want to argue about it, go stand for Parliament in Norway - you'd lose.) and you're running standing costs of around $10,000/day. Now, the intermittently running CRI (Cuttings Re-Injection) plants that I work with routinely have about a 20% downtime, but for continuously operating plant on a vapour input that's going to be lower. Say 10%. Factor another couple of thousand a day averaged for the costs of spares, spares fitting, spares storage and spares shipping. In the order of 10% of your tax savings are eaten up by the running costs of your equipment for the savings. And if the tax regime changes, the running costs won't. That make it a comparatively marginal investment. But since Statoil have been quite public about making this a public experiment in developing the technology... that's no great surprise.]
Incidentally, I see that some of the reports on this field are saying that the re-injection is into the "Utsira" reservoir. This is not the producing horizon for this field (I think it's a combination of Statfjord group and Brent group; below the X unconformaity for certain); it's at about 1/3 of the depth of the producing horizons. This is one of the things that concerns some environmental campaigners - the Utsira, in this area, has never had a cap rock sufficiently competent to contain hydrocarbons or CO2 (in other areas the Utsira is a producing reservoir; but not here). Consequently there are good grounds to believe that the residence time of the CO2 in the formation will be shorter than the geological timescale which other people shout about. The estimate of 100,000 years containment might sound impressive, but since the records of the LPTM indicate that blast of global warming took more than 120,000 years to return to "normal" climate after the discharge of the "hydrate capacitor". So, a containment of 100,000 years would simply be lengthening the duration of the problem (anthropogenic atmosphere modification), not a cure for the problem.
Ideally, I would throw away this bill, all blasphemy laws and all race hate laws, and simply make a generic law that protects people's rights to protest, assemble, hold a faith, do whatever they damn well feel like, with the sole limit that they cannot deliberately seek to have others come to harm in the process.
Hmmm. Throwing away all blasphemy laws would probably require the disestablisment of the Church of England. The last time I heard legislation/ House of Commons specialists give an estimate of the time for that it was several years of parliamentary time to allow all the necessary acts to be changed after due debate. That's not allowing for any obstructive debating tactics.
Well, I can see my wife's old flat in central Siberia from here http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=63.197479,75.440884 &spn=0.058794,0.059910&t=k&hl=en
But there is a substantial amount of distortion (orientation of the airport's runway a few km west of town) due to the Mercator projection being used. That's going to make it hard to find things at high latitudes.
The oilfield I was working on when I met her is: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=64.0211,74.8303&spn =0.235176,0.239639&t=k&hl=en (the fields appear to be Latitude/ Longitude, and a scale or "span" pair of parameters. Maybe I can correct for the Mercator distortion with that?) Anyway, does the link show the right features on the ground? Hmmm, The refinery is positioned correctly, but I can't see the access road or the pipeline, so I think that means their imagery (of here at least) is several years old.
Nobody can really be that suprised by the 'popularity' of downloading pirated software, but I was a little thrown by the apparent willingness of people to pay for pirated copies of it. That is because the people paying the money are not paying for the pirated copy. They're (generally) paying for someone who is more technically savvy than them to have considered their needs (in terms of a application or a game), their resources (what is their computer up to running? how much can they pay?), and come up with a program that will be appropriate. The savvy person is also expected to have checked for viruses, malware etc, and quite frequently is expected to go round and install the program too (there is enough news that people know there are "viruses" out there, whatever one of those is). It's that service (plus the actual provision of media, time for copying etc) which people are happy to pay for. Pay for software? Don't make me laugh. Just because this is Slashdot, don't forget there are plenty of people who will buy a 5th hand P-200 machine and get very badly burned (financially) when the kid persuades them to spend a week's leisure money or half a Christmas-cost on a current game, then find that it won't work on a machine that works perfectly well. And that's when they turn back to their mate down the pub instead of the vultures in the software-retail industry. It's hard enough to convince some people that there's a difference between a PC game and console game even when there's a physical difference in the packaging.
These types of people used to communicate on BBSes back in the days before the Internet took off. Agreed. As I said about CIS (Compuserve) back in 1992, which predates most BBSs (though how far back the "IRC-like" stuff goes, I don't know. hell, I even remember when CIS made a big thing about introducing internet gateways so you could get from CIS to this "Internet" thing, if you needed or wanted to.
Nowadays if you got rid of irc, blackhats would just use something else (ex: Waste) to communicate. It's sounding increasingly to me as if the person who puts out an OS to the desktop with a server background which/dev/null'd all IRC traffic would have a winner for the business environment. Yeah, if there's someone who can demonstrate a need for this sort of stuff, then they can apply to the IT department to get a pinhole for it. And if their pinhole gets raped, their paycheck gets to pay the clean-up costs. If it's Gates who puts out that enhanced security OS, then "Well Done, Bill" ; if it's someone like the LinSpire man (Mike Richmond? Something like that. Do they provide any non-US configurations yet?), likewise "Well Done". Meanwhile, not something I'm inspired to waste more time with. Same goes for this "Waste" thing.
At least irc is fairly insecure, which makes it easier to monitor the people who are doing bad things. Hmm, interesting point. Rearrange {"Chicken", "egg", "which came first", 2x"the", "or"}.
Sometimes you just want to talk with people and email or mailing lists are just too slow. Isn't that what your mobile phone is for? Or do you know people who have always-on internet connectivity and don't have mobile phones? SMS is quite handy I'll agree, particularly when one half of the conversation is in intermittent connectivity. Is "Instant Messaging" an imitation of that?
Sometimes you just want to talk with people and email or mailing lists are just too slow. Are you talking about idle chit-chat, or doing something productive? If you're doing something productive then generally you need to check what you're saying, inspect references, re-do your calculations by different methods, search for additional evidence one way or the other. But idle chit-chat? Well, just talk. Use your phone, or if your contact is somewhere else in the world, use one of these VoIP things. (Which begs the question of if those VoIP things open new security holes.)
Just because you don't see a use doesn't mean it's useless. Quite the contrary, actually. Examples? Where it's so vitally important that you get the message through instantly, as opposed to waiting for (less than) 20 minutes for a cycle of emails to pass through a list server. (Please, when you bring forward your examples, bear in mind that I work in real-time drilling supervision and well-control on oil rigs. I know what communication methods we use when there are decisions that have to be made rapidly. I've made my mistakes when making "instant decisions". One man is dead, and on a different occasion a client lost a couple of million dollars; most decisions are of little real urgency. So what is so all-fired important that you've got to make a decision faster that you can't write it down?
I may be missing something here, but if IRC is used to control malicious programs, then why allow IRC?
Call me a stick in the mud, but I have simply never seen the purpose of IRC. I've installed programs for it, logged into the LUG's channels because I'm told it's the best thing since sliced bread, found it to be a an utter waste of time, and removed the IRC client. Three times. I simply can't see any purpose to it that is worth either the massive time waste (people don't think before they reply to questions), or the huge security hole that it appears to be. [BTW for people on AberLUG, I know there's a no-install Java access route too. But there's no content.]
So why are people (network administrators, specifically) allowing the packets to pass? You've got a problem with, say, your AS chunk of routing space being full of IRC-controlled robot machines. So set your router to forward all IRC packets (in- or out-bound) to/dev/null (or a logging system) and then annihilate any IRC bot-controllers in your system.
If IRC has some value (which I have yet to be shown an argument for, let alone be convinced by such an argument ; "Look at this, it's kewl!" is not an argument), then tell the developers who claim so to come up with an IRC-like system which is provably secure and that provides the functionality they want without the security risks. Any of the security risks. Which returns to the original point - what is the "value" of IRC that people tolerate the security risks that appear to be inherent in the model.
Question: What did people do for rapid networked communication between self-selected groups before someone (whoever) invented IRC? Answer : mailing lists and/or private newsgroups on non-peering, non-usenet NNTP servers.
Question: What is still a major method of rapid networked communication amongst self-selected groups? Answer: mailing lists (and private newsgroups too, but often less visible than the lists). Did you notice that SourceForge provides this functionality? You think it's there to make the menus longer, or for some other reason?
If it causes pain, and you've got an alternative, stop doing it.
BTW, who was responsible for this junk? I remember something similar being available on Compuserve when I joined in 1992, but it was unusable then and hasn't got any better since.
It is possible that the security risks of IRC are consequent on the possibility of being anonymous on the communication system. That may account for a lot of the junk too. Although the IRC-like stuff in Compuserve was on a private network with personal accountability through credit-card-backed account identifiers, and that was pretty content-free.
love Google Maps, but I hate their projection;
It's a Mercator projection...
it looks like Africa and Greenland have similar areas.
Which is a problem people have been pointing out with Mercator projections for several centuries, and which is why Lambert, Peters, and cartographers galore have come up with their own alternative projections. BUT Mercator projections remain mathematically among the simplest ways to map a sphere onto a plane. Which is, I suspect why they're being used.
What's asorbing me is the waveband of their imagery. Look at the SW North Sea (or possibly another shallow sea you're familiar with... significant over-representation of "land" colours in 20-50m deep sea. There's also a lot of oil drilling areas of Siberia which have been whited-out. (The wife was just on the phone to home in Siberia while I'm writing this.) Hmmm.
The commonest use I've seen for WMP on computers is to avoid the company's password policy on machines used at work. This would probably be the big driver for uptake of XP N around the world.
There is a bug (feature) in WMP, and possibly in other media players - if it is running a visualisation, even if it is minimised, then it will interfer with the action of screensaver activation, so that your screensaver will not fire up after some set period of time. This is great if you're watching a DVD at home. If you're running a PC in an unsecured office, with highly confidential data on screen (say, you're the manager of a [generic industrial plant] writing this month's production and safety report - I've seen it!) and you've got WMP running in the background, then the company's mandatory screensaver policy is bypassed, and you don't need to enter your password for the 20th time that day.
Someone set up that 5 minute screensaver policy, and the 8-chars+2-digits+2-punctuations minimum password policy, and is expending effort to enforce it, and they're doing it for a reason. But this WMP bug/feature actively undermines this obviously important security policy.
Worse, it does this undermining at an appreciable cost in network bandwidth. Take the above mentioned [generic industrial plant], approximately 150 PCs going 24 hours a day, each one with a 128k "Internet Radio" channel running, so that when you come in from the shopfloor you don't need to re-enter that damned long password which you had to change last week... That's a substantial bandwidth you've got to pay for on your link, and it seriously undermines the business use of the network. Which makes my life harder as an intermittant contractor.
I'm not sure which will happen first - a remote exploit through media streams, or the company-wide replacement of WinXP with WinXP N. In a security-conscious company, I'd like to think the latter; but since I live in the real world, I'd expect the whole company WAN to be taken down by an exploit before anything is done.
I'm sure that MS have thought all this through. Which is why the inclusion of a media player of any sort in WinXP "Pro" absolutely beggars belief. I can only believe that the people at Microsoft consider their job is to listen to networked radio all day, not write code, analyse manufacture problems, control quality, or fill in expenses forms.
Anyway, I look forward to exploits that hit streamed audio and/ or video. Then I can say "I told you so!" (and yes, I do know what my clients would do if they knew my name. Shoot the messenger.) Crackers and Expoliterz, get to it! There's a *world* of business data out there to steal, and great gobs of botnets to construct.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you've got harddrive space, most older distro's work fine on hardware down to 100mhz.
Oh, the youth of today!
When I first started tinkering with Linux, it was on a 386-dx at 25MHz and with a whole 4 MB of memory. It was still working when the burglars had it. And that box was 5 years old when Linus started getting tee'd off with Minix.
From TFA : Companies may also choose to keep a low profile about projects to avoid a time-consuming sales visit from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft, according to Aaron Seigo, who works as a consultant with projects deploying the desktop environment KDE.
"I've seen it happen first hand," says Seigo. "Microsoft sees it as a lost sale, so you'll get a phone call and they'll try to send in one of their regional sales people. He'll ask 'why are you running Linux? How many machines are you running?' and so on. From a sales intelligence perspective it makes sense, but most companies find that invasive."
Won't take no for an answer
It can be difficult to avoid such a visit, according to Seigo. "They will keep calling. Microsoft usually has very good sales people so they will be persistent -- they won't take the first 'no' for an answer," he says.
At last, I've found a use for that retarded moron son of the Boss, who we keep in the stationary cupboard ensuring that the paperclips are all stored in the correct orientation. We give him the job title "Senior Vice President for Co-ordination of Communications with Microsoft", put a sign to that effect on the door to the stationary cupboard, give him a phone without outgoing calls capabilty, give his telephone number and job title to Microsoft, and then lock the Microsoft visitor in the cupboard with him.
As long as no-one who actually works at work talks to the SVPCCM (this is the cunning bit - that's why I specified the Boss's moron son), we can have the morale boost of being nasty to both MS and the Moron Son (another MS!, it's an emergent property. I didn't plan that. I feel the touch of the Noodly Appendage - this must be the One True Solution.), while getting on with doing our real work without disturbance.
Could we sell tickets? I think so! More fun than pulling the wings off flies, and much more morally defensible.
That's only a factor of "several" better resolution than you routinely get from film.
Work it out - a 35mm negative (remember those?) is also about a square inch and is on the order of 10 million pixels. That's for off-the shelf film being processed off-the-shelf, then put into a routine scanning system. If you use high-resolution film, hypered and cold-processed, possibly in a medium format camera, you'll be pushing 100 Mpx. And then you could go up to the cutting edge of photographic technology and look at half-plate or full-plate negatives (that's emulsion spread onto sheets of glass before being put into the camera) and you'd be far over 100 Mpx.
Digital technology is approaching the capabilities of film technology, but it's not there yet. Everyone knows that digital will eventually overtake film (look at when Kodak started to push technologies like PhotoCD as an image format), but it's still not routinely beating film. Maybe another 2 years.
(Note that the scanned images you get with your film for the price of a beer are generally not very good quality. Then again, the quality of standard processing seems to be going down as well because people are getting used to not being able to enlarge their images to the equivalent of 3x5 metres wide. Did you never wonder why your enlarger's head could be tilted to point horizontally across the darkroom?)
There's also a write-up on this available online at 'Nature' http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051114/full/051114 -13.html
It raises informative points which the interested amateur may do well to note.
To address point's raised in the discussion:
Although grasses are dominant in habitats across the world today, they weren't thought to exist until some ten million years after the age of dinosaurs had ended.
A significant change in the "first appearence" horizon of the grasses. Despite the parody that creationists present, real-world geologists (and palynologists in particular) are much more precise in the language they use. "Date of first appearence in the fossil record" is a concept that rapidly gets abbreviated in the popular press to "date of origin", but the two concepts are very distinct. Unfortunately, this gives unscrupulous people an opportunity to claim there is more dispute in the science of harth history than there actually is. There are disputes, but within the profession they're nowhere near as significant as the unscrupulous protray them to be.
The team collected 65-million-year-old droppings from the volcanic Deccan Traps of central India in order to study the diet of titanosaurs, the group of super-size dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus.
The discovery of the coprolites between lava/ tuff deposits of the Deccan traps illuminates the "was it the asteroid at Chixulub or was it the Deccan eruptions" debate. There have long been people who used evidence like this to argue that the Chixulub impactor was not the only factor. Also, since the Deccan volcanicity was going on before the Chixulub impactor, the "Chixulub caused Deccan" arguement has never had appreciable support in the profession. (Note - Diplodocus was extinct long before this, though it's descendents or relatives were still around.)
Now it seems that dinosaurs or other early mammals may have been the early grazers that gave grass a head start. Dinosaurs probably contributed minimally to this, Stromberg says: they mainly had the wrong kind of teeth for ripping up grass, and the titanosaur coprolites indicate that grass was only a small part of their diet.
RTFA is as over-used and under heard phrase as RTFM used to be.
(Note 2 - I should update my signature line to include the "FGS".)
Just run the entire thing off of a thumb drive or live distribution that they can use anywhere they go that mounts your netdrive ;)
Are you nuts? Do you really think you're going to get a whole organization to run in that fashion? Do you think end users are going to keep up with thumb drives and live CDs?
More to the point, if the network security policy of the client organisation bans the use of "thumb" drives etc. you're stuffed. (As several of my client companies do. I often carry a hand-held computer with a serial cable and a terminal emulator because it's more reliable than floppies these days.)
A good reason for doing this is to ensure that any data entering/ leaving the network goes through "sheepdip" computers. Another good reason is to stop the cow-orkers from downloading stuff on the work's internet charges and taking it home. Plenty of good reasons for doing it - see "diskless workstation" in the Jargon File.
Where did I put that copy of Petter's NT electronic crowbar http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ ? Oh, it's in my briefcase where it should be.
I still haven't seen anything that's anything like as usable as my Psion 5mx, a 5 year old machine. Heretical as it may be to the Slashdoterati, this is a case where "innovations simply haven't been accepted by the masses, probably because of Psion's poor US marketing.
Address book - yes, it does that ; phone numbers too of course ; sufficiently capable word processor for me to make quite copious notes in my day-to-day work ; sufficient comms for those occasions where I have need for comms ; moderately powerful spreadsheet which opens in a couple of seconds ; adequate calculator ; good typable keyboard plus a touch screen.
But most important of all, several weeks on a couple of AA cells. That's really, really important. And absolutely NOTHING on the market even thinks about approaching that.
if this chip comes out you can be sure of the fact that people are going to break open their phone and pull that sucker out.
their phone ?
But very often it isn't *their* phone, at least not until they've been connected to a particular tarrif plan for some years. Effectively a lot of people lease a telephone along with their line. Nothing wrong with that - it's a well-tried business plan - but many people forget that they're walking around with a bit of the phone company's property in their pocket.
Have you tried getting details on the 110N from Dell's UK site? I'm getting a number of "product unavailable", "your order requires further processing", etc messages that make it look as if Real World (TM) Dell (TM) are slightly confused.
I'll have another try after work.
I am NOT going to watch quietly Quetzlcoatlus getting buried in oblivion!
Don't worry over much about it. The cited articles appear to be re-reporting of a presentation of (as-yet) unpublished work. The discoverers of Quetzlcoatlus (is that spelling right?) will get to defend their beast in the lists of debate in due course.
AIUI (from other reportage), the material under discussion originated from Spain and/ or Morocco, while Quetzl came from Texas (where else?) which was more-or-less adjacent at the time. Might be the same species, or a member of the same genus at least. Sexual dimorphism, anyone?
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
*grumble*historicalaccuracy*grumble*
Even if it were true (which it's not), it doesn't of course matter. Because the breaking of the Enigma codes relied on a combination of faulty operation of the code engine (the predictable weather reports for example) and sophisticated maths analyses. The operation was speeded up by getting the code books, but only until the next code book change ; the code books were in no sense essential.
While we're talking about historical inaccuricies, let's quickly examine the success of British cryptographers in breaking Enigma. That's the Enigma code whose methodology for breaking was developed by the Polish secret service in the mid-late 1930s.
Not belittleing the Bletchley Park work, but it was built on the work of other people.
From this I believe that just about anything can escape the galaxy, it would just take an extremely long time.
You need to look at the concept of "escape velocity". There are two ways to approach this concept - as an expression of a time series of decreasing velocities, or on an energetics basis. The energy basis is simpler to explain - consider that an object moving in a gravitational field has a particular amount of kinetic energy as a consequence of it's motion. The same object would require a certain amount of energy to move out to an arbitrarily large distance from the centre of the gravitational field. If the kinetic energy due to motion is greater than the potential energy that would be needed to move to an arbitrarily large distance from the centre of the gravitational field, then the object is moving faster than the escape velocity from the gravitational field at it's starting position. (There are some considerations of direction that make the velocity time series approach more useful to study, but you'd need to get your ector maths up to scratch to benefit from them.)
It's my understanding that the Neanderthals lived in caves located below sea level. A big storm came and wiped them all out.- cosqu1.htm , which I think are actually dated to the Palaeolithic, and produced most likely by AMHs (Anatomically Modern Humans).
You're apparently referring to the paintings in the Grotte Cosquer http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/archeosm/en/fr
This site, and no doubt many others, had an entrance considerably below present day sea level - 40-odd metres for Cosquer - but the cave passages followed by the ancients led up to passages that have not (yet) been flooded. But at the time that the paintings were made, the sea level was below the cave entrance, as has been documented by fossils of land animals , drowned plants etc. Plus the fairly obvious issue of how the painters got their light sources into the cave. (The abundance of soot marks in the cave testifies that burning organic matter was used for illumination during the production of the paintings.) It's just about conceivable that an ancient could have carried illumination which he could have lit after doing a lung-powered cave dive (Norbert Casteret could do it, so why not Uggh the Caveman?)
Such policies are very enforceable, and hold up under the law for the dismissal of employees who violate them. ... well it doesn't look like *the picture*, so go ahead. And as for the CF card in my left pocket and the CF-PCMCIA adaptor in my right pocket. What's that? "Stuff I need for my work. It's a calibrator for a poison gas sensor." Go ahead.
Providing the workplace provides reasonably secure "locker-room" type areas where you can store your necessary bit and pieces, then a "violation=unemployment" policy is reasonable.
Since I frequently work in such places, I know what I would consider "reasonably secure" :
Firstly, I wouldn't trust any on the minimum-wage security guards who are used to avoid paying for wallpaper. If there's a human involved, then I don't trust the system.
Secondly, I wouldn need to know that the security policy is in place before I am called to that site. This is, of course, impossible. I've been flown to sites before where no-one knows why I'm there, who I'm working for, or what I'm meant to be doing (turned out I should have flown to site A, not site D. Damned typists! ordering the wrong flight for me.) Of course it would be nice if the different companies in particular businesses had even vaguely similar policies, but that's just ludicrous to ask for.
Thirdly, it might be interesting if the minimum-wage security people would actually recognise the various pieces of equipment under discussion. Cameras might be banned, but mobile phones - well they've only got to be turned off; memory sticks are banned, but if I've got an external hard drive in my pocket and a laptop in my bag
Oh, and as proof of "reasonably secure" one would expect to see crows picking the eyes out of the last thief, who's chained into a gibbet-cage. Maybe they'd be dead already, but better if they're alive and moaning.
I don't think that place in Libya/Egypt that is below sea level is as big as the Mediterrean. It's more like as big as the Great Salt Lake or the Aral Sea.
Quattara depression, or some spelling vaguely like that. 29.5N 26E to 30N 28.5E, approximately. Average is about 25m below sea level. I don't think it's even the scale of the Great Salt Lake, let alone the Aral Sea.
so now...what age do i put on earth's birthday card?
4.538 billion years if you're addressing it to the Jack Hills zircon cores.
4.564 billion if you're addressing it to the extinxt Hafnium radiogenic clock in meteorites.
Up to 20 to 100 million years older if you're addressing it to the CAIs.
Ask a silly question, get a straight answer - now there's a slashdot first for you .
Illegal meaning the country being visited might consider a GPS to be "military equipment". /prima facia/ indication of criminal intent.
Very much agreed.
My first trip to the former Soviet bloc was to Azerbaijan, and I took my GPS and found it very useful for work out in the middle of some extremely flat nowhere. My second trip was just after the burglars had stolen my GPS so no toys with me that time. Which was just as well, because the area I was working in was a military restricted zone (I found this out when I got there; as normal) and there was already one Yankee doing hard time for being found in such an area with a handheld GPS as
He's lucky he didn't get shot (if he did get shot later, "Sorry" to the family, I didn't know. I was lucky, the dude wasn't. Or he was a spook and got his paycheck cancelled.)
Almost certainly the consulate will tell you that they don't know the local regulations for certain, and that your best course would not to take anything you consider may be suspect ; if you do actually need the device in question, then simply apply for an armaments importation license and see how far that gets you. [If they do it this way, they're not liable for you refusing their advice, OR they have to forward a known piece of bureaucracy to known people in their chain of command, and the responsibility for the decision goes back to the home country. Much safer. And easier.]
Trials are underway to stuff carbon back into the drilling holes instead of releasing it into the air. That shuld keep oil and natural gas CO2 emmission close to zero for power plants.
... that's no great surprise.]
I take it that you refer to the CO2 reinjection on the Slepnir platform? It is the only commercially active one that I'm aware of (but I work for a living drilling holes in the ground, so what would I know?)
The Slepnir program has to separate CO2 from the gas at the wellhead for 2 reasons - the reservoir produces about 9% V/V CO2 (unusual in itself for a non-carbonate-hosted field - probably an indication of substantial bacterial degradation of the hydrocarbons. I'd be interested to get the MS sicced onto that); and the export lines mix in with other fields output before they make landfall. The CO2 production from the reservoir means that the CO2 must be reduced in the exported gas at some point, because gas with over 2% V/V CO2 attracts a seriously decreased price. (Americans reading this should reprogram themselves to read "gas" in the sense that the world does, not their local dialect) But almost universally, that processing would be cheaper and easier to do onshore (compared to offshore). The fact that other fields feed into the Slepnir export lines downstream from Slepnir however means that the fines for contaminating their output and the increased processing costs ashore bump the cost-benefit in favour of processing it at the rig.
How marginal this cost-benefit calculation is you can tell from the fact that the tax benefit from disposing of the CO2 down a cuttings re-injection well (instead of venting it to atmosphere) is only $140,000 per day. That would be in the region of 5 or 10% of daily costs. Appreciable, but not in itself urgently compelling.
[I'll flesh those figures a bit : A conventional cuttings re-injection plant needs a running crew of 3 on day shift and 2 on nights, so for permanent plant you'd need to account for about 4 staff on the permanent crew of the rig (~$4000/day bed-night costs, plus ~$3000 a day wages); add in the costs of their onshore relief crews (Norway works 2+3+2+4; 2 weeks on-rig, 3 off-rig, 2 on, 4 off. If you want to argue about it, go stand for Parliament in Norway - you'd lose.) and you're running standing costs of around $10,000/day. Now, the intermittently running CRI (Cuttings Re-Injection) plants that I work with routinely have about a 20% downtime, but for continuously operating plant on a vapour input that's going to be lower. Say 10%. Factor another couple of thousand a day averaged for the costs of spares, spares fitting, spares storage and spares shipping. In the order of 10% of your tax savings are eaten up by the running costs of your equipment for the savings. And if the tax regime changes, the running costs won't. That make it a comparatively marginal investment. But since Statoil have been quite public about making this a public experiment in developing the technology
Incidentally, I see that some of the reports on this field are saying that the re-injection is into the "Utsira" reservoir. This is not the producing horizon for this field (I think it's a combination of Statfjord group and Brent group; below the X unconformaity for certain); it's at about 1/3 of the depth of the producing horizons. This is one of the things that concerns some environmental campaigners - the Utsira, in this area, has never had a cap rock sufficiently competent to contain hydrocarbons or CO2 (in other areas the Utsira is a producing reservoir; but not here). Consequently there are good grounds to believe that the residence time of the CO2 in the formation will be shorter than the geological timescale which other people shout about. The estimate of 100,000 years containment might sound impressive, but since the records of the LPTM indicate that blast of global warming took more than 120,000 years to return to "normal" climate after the discharge of the "hydrate capacitor". So, a containment of 100,000 years would simply be lengthening the duration of the problem (anthropogenic atmosphere modification), not a cure for the problem.
Ideally, I would throw away this bill, all blasphemy laws and all race hate laws, and simply make a generic law that protects people's rights to protest, assemble, hold a faith, do whatever they damn well feel like, with the sole limit that they cannot deliberately seek to have others come to harm in the process.
Hmmm. Throwing away all blasphemy laws would probably require the disestablisment of the Church of England. The last time I heard legislation/ House of Commons specialists give an estimate of the time for that it was several years of parliamentary time to allow all the necessary acts to be changed after due debate. That's not allowing for any obstructive debating tactics.
Well, I can see my wife's old flat in central Siberia from here http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=63.197479,75.440884 &spn=0.058794,0.059910&t=k&hl=en
:n =0.235176,0.239639&t=k&hl=en (the fields appear to be Latitude/ Longitude, and a scale or "span" pair of parameters. Maybe I can correct for the Mercator distortion with that?) Anyway, does the link show the right features on the ground? Hmmm, The refinery is positioned correctly, but I can't see the access road or the pipeline, so I think that means their imagery (of here at least) is several years old.
... http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=60.023500,70.989800 &spn=0.058794,0.059910&t=k&hl=en 0 &spn=0.222816,0.239639&t=k&hl=en = 0.222816,0.239639&t=k&hl=en ... that one doesn't show anything - they appear to have it logges as "sea" and don't store pictures of "sea". Let's try Beatrice then ... http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=58.1472,-3.0207&spn =0.222816,0.239639&t=k&hl=en ... nope, that logs as sea too. ... at http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=57.202914,-2.215784 &spn=0.006963,0.007489&t=k&hl=en, and from the combination of the colour of van parked outside the office front door, and the fact that Kverner's office is a building site but the new airport terminal is there, again I get that their coverage is about 3 years old here.
3 8&spn=57.041016,298.652344&t=k&hl=en
But there is a substantial amount of distortion (orientation of the airport's runway a few km west of town) due to the Mercator projection being used. That's going to make it hard to find things at high latitudes.
The oilfield I was working on when I met her is
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=64.0211,74.8303&sp
Where I was working last year (a Vwxyz- joint venture, not that Vwxyz want their name associated with it. Something to do with tax.)
Looks about right, got the tree-cut of the bounding seismic line to the north, but no road cuts at all, or a drilling pad.
This area's imagery is 2 years old at least.
Let's try Tanzania. (This one has been published, so no need ofr obfuscating Aminex's name.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-8.382100,39.57380
Looks Ok, but a little too blurred. Can't date their coverage from that. But zoom out a bit and there's a startling difference in the quality of their coverage of Songo-Songo compared to Nyuni Island. I wonder why?
OK, back to the day job.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=60.8058,1.4499&spn
One last look
I'd not heard it mentioned before, but Google have also got reasonable bathymetry in the database too. See the Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain and the Alaskan trench. http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=30.937500,176.8359
Very interesting looking at the deserts of the world too. Geology very visible.
Nobody can really be that suprised by the 'popularity' of downloading pirated software, but I was a little thrown by the apparent willingness of people to pay for pirated copies of it.
That is because the people paying the money are not paying for the pirated copy. They're (generally) paying for someone who is more technically savvy than them to have considered their needs (in terms of a application or a game), their resources (what is their computer up to running? how much can they pay?), and come up with a program that will be appropriate. The savvy person is also expected to have checked for viruses, malware etc, and quite frequently is expected to go round and install the program too (there is enough news that people know there are "viruses" out there, whatever one of those is).
It's that service (plus the actual provision of media, time for copying etc) which people are happy to pay for.
Pay for software? Don't make me laugh.
Just because this is Slashdot, don't forget there are plenty of people who will buy a 5th hand P-200 machine and get very badly burned (financially) when the kid persuades them to spend a week's leisure money or half a Christmas-cost on a current game, then find that it won't work on a machine that works perfectly well. And that's when they turn back to their mate down the pub instead of the vultures in the software-retail industry. It's hard enough to convince some people that there's a difference between a PC game and console game even when there's a physical difference in the packaging.
These types of people used to communicate on BBSes back in the days before the Internet took off.
/dev/null'd all IRC traffic would have a winner for the business environment. Yeah, if there's someone who can demonstrate a need for this sort of stuff, then they can apply to the IT department to get a pinhole for it. And if their pinhole gets raped, their paycheck gets to pay the clean-up costs. If it's Gates who puts out that enhanced security OS, then "Well Done, Bill" ; if it's someone like the LinSpire man (Mike Richmond? Something like that. Do they provide any non-US configurations yet?), likewise "Well Done". Meanwhile, not something I'm inspired to waste more time with. Same goes for this "Waste" thing.
Agreed. As I said about CIS (Compuserve) back in 1992, which predates most BBSs (though how far back the "IRC-like" stuff goes, I don't know. hell, I even remember when CIS made a big thing about introducing internet gateways so you could get from CIS to this "Internet" thing, if you needed or wanted to.
Nowadays if you got rid of irc, blackhats would just use something else (ex: Waste) to communicate.
It's sounding increasingly to me as if the person who puts out an OS to the desktop with a server background which
At least irc is fairly insecure, which makes it easier to monitor the people who are doing bad things.
Hmm, interesting point. Rearrange {"Chicken", "egg", "which came first", 2x"the", "or"}.
Sometimes you just want to talk with people and email or mailing lists are just too slow.
Isn't that what your mobile phone is for? Or do you know people who have always-on internet connectivity and don't have mobile phones?
SMS is quite handy I'll agree, particularly when one half of the conversation is in intermittent connectivity. Is "Instant Messaging" an imitation of that?
Sometimes you just want to talk with people and email or mailing lists are just too slow.
Are you talking about idle chit-chat, or doing something productive? If you're doing something productive then generally you need to check what you're saying, inspect references, re-do your calculations by different methods, search for additional evidence one way or the other. But idle chit-chat? Well, just talk. Use your phone, or if your contact is somewhere else in the world, use one of these VoIP things. (Which begs the question of if those VoIP things open new security holes.)
Just because you don't see a use doesn't mean it's useless. Quite the contrary, actually.
Examples? Where it's so vitally important that you get the message through instantly, as opposed to waiting for (less than) 20 minutes for a cycle of emails to pass through a list server.
(Please, when you bring forward your examples, bear in mind that I work in real-time drilling supervision and well-control on oil rigs. I know what communication methods we use when there are decisions that have to be made rapidly. I've made my mistakes when making "instant decisions". One man is dead, and on a different occasion a client lost a couple of million dollars; most decisions are of little real urgency. So what is so all-fired important that you've got to make a decision faster that you can't write it down?
I may be missing something here, but if IRC is used to control malicious programs, then why allow IRC? /dev/null (or a logging system) and then annihilate any IRC bot-controllers in your system.
Call me a stick in the mud, but I have simply never seen the purpose of IRC. I've installed programs for it, logged into the LUG's channels because I'm told it's the best thing since sliced bread, found it to be a an utter waste of time, and removed the IRC client. Three times. I simply can't see any purpose to it that is worth either the massive time waste (people don't think before they reply to questions), or the huge security hole that it appears to be. [BTW for people on AberLUG, I know there's a no-install Java access route too. But there's no content.]
So why are people (network administrators, specifically) allowing the packets to pass? You've got a problem with, say, your AS chunk of routing space being full of IRC-controlled robot machines. So set your router to forward all IRC packets (in- or out-bound) to
If IRC has some value (which I have yet to be shown an argument for, let alone be convinced by such an argument ; "Look at this, it's kewl!" is not an argument), then tell the developers who claim so to come up with an IRC-like system which is provably secure and that provides the functionality they want without the security risks. Any of the security risks. Which returns to the original point - what is the "value" of IRC that people tolerate the security risks that appear to be inherent in the model.
Question: What did people do for rapid networked communication between self-selected groups before someone (whoever) invented IRC? Answer : mailing lists and/or private newsgroups on non-peering, non-usenet NNTP servers.
Question: What is still a major method of rapid networked communication amongst self-selected groups? Answer: mailing lists (and private newsgroups too, but often less visible than the lists). Did you notice that SourceForge provides this functionality? You think it's there to make the menus longer, or for some other reason?
If it causes pain, and you've got an alternative, stop doing it.
BTW, who was responsible for this junk? I remember something similar being available on Compuserve when I joined in 1992, but it was unusable then and hasn't got any better since.
It is possible that the security risks of IRC are consequent on the possibility of being anonymous on the communication system. That may account for a lot of the junk too. Although the IRC-like stuff in Compuserve was on a private network with personal accountability through credit-card-backed account identifiers, and that was pretty content-free.
love Google Maps, but I hate their projection; ...
... significant over-representation of "land" colours in 20-50m deep sea. There's also a lot of oil drilling areas of Siberia which have been whited-out. (The wife was just on the phone to home in Siberia while I'm writing this.) Hmmm.
It's a Mercator projection
it looks like Africa and Greenland have similar areas.
Which is a problem people have been pointing out with Mercator projections for several centuries, and which is why Lambert, Peters, and cartographers galore have come up with their own alternative projections. BUT Mercator projections remain mathematically among the simplest ways to map a sphere onto a plane. Which is, I suspect why they're being used.
What's asorbing me is the waveband of their imagery. Look at the SW North Sea (or possibly another shallow sea you're familiar with
The commonest use I've seen for WMP on computers is to avoid the company's password policy on machines used at work. This would probably be the big driver for uptake of XP N around the world.
There is a bug (feature) in WMP, and possibly in other media players - if it is running a visualisation, even if it is minimised, then it will interfer with the action of screensaver activation, so that your screensaver will not fire up after some set period of time. This is great if you're watching a DVD at home. If you're running a PC in an unsecured office, with highly confidential data on screen (say, you're the manager of a [generic industrial plant] writing this month's production and safety report - I've seen it!) and you've got WMP running in the background, then the company's mandatory screensaver policy is bypassed, and you don't need to enter your password for the 20th time that day.
Someone set up that 5 minute screensaver policy, and the 8-chars+2-digits+2-punctuations minimum password policy, and is expending effort to enforce it, and they're doing it for a reason. But this WMP bug/feature actively undermines this obviously important security policy.
Worse, it does this undermining at an appreciable cost in network bandwidth. Take the above mentioned [generic industrial plant], approximately 150 PCs going 24 hours a day, each one with a 128k "Internet Radio" channel running, so that when you come in from the shopfloor you don't need to re-enter that damned long password which you had to change last week ... That's a substantial bandwidth you've got to pay for on your link, and it seriously undermines the business use of the network. Which makes my life harder as an intermittant contractor.
I'm not sure which will happen first - a remote exploit through media streams, or the company-wide replacement of WinXP with WinXP N. In a security-conscious company, I'd like to think the latter; but since I live in the real world, I'd expect the whole company WAN to be taken down by an exploit before anything is done.
I'm sure that MS have thought all this through. Which is why the inclusion of a media player of any sort in WinXP "Pro" absolutely beggars belief. I can only believe that the people at Microsoft consider their job is to listen to networked radio all day, not write code, analyse manufacture problems, control quality, or fill in expenses forms.
Anyway, I look forward to exploits that hit streamed audio and/ or video. Then I can say "I told you so!" (and yes, I do know what my clients would do if they knew my name. Shoot the messenger.) Crackers and Expoliterz, get to it! There's a *world* of business data out there to steal, and great gobs of botnets to construct.