Just what I needed. The jackass at the next table not only bellowing into his cell phone, but his damned wireless game beeping and booping as well. Good thing my state prohibits the carrying of concealed weapons.
I think this is a great idea, and should be extended into other areas. Penalize people who get sick. They should have taken better care of themselves and are costing the rest of us money. And people who have their houses knocked down by an earthquake or flattened by a storm should be fined as well for not taking the proper precautions.
I saw a picture of this being handled on TechTV, and it's much bulkier than the iPod. The iPod is a far more convenient form-factor for a portable player, IMO, and I predict that the Rio Riot's sales will suffer for that reason. That said, it has an interesting feature that the iPod lacks: it will create a favorites list based on your usage, which the TechTV guy loved.
Yay, it'll be so convenient having one company control my television, internet access and phone service. I can hardly wait.
You can use DirecTV or Dish Network for your video, DirecPC (or DSL if available) for your internet, and get your telephone service from your local Bell company or a multitude of wireless providers. I'm not seeing the problem here. If you don't want what AOL/TW is providing, there's no reason you have to use it.
I've taken to using my U.S. passport for ID where I can (i.e. just about anywhere except while driving). As an experiment, I even used it for ID at my last driver's license renewal, saying that I had misplaced my old license. Passports don't have addresses or Social Security Numbers on them, and I suspect that the fears of the civil libertarians will act as a brake on any ambitions that the federal government might have toward adding national ID features to them.
Those old tapes were made with mylar, which resists stretching (an important characteristic in a tape, as you can imagine).
I wonder what television and movies are going to substitute for all those old shots where rack after rack of 9-track tape reels is shown, to illustrate the vast quantities of data on [whatever] are being stored.
In the scifi short story, Light of Other Days, the author (was it Bradburyintroduced the concept of slowglass, which people used for lighting (a 12-hour delay let sunlight be emitted at night) and for view windows. In later stories, he had the government grinding into microscopic particles slowglass of varying delays. It was then distributing it via crop-duster-like aircraft. The result was that anytime someone wanted to, they could collect some pieces of this stuff, which was as ubiquitous as dust, and use a microscope to see the delayed images. It was like an infinite universe of surveillance cameras which was impossible to avoid. Eek. I hope it never really becomes possible.
The easy way to destroy a chip would be with one of those high-voltage zappers that are sold for self-defense. Several tens of thousands of volts will cream any MOS semiconductor. However, I can see merchants refusing to take such 'damaged' currency if it won't register on their readers, so wiping the chips out may not accomplish much except force you to take your deactivated money to a bank for replacement.
Someone spammed this site to every newsgroup I visit, including some in the microsoft.public.* domain. Even though they've decried this tactic, I remain suspicious. That said, if what they claim is true, I wouldn't put a lot of trust in Paypal either. I remember when the current laws governing credit cards was first passed. Before that, you were pretty much S.O.L. if a transaction went bad or your card was stolen. It may be nearing time for regulation to enter the picture here as well.
Don't forget to put a nylon cord in the conduit when you install it. When you go to run a new cable, it's a lot easier to pull it through than to try to push it or get a fishtape through the conduit. And when you run the new cable, pull a new section of cord through with it for the next time.
I'm one of those veterans who built his own computer at the dawn of the Personal Computer era. The 4 MHz Z80 was the ne plus ultra of the processor world, and we thought we were hot stuff when we managed to overclock one above 5 MHz. Their Serial I/O chips were also the most advanced thing going for serial comms, and we implemented many protocols like X.25 and PARS that formerly required a complete circuit board for what the SIO did. It's a bit sad to see what was once the cutting edge company brought so low.
FOR THE PAST week, I have been carrying around a new hand-held, wireless device that is simultaneously the best personal digital assistant I have ever used and the most capable cellphone.
It looks like a flip-phone and makes and receives calls with ease. It has a large screen, and can surf the Web and send and receive e-mail. It also has a full keyboard that makes composing e-mails or memos a breeze. It uses the Palm operating system and can synchronize dates and addresses with a PC.
Yet, despite all that power, this device is shorter and narrower than a Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC, or even a Palm V. About the size of a wallet and under 6 ounces in weight, it feels great in the hand and fits easily in a pocket.
This new product is the Treo 180 from Handspring. It costs $399 and will be available in early January. Designed by Jeff Hawkins, the man who invented the Palm Pilot and the Handspring Visor, the Treo is a true breakthrough. Unlike other combo devices, which were either phones with Palms jammed into them or Palms with phone features added, the Treo is a true hybrid. It was designed from the ground up to be a new kind of device, which the company calls a "communicator."
DR never had much business sense
on
Lineo Frees CP/M
·
· Score: 1
I used to work for the U.S. Navy, and we once negotiated with DR for rights to embed a custom version of CP/M in one of our systems. After months of painful haggling, we finally gave up when they wanted many many thousands of dollars (I dimly recollect in the neighborhood of $100K) for the source code, and just wrote what we needed for a fraction of what they were asking. They could have had a significant amount of money plus per-platform license fees, but instead chose to piss us off. Idiots.
How much of a problem is this really? Not that many people are going to let their neighbors have unfettered access to their network. I sure wouldn't. I can just see the Secret Service kicking in my door when some goober neighbor threatens the President via my IP. Not to mention them downloading child porn and nuclear weapon plans, while sharing software from companies who are known for their attack-shark lawyers. I think most people who have the brain cells to put a wireless network together are going to realize these drawbacks and have the same reaction.
Well, I took a look at mine, thought, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" and it's been living in my closet ever since. I keep it just because it's such an interesting artifact of a nutty era, and because I may one day want a barcode scanner for some reason. I'm a techie, not your usual trust-fund baby or CEO reader of Forbes, so I presume most of the rest of the readers pitched them within seconds.
It may not be a necessity for your slow internet connection, but at these speeds you'll be able to have things like wireless video servers and other fun things. You'll ultimately be able to carry your info/entertainment appliances around anywhere in your house and wirelessly access the equipment that serves them. I've had to crawl under my house many times to snake the various cables around down there, and it's a real pain. Particularly so when I reconfigure a room and now the wiring is in the wrong place. In the future, you'll just move the television, computer, or whatever to its new location, and there you are.
As for range, this article says, "We carried the workstation around our offices with some freedom within a range of 75 feet or so with no deterioration in quality until very substantial impediments (heavy concrete walls) interrupted the signal."
A 75 ft distance would be more than enough for most homes, if the WAP were in the center.
Email is ignored or discared, because it's too easy for non-constituents to write in and waste their time. Based on my sister-in-law's input (she served as office manager for a state representative for many years), the most effective forms of communication, in order of precedence, are:
Handwritten letter.
Typed letter, as long as it's signed and doesn't look like it was mass-produced.
Fax. Ditto that it doesn't look like a mass-produced effort.
Phone calls. These have the side benefit that you can not only make your opinion known, but can try to drag the representative's opinion out of whomever you get on the line.
Mass mailings of identical letters by members of some interest group.
Mass mailings of identical postcards by members of some interest group
Mass faxing of identical letters, by members of some interest group
Email
The lesson to be derived is that the effectiveness is in inverse proportion to the ease with which it's generated.
For phone calls and letters, it takes a surprisingly small number to cause the representative to take notice. I witnessed this firsthand when a friend of mine in PR organized a letter-and-fax campaign to support a particular design for a public library. Just 50 or so (each uniquely generated by an individual) made the city council members think that a huge groundswell of public opinion was underway.
This brings to mind something that I've thought of recently. How come datacomm companies such as Linksys or DLink haven't come out with a hardware router/firewall product that incorporates virus scanning on all traffic? Seems to me that it would be a better way to handle the problem, since it would cut the human out of the loop. The hardware could update itself silently, and not only keep you from being infected, but prevent you from infecting others. In fact, I see this as something that could be incorporated directly in a cable modem.
Not sure what Hemos means by better output, but the larger hard drive is no problem. I hacked a second, 80 gig, drive into my Tivo and have it up to 128 hours capacity. Others have hacked in even larger capacity drives in both primary and secondary and boosted their capacity into the multiple hundreds of hours. At that level, it must start getting tough to manage all the programming, though.
I think the failure of this thing is more due to the keyboard and mouse than anything else. If I want those things, I'd use a true laptop. A truely useful network appliance, on the other hand, would be closer to a large-screen PocketPC or Palm. Something with enough screen real estate to be useful, but no keyboard or mouse, just a finger or stylus. You could cradle it in one arm and input to it with the other like you would a clipboard. And it should have the ability to play streaming audio so that it could be used like a portable radio. I'd love something like that, so I could tote it all over the house and use it without having to set it down on something. Some of webpads like the Viewsonic 100 are getting close.
Re:what type of security they're NOT teaching
on
Real Cyber-Spying
·
· Score: 2, Informative
He was convinced that if policy hadn't been broken that there would have been no way to get access.
There's always a way, even in very vigilant organizations, assuming you're willing to take the trouble and sustain the risks. An, ahem, acquaintence once wanted into a room that was protected by an electronic combination lock. He put invisible ultraviolet powder on the keys and went back a few hours later to see which had been rubbed off. It was a simple matter to try the limited number of combos to gain entry.
The Linksys PC Card is terrible. Ten unobstructed feet from my WAP (a Linksys WAP 11, which I'm quite happy with) and the signal strength was barely 50%. Completely unusable 30 feet away thru a wall. Switching to an Orinoco Silver cured these problems. And I'm not the only one who had this difficulty; others on the alt.internet.wireless newsgroup report the same poor reception problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Just what I needed. The jackass at the next table not only bellowing into his cell phone, but his damned wireless game beeping and booping as well. Good thing my state prohibits the carrying of concealed weapons.
I think this is a great idea, and should be extended into other areas. Penalize people who get sick. They should have taken better care of themselves and are costing the rest of us money. And people who have their houses knocked down by an earthquake or flattened by a storm should be fined as well for not taking the proper precautions.
I saw a picture of this being handled on TechTV, and it's much bulkier than the iPod. The iPod is a far more convenient form-factor for a portable player, IMO, and I predict that the Rio Riot's sales will suffer for that reason. That said, it has an interesting feature that the iPod lacks: it will create a favorites list based on your usage, which the TechTV guy loved.
Yay, it'll be so convenient having one company control my television, internet access and phone service. I can hardly wait.
You can use DirecTV or Dish Network for your video, DirecPC (or DSL if available) for your internet, and get your telephone service from your local Bell company or a multitude of wireless providers. I'm not seeing the problem here. If you don't want what AOL/TW is providing, there's no reason you have to use it.
I've taken to using my U.S. passport for ID where I can (i.e. just about anywhere except while driving). As an experiment, I even used it for ID at my last driver's license renewal, saying that I had misplaced my old license. Passports don't have addresses or Social Security Numbers on them, and I suspect that the fears of the civil libertarians will act as a brake on any ambitions that the federal government might have toward adding national ID features to them.
Those old tapes were made with mylar, which resists stretching (an important characteristic in a tape, as you can imagine).
I wonder what television and movies are going to substitute for all those old shots where rack after rack of 9-track tape reels is shown, to illustrate the vast quantities of data on [whatever] are being stored.
In the scifi short story, Light of Other Days, the author (was it Bradburyintroduced the concept of slowglass, which people used for lighting (a 12-hour delay let sunlight be emitted at night) and for view windows. In later stories, he had the government grinding into microscopic particles slowglass of varying delays. It was then distributing it via crop-duster-like aircraft. The result was that anytime someone wanted to, they could collect some pieces of this stuff, which was as ubiquitous as dust, and use a microscope to see the delayed images. It was like an infinite universe of surveillance cameras which was impossible to avoid. Eek. I hope it never really becomes possible.
The easy way to destroy a chip would be with one of those high-voltage zappers that are sold for self-defense. Several tens of thousands of volts will cream any MOS semiconductor. However, I can see merchants refusing to take such 'damaged' currency if it won't register on their readers, so wiping the chips out may not accomplish much except force you to take your deactivated money to a bank for replacement.
Someone spammed this site to every newsgroup I visit, including some in the microsoft.public.* domain. Even though they've decried this tactic, I remain suspicious. That said, if what they claim is true, I wouldn't put a lot of trust in Paypal either. I remember when the current laws governing credit cards was first passed. Before that, you were pretty much S.O.L. if a transaction went bad or your card was stolen. It may be nearing time for regulation to enter the picture here as well.
Don't forget to put a nylon cord in the conduit when you install it. When you go to run a new cable, it's a lot easier to pull it through than to try to push it or get a fishtape through the conduit. And when you run the new cable, pull a new section of cord through with it for the next time.
I'm one of those veterans who built his own computer at the dawn of the Personal Computer era. The 4 MHz Z80 was the ne plus ultra of the processor world, and we thought we were hot stuff when we managed to overclock one above 5 MHz. Their Serial I/O chips were also the most advanced thing going for serial comms, and we implemented many protocols like X.25 and PARS that formerly required a complete circuit board for what the SIO did. It's a bit sad to see what was once the cutting edge company brought so low.
Well great. I had the tag closed and verified it in preview, and somehow it got hosed in posting. Oh well, sorry about that.
Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal had a review of the Handspring Treo 180 yesterday. (Picture here). Here's how the article begins:
FOR THE PAST week, I have been carrying around a new hand-held, wireless device that is simultaneously the best personal digital assistant I have ever used and the most capable cellphone.
It looks like a flip-phone and makes and receives calls with ease. It has a large screen, and can surf the Web and send and receive e-mail. It also has a full keyboard that makes composing e-mails or memos a breeze. It uses the Palm operating system and can synchronize dates and addresses with a PC.
Yet, despite all that power, this device is shorter and narrower than a Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC, or even a Palm V. About the size of a wallet and under 6 ounces in weight, it feels great in the hand and fits easily in a pocket.
This new product is the Treo 180 from Handspring. It costs $399 and will be available in early January. Designed by Jeff Hawkins, the man who invented the Palm Pilot and the Handspring Visor, the Treo is a true breakthrough. Unlike other combo devices, which were either phones with Palms jammed into them or Palms with phone features added, the Treo is a true hybrid. It was designed from the ground up to be a new kind of device, which the company calls a "communicator."
I used to work for the U.S. Navy, and we once negotiated with DR for rights to embed a custom version of CP/M in one of our systems. After months of painful haggling, we finally gave up when they wanted many many thousands of dollars (I dimly recollect in the neighborhood of $100K) for the source code, and just wrote what we needed for a fraction of what they were asking. They could have had a significant amount of money plus per-platform license fees, but instead chose to piss us off. Idiots.
How much of a problem is this really? Not that many people are going to let their neighbors have unfettered access to their network. I sure wouldn't. I can just see the Secret Service kicking in my door when some goober neighbor threatens the President via my IP. Not to mention them downloading child porn and nuclear weapon plans, while sharing software from companies who are known for their attack-shark lawyers. I think most people who have the brain cells to put a wireless network together are going to realize these drawbacks and have the same reaction.
I wonder what they all did with them...
Well, I took a look at mine, thought, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" and it's been living in my closet ever since. I keep it just because it's such an interesting artifact of a nutty era, and because I may one day want a barcode scanner for some reason. I'm a techie, not your usual trust-fund baby or CEO reader of Forbes, so I presume most of the rest of the readers pitched them within seconds.
It may not be a necessity for your slow internet connection, but at these speeds you'll be able to have things like wireless video servers and other fun things. You'll ultimately be able to carry your info/entertainment appliances around anywhere in your house and wirelessly access the equipment that serves them. I've had to crawl under my house many times to snake the various cables around down there, and it's a real pain. Particularly so when I reconfigure a room and now the wiring is in the wrong place. In the future, you'll just move the television, computer, or whatever to its new location, and there you are.
As for range, this article says, "We carried the workstation around our offices with some freedom within a range of 75 feet or so with no deterioration in quality until very substantial impediments (heavy concrete walls) interrupted the signal."
A 75 ft distance would be more than enough for most homes, if the WAP were in the center.
The lesson to be derived is that the effectiveness is in inverse proportion to the ease with which it's generated.
For phone calls and letters, it takes a surprisingly small number to cause the representative to take notice. I witnessed this firsthand when a friend of mine in PR organized a letter-and-fax campaign to support a particular design for a public library. Just 50 or so (each uniquely generated by an individual) made the city council members think that a huge groundswell of public opinion was underway.
This brings to mind something that I've thought of recently. How come datacomm companies such as Linksys or DLink haven't come out with a hardware router/firewall product that incorporates virus scanning on all traffic? Seems to me that it would be a better way to handle the problem, since it would cut the human out of the loop. The hardware could update itself silently, and not only keep you from being infected, but prevent you from infecting others. In fact, I see this as something that could be incorporated directly in a cable modem.
Take a look at this article on gamedev.net. It might contain what you're after.
Of course, if he wanted to do some misusing himself, he's now got a fall-guy.
I wonder how he tracked the guy down, by the way?
Not sure what Hemos means by better output, but the larger hard drive is no problem. I hacked a second, 80 gig, drive into my Tivo and have it up to 128 hours capacity. Others have hacked in even larger capacity drives in both primary and secondary and boosted their capacity into the multiple hundreds of hours. At that level, it must start getting tough to manage all the programming, though.
I think the failure of this thing is more due to the keyboard and mouse than anything else. If I want those things, I'd use a true laptop. A truely useful network appliance, on the other hand, would be closer to a large-screen PocketPC or Palm. Something with enough screen real estate to be useful, but no keyboard or mouse, just a finger or stylus. You could cradle it in one arm and input to it with the other like you would a clipboard. And it should have the ability to play streaming audio so that it could be used like a portable radio. I'd love something like that, so I could tote it all over the house and use it without having to set it down on something. Some of webpads like the Viewsonic 100 are getting close.
There's always a way, even in very vigilant organizations, assuming you're willing to take the trouble and sustain the risks. An, ahem, acquaintence once wanted into a room that was protected by an electronic combination lock. He put invisible ultraviolet powder on the keys and went back a few hours later to see which had been rubbed off. It was a simple matter to try the limited number of combos to gain entry.
The Linksys PC Card is terrible. Ten unobstructed feet from my WAP (a Linksys WAP 11, which I'm quite happy with) and the signal strength was barely 50%. Completely unusable 30 feet away thru a wall. Switching to an Orinoco Silver cured these problems. And I'm not the only one who had this difficulty; others on the alt.internet.wireless newsgroup report the same poor reception problem.