homer_ca writes:
I think the Windows error reporting service can only handle application errors and non-fatal system errors. If there was a BSOD or a hard freeze, the service wouldn't be running any more to report the crash, although theoretically it's possible for the service to check for a BSOD crash dump file and send a report after rebooting.
That is exactly what ti does. My girlfriend's laptop (XP Home) had a defective heat sink, so the vid card was overheating and crashing Windows. After it came back up, it sent off an error report to MS. (BTW, free repair, compaq paid Airborne Express shipping both ways, and had online maintenance tracking. Not too shabby.)
Perhaps because Opera *still* is a huge PITA, as their JavaScript support is astoundingly bass-ackward. As a web developer, I would rather support NS 4.7 *and* WML that deal with Opera.
Heavily snipped from aerojad:
Well the idea sounds cool and all, but isn't this just a bit too involved to help people come up with and remember what will become basically random strings of characters? [...] When it comes to cracking, wouldn't you have just about the same odds of guessing what random password the person got through inkblots with what the person would have got with a random character generator?
[ x ] You have greatly misunderstood password cracking. HTH, HAND.
Or, more helpfully...
Then entire point of this system is to help people memorize passwords that are hard to guess. The passwords that this system generates are hard to distinguish from random noise* but, unlike a stream of random characters, are easy to remember.
The way real password crackers work is by looking through a dictionary. They typically use all sorts of heuristics, such as looking for single words, dates, words with "i"s replaced with "1"s, storing and looking for previously cracked passwords (so if you know bob's password on system 1 is "sghjkhfiow34hi", you can add that to your cracker for system 2). After they exhaust all of these passwords, they start looking for combinations of words. Finally, as a last resort, they start looking at random-looking passwords.
These two points are connected by the fact that people are lazy. If you're a sysadmin, and you assign your users "good", randomly-generate passwords, they'll write them on a sticky note and put them on their monitor. A $50 bribe to the cleaning person will buy an attacker a handful of passwords. If you're an e-commerce site, and you assign you customers random passwords, you will find that your only customers are idiot savants.
OTOH, if you let your users/customers generate their own passwords, they'll choose something predictable, and their passwords will quickly fall to an offline cracker.
The touted benefit of this method is that you give your users/customers the inkblots one at a time, collect 2 characters per inkblot, and at the end of the session you have a password that your users can easily remember, but that password crackers, and even 3v1l people who know the user, will not be able to guess.**
.
Footnote 1: Yes, the passwords that come out of this system will have a fairly predictable distribution of characters. The even digits will have the distribution of the first letters of words, and the odd ones will have the distribution of final letters of words. It's still a much larger password space than typical passwords.
Footnote 2: It remains to be seen how useful this system will actually be. This system takes much more time than my current method of "choose n characters from/dev/random and write them in my 3DES-encrypted Palm Memo Pad replacement," and I actually care about password security. It may be easy for people to remember their inkblot passwords, but it will take quite a while to generate the password in the first place. I think that level of inconvenience will prove insurmountable for applications like e-commerce. It may well work for enterprises, where your choice is "Follow the policy or clean out your desk."
ac writes:
There are photos available on the CNN site:
"Giant sea creature baffles Chilean scientists"
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/07/02/chile.science.reut/index.html
Unless someone has already posted
aziraphale writes
Why would I want a laptop with a bigger screen than my 12.1" one if I don't actually get that many more pixels?
Your eyes aren't that great, and you can't resolve pixels at 120 dpi.
You have a desktop monitor that you use in addition to your laptop's screen, and you want the resolutions to match up. (I do this with my 15" tiBook and 17" Studisplay at home. I'm quite grateful for the relatively low res on the tiBook screen.)
You give presentations on your laptop, and want people across the table to be able to see.
The author claims that the P4 is "Faster on integer single-processor tasks, which is what most people use most of the time."
This is patently false. Typically, users run more than one program at a time. At the very least, there's an application, and the operating system. The machine I'm typing this on has 40 processes going, totalling a few hundred threads. Single-porcessor systems may have been king back in 1995, but these days you can typically make excellent use of multiple processors.
I just went to Dell's site and configured a dual-processor 3.02GHz Xenon with 240 Gigs of 7200RMP IDE, disk, DVD-RW, and a Gig of RAM. Cost: $4,351
I went to Apple's site and configured dual-processor 2GHz G5 with 250 Gigs of 7200RMP IDE disk, DVD-RW, anda Gig of RAM. Cost: $3,374
So, let's see, the Mac is 10-25% faster, and costs 30% less.
If you care about bang for the buck, you should buy a Mac. (Of course, after replacing all your software, you'd be behind. See if they'll let you switch platforms on the next upgrade cycle.)
Do the work for 2 weeks, then threaten to quit immediately unless you are paid overtime, including back pay.
This works best if you can convince several of your coworkers to go along. Of course, you can expect to be fired/laid off as soon as you become non-essential if you do this.
The only problems with Laser weapons are that they are illegial under the Geneva conventions, as are any weapons that are designed to permanently blind a person.
AFAIK, laser weapons aren't specifically banned, only weapons that are designed to blind. This weapon is not designed to blind, it's designed to drill a hole through you.
The problem is the energy.. there's just no way to have that much energy mobile in any form other than chemical (explosive) as it is now. Nuclear would work, but they don't make those in standard NATO cartridges.
If you had read the article, you would see that this device is, indeed, nuclear-powered. It uses alpha-radiation as a heat source; the entire stock is a vessel for hot pressurized gas.
My concern is that each weapon has a untra-high temperature and pressure gas container on it. One imagines that rupturing that container would be sufficient to take out the whole squad.
AC writes:
Of course, now everyone is back to gasoline. I wonder what would happen to diesel technology if F1 or somesuch changed to diesel
Interesting question. I mean, theoretically, they should. Diesel has a greater energy density than gasoline, which would mean that the cars could be smaller and lighter. (I imagine they'd do that, rather than increase the sinage, since AFAIK tire wear is the limiting factor.)
First of all, ethanol isn't banned on airplanes. Hell, they hand out free bottles of it on intrnational flights. (Hello, vodka!)
Also, new planes will soon have power on all seats. The only reason that they don't is that they can currently get people to pay for business-class upgrades in order to get juice. All new 777's have individual LCD monitors for each seat in coach class, a couple years ago, you had to crane your neck in order to see the in-flight movie. It will take a while, but as soon as one airline (I'm guessing British Air) orders it on their planes, everyone will quickly have it. Yay, capitalism!
OTOH, a power-source that was cheap, safe, power-dense, and refillable would be really cool. THe current solution of carrying around extra LiIon packs is not really doable. If they could get power densities good enough that a couple tiny bottles of ethanol could keep your laptop going for 8 hours, it would make mobile computing much easier. The only problem would be the regulation of fuel sales. Would you have to go to the liquor store to buy more power for your laptop?
AC writes
>The only significant input is sunlight, the only significants outputs are milk and electricity.
And of course, the cow... which after a few years of producing milk and methane for us will do a nice job as leather jackets, shoes and burgers.
Actually, I know milk cow doesn't turn into burger (too tough for picky Americans), and I doubt it turns into jackets (too many scars from a long life), but shoes, sure, and possibly also pet food or *shudder* cow food. (Go go gadget BSE!)
EllisDees writes:
The methane is being generated no matter how you look at it. So the question is do we just let it escape into the atmosphere or do we burn it, producing energy + H2O + CO2.
The argument for the digestors is actually a bit stringer than that. When dealing with manure, you pretty much have 3 options:
Dump in in a big pile/bury it/etc.
This results in anerobic decomposition, which produces methane. In additon to being a very effictive (bad) greenhouse gas, methane is smelly. Also, the resulting composte can have weeds and pathogens in it.
"Properly" (aerobically) compost it.
This results in carbon dioxide and high-quality compost. CO2 is a much less effective greenhouse gas than methane, so this is a pretty good choice. There was a recent/. article about this.
Compost it at a high temperature in an oxygen-free environment, collect the methane, and feed it into a generator.
This is the most complicated method, but it's pretty rockin'. You end up wth the CO2 and high quality maure, but also with a bunch of electricity. Basically, it's a short-cycle renewable loop. Grass takes energy from the sun, CO2 from the air, and nutrients from the soil, and makes more grass. Cows eat the grass and make more cow, milk, and cow poop. You sell the milk, and turn the poop into CO2, soil nutrients, and electricity. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only significant input is sunlight, the only significants outputs are milk and electricity.
To be fair, giving subscribers a view into the future has 2 advantages for linked sites: 1) You get some warning. Not a lot, sure, but maybe enough that you could convert a dynamic page to a static snapshot, saving your database from being hosed. 2) To some small degree, it spreads out the load on your server. This is a good thing.
I highly reccomend VisCheck for anyone who designs things to be used. It's a free service that simulares various forms of colorblindness. I've found it very helpful over the years.
DavidpFritz writes
(2) Moderation is biased torwards early posters, and as such it would provide a disincentive for non-subscribers to post, thereby reducing the amount of discussion. This could be a good thing, since subscribers (hopefully!) provide more worthwhile reading.
Personally, I bristle at the suggestion that this is a good thing. It may be true that subscribers are statistically better posters, but letting subscribers post for 20 minutes before the unwashed masses even see the article raises the bar quite high for non-subscriber posters.
If an article comes already filled in with 40 posts, I suggest that it will create a strong disinsentive for non-subscribers to post thoughtful discussions. Of course, the losers who fire off some crap without even reading the article will continue to do so. If this scenerio plays out, the quality of posts on/. will decline.
Another advantage of not letting posts on future articles is that it will encourage subscribers who see the article early to actually think about their posts, instead of just firing something off.
Re:Near Ground Ozone _IS_ an environmental problem
on
Ozone As Pesticide
·
· Score: 1
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'd be interested in knowing what the source of the poor air quality is. If it's pesticides & particulates, then ozone would be great. If it's unburned hydrocarbons from tractors than they should either: a) Not use ozone or b) Clean up emissions from their tractors
Slashdot Mirror
That's what we did.
Look, man, most places have shitty products and bad support. Don't get me started about the POS Dell "servers" we have at work.
It's a Presario 1500T. It was getting quite hot above the keyboard on the right side, and the CD-ROM tray (when ejected) was even hotter.
Perhaps because Opera *still* is a huge PITA, as their JavaScript support is astoundingly bass-ackward. As a web developer, I would rather support NS 4.7 *and* WML that deal with Opera.
AFAIK, they can declare the filings "sensitive" and they don't go public for a year.
Or, more helpfully...
- Then entire point of this system is to help people memorize passwords that are hard to guess. The passwords that this system generates are hard to distinguish from random noise* but, unlike a stream of random characters, are easy to remember.
- The way real password crackers work is by looking through a dictionary. They typically use all sorts of heuristics, such as looking for single words, dates, words with "i"s replaced with "1"s, storing and looking for previously cracked passwords (so if you know bob's password on system 1 is "sghjkhfiow34hi", you can add that to your cracker for system 2). After they exhaust all of these passwords, they start looking for combinations of words. Finally, as a last resort, they start looking at random-looking passwords.
These two points are connected by the fact that people are lazy. If you're a sysadmin, and you assign your users "good", randomly-generate passwords, they'll write them on a sticky note and put them on their monitor. A $50 bribe to the cleaning person will buy an attacker a handful of passwords. If you're an e-commerce site, and you assign you customers random passwords, you will find that your only customers are idiot savants.OTOH, if you let your users/customers generate their own passwords, they'll choose something predictable, and their passwords will quickly fall to an offline cracker.
The touted benefit of this method is that you give your users/customers the inkblots one at a time, collect 2 characters per inkblot, and at the end of the session you have a password that your users can easily remember, but that password crackers, and even 3v1l people who know the user, will not be able to guess.**
.
Footnote 1: Yes, the passwords that come out of this system will have a fairly predictable distribution of characters. The even digits will have the distribution of the first letters of words, and the odd ones will have the distribution of final letters of words. It's still a much larger password space than typical passwords.
Footnote 2: It remains to be seen how useful this system will actually be. This system takes much more time than my current method of "choose n characters from /dev/random and write them in my 3DES-encrypted Palm Memo Pad replacement," and I actually care about password security. It may be easy for people to remember their inkblot passwords, but it will take quite a while to generate the password in the first place. I think that level of inconvenience will prove insurmountable for applications like e-commerce. It may well work for enterprises, where your choice is "Follow the policy or clean out your desk."
What about a beowolf cluster.. of... oh, right
- Your eyes aren't that great, and you can't resolve pixels at 120 dpi.
- You have a desktop monitor that you use in addition to your laptop's screen, and you want the resolutions to match up. (I do this with my 15" tiBook and 17" Studisplay at home. I'm quite grateful for the relatively low res on the tiBook screen.)
- You give presentations on your laptop, and want people across the table to be able to see.
HTH, HANDThe author claims that the P4 is "Faster on integer single-processor tasks, which is what most people use most of the time."
This is patently false. Typically, users run more than one program at a time. At the very least, there's an application, and the operating system. The machine I'm typing this on has 40 processes going, totalling a few hundred threads. Single-porcessor systems may have been king back in 1995, but these days you can typically make excellent use of multiple processors.
I just went to Dell's site and configured a dual-processor 3.02GHz Xenon with 240 Gigs of 7200RMP IDE, disk, DVD-RW, and a Gig of RAM. Cost: $4,351
I went to Apple's site and configured dual-processor 2GHz G5 with 250 Gigs of 7200RMP IDE disk, DVD-RW, anda Gig of RAM. Cost: $3,374
So, let's see, the Mac is 10-25% faster, and costs 30% less.
If you care about bang for the buck, you should buy a Mac. (Of course, after replacing all your software, you'd be behind. See if they'll let you switch platforms on the next upgrade cycle.)
Silly slashdotter, read the linked article. The average watermelon has 4 pounds of rind. 16/4 = 4
And do you really want to eat 4 pounds of watermelon at a sitting?
- Do the work for 2 weeks, then threaten to quit immediately unless you are paid overtime, including back pay.
This works best if you can convince several of your coworkers to go along. Of course, you can expect to be fired/laid off as soon as you become non-essential if you do this.My concern is that each weapon has a untra-high temperature and pressure gas container on it. One imagines that rupturing that container would be sufficient to take out the whole squad.
First of all, ethanol isn't banned on airplanes. Hell, they hand out free bottles of it on intrnational flights. (Hello, vodka!)
Also, new planes will soon have power on all seats. The only reason that they don't is that they can currently get people to pay for business-class upgrades in order to get juice. All new 777's have individual LCD monitors for each seat in coach class, a couple years ago, you had to crane your neck in order to see the in-flight movie. It will take a while, but as soon as one airline (I'm guessing British Air) orders it on their planes, everyone will quickly have it. Yay, capitalism!
OTOH, a power-source that was cheap, safe, power-dense, and refillable would be really cool. THe current solution of carrying around extra LiIon packs is not really doable. If they could get power densities good enough that a couple tiny bottles of ethanol could keep your laptop going for 8 hours, it would make mobile computing much easier. The only problem would be the regulation of fuel sales. Would you have to go to the liquor store to buy more power for your laptop?
This results in anerobic decomposition, which produces methane. In additon to being a very effictive (bad) greenhouse gas, methane is smelly. Also, the resulting composte can have weeds and pathogens in it.
This results in carbon dioxide and high-quality compost. CO2 is a much less effective greenhouse gas than methane, so this is a pretty good choice. There was a recent
This is the most complicated method, but it's pretty rockin'. You end up wth the CO2 and high quality maure, but also with a bunch of electricity. Basically, it's a short-cycle renewable loop. Grass takes energy from the sun, CO2 from the air, and nutrients from the soil, and makes more grass. Cows eat the grass and make more cow, milk, and cow poop. You sell the milk, and turn the poop into CO2, soil nutrients, and electricity. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only significant input is sunlight, the only significants outputs are milk and electricity.
To be fair, giving subscribers a view into the future has 2 advantages for linked sites:
1) You get some warning. Not a lot, sure, but maybe enough that you could convert a dynamic page to a static snapshot, saving your database from being hosed.
2) To some small degree, it spreads out the load on your server. This is a good thing.
I highly reccomend VisCheck for anyone who designs things to be used. It's a free service that simulares various forms of colorblindness. I've found it very helpful over the years.
If an article comes already filled in with 40 posts, I suggest that it will create a strong disinsentive for non-subscribers to post thoughtful discussions. Of course, the losers who fire off some crap without even reading the article will continue to do so. If this scenerio plays out, the quality of posts on /. will decline.
Another advantage of not letting posts on future articles is that it will encourage subscribers who see the article early to actually think about their posts, instead of just firing something off.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'd be interested in knowing what the source of the poor air quality is. If it's pesticides & particulates, then ozone would be great. If it's unburned hydrocarbons from tractors than they should either:
a) Not use ozone or
b) Clean up emissions from their tractors