Re:Here's another ancient one that DOES impact you
on
Oldest Supported Software?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Canada started working on its replacements long after the FAA but it looks like we'll get there sooner. Like the FAA, we initially contracted a system called CAATS that would have done most of the things proposed by AAS. Somewhere in the mid-90's it became obvious that the proposal was pie-in-the-sky and the contractors would never be able to deliver -- every time the players sat down to review the situation they ended up reducing the goals of the project and delaying the acceptance date. Since the existing systems were starting to fall apart we switched to off-the-shelf systems (HP Unix boxes with Sony 2kx2k displays) running software that emulated the old vector tube displays. The main computers were essentially unaware that they were talking to modern hardware. The privatized ATC system also started rewriting the host software to run under Unix, and will be replacing the old hardware in 2004-2005. At that point we will have a new host emulating an old host, talking to new displays emulating old displays. Once a bug-for-bug clone is operational, we will be able to look at modernizing the software to take advantage of the increased computing power available. The original CAATS project has been scaled back to the point where it's little more than a shim layer that manipulates data passing between the host and the displays.
The British have already purchased a few ATC support systems from Canada and are considering more of them. Since they are running on similar hardware, there's a good chance that we will see common software running on both sides of the Atlantic by the end of the decade.
The FAA has looked at some of our systems. As the parent post said, however, they no longer know how their own system works and are terrified at the prospect of changing just a portion lest the whole house of cards falls down.
BTW, with reference to the topic at hand, we are just now replacing our 30-year-old ATC weather system. The original OIDS system ran on an Interdata-70 system with core storage and tape I/O. The only significant changes in the last 30 years was the switch to TTL memory and the addition of a floppy controller (that simulates a tape device). We still boot the machine using the binary switches on the front panel.... The replacement system runs on a network of NT4 machines and has been installed at about half of our facilities. I'm hoping the old system is donated to a computer museum.
And, in all three, no members of the public remained to watch the ballot counting. Voter apathy is probably as high or higher in Canada than in the US.
One doesn't suggest the other. I think Canadians generally trust the system and sleep well knowing that the ballots are counted in the presence of people representing opposing sides. They get properly inflamed when the rules are violated (such as posting the eastern results before the western polls have closed), and many people stay up watching TV until after the winner is declared. You don't honestly expect people to stick around all afternoon just to watch their ballot box get counted, do you?
I've switched (back) to using credit cards instead of debit cards for point-of-service purchases, so that if I get defrauded, I end up with a huge CC bill (relatively) instead of an empty bank account.
You also get the benefit of their purchase profiling system when you use a CC. I have had a few occasions to talk to the nice people at VISA after my card was used to make an atypical purchase. Most of the time it was me ordering something by phone or online, but once it WAS a fraudulent purchase (someone grabbed my card number in Canada and then tried to use it to buy luggage at a travel agency in Hong Kong). I have never heard of a debit purchase being questioned or refused (as long as there is funds available), which leads me to think the banks place a lot of trust in the PIN.
This is good news for Linux in general, good to hear this. Wonder if the "Windows Tax" will still apply like it did with
IBM, tho?
GateWay Canada used to sell machines with RedHat preinstalled. As I recall, the price was almost identical to the price with Windows installed. They also absolutely refused to sell the machine without any OS (I prefer Debian and don't want to pay for RedHat, either). All of this suggests that they are paying a Windows tax and will pass it on to you regardless of what OS you want.
Instead, NASA's plan now calls for building an unmanned craft, which would be launched on a throwaway rocket and attach
itself to the Hubble to steer the telescope safely into the Pacific Ocean -- eliminating any possibility that the 12.5-ton
telescope could fall on, say, Mexico City or Miami.
- If the same e-mail attachment comes through your network a few hundred times, it must be a virus.
- If the same kilobyte-long web address keeps getting requested, it must be a worm.
The problem with this type of approach is that you won't recognize that "the same message keeps appearing" until you've seen it at least twice. That's too late since the first occurrence will infect the target machine. Once the virus is behind your IPS you may as well not have one.
One more reason to use a credit card: pre authorized payments. I *never* give a company access to my bank (chequing) account if I have the possibility of having them bill my Visa card. The reason is that I can call Visa and have a charge refused and discontinue the authorization, whereas the banks make it difficult to recover errors (or fraud) and insist that the customer contact the billing company to have the payments discontinued.
Ob "security through obscurity" post
on
Security FUD On Linux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not the amount of holes in your software, is whether or not the typical cracker knows how to exploit them.
That's why Microsoft is so committed to solving security through obscurity -- they believe that keeping the flaws secret will keep crackers from developing exploits.
The "study" will also no doubt find that Microsoft fixes their bugs much faster than open source programmers since the Windows bug and downloadable fix are often announced on the same day.
The One Man Star Wars Trilogy sells out just about every performance. When Charles was held-over for the "Best of the Vancouver Fringe Festival" the entire week was sold out almost immediately. He was then held-over after the "Best Of" run for another sold-out week. The only reason I got to go at all is because his brother arranged to have two family passes set aside for me.
At the end of the show I attended he gave away an original 1970's figurine to the first person to correctly identify the only "underwear shot" in the trilogy -- who showed their underwear and in what scene...?
The post said that some might quibble with the changes he made to a few memorable lines. I have to point out that he didn't make mistakes, but simply took license with them to add some humour. I loved the bit he added toward the end of the third movie where Mark Hamill realizes his acting career is over....
I didn't see Highlander 2, but was duped into Highlander 3. Much like The Matrix, there should have been only one!
When "Highlander: Endgame" came out one of the people at work organized a group movie night. After the movie she apologized to the group right there in the lobby. I can't believe they're making a 5th movie in that series (due in 2004).
kernel-2.6.0-test9.tar.bz2 is not a valid Win32 application
Try associating WinZip with the bz2 extension. I haven't tried opening a bz2 file yet, but I'm able to download.gz files and open them by double-clicking in Explorer -- WinZip pops up a message box saying that the compressed file contains a tar archive, and asks me if I would like to have the tar archive extracted to a tempdir and opened....
It seems somehow fitting that SCO would link to FUD in the jargon file, since the previous entry in the jargon file is "fuck me harder". After all, isn't that what SCO is doing to their shareholders?
Not yet. Right now they're playing the game of "See how big it is?" The people buying shares now won't see the ropes and whips until it's too late.
I'll just take your word for it and you just saved me the effort of actually checking the hash.
Slashdot has been saying "use the mirrors" for every version of the kernel. Someone always posts a torrent link. Flamewars about the risk of using "unofficial" torrents ensues. This leads one to ask "why the heck doesn't kernel.org host a torrent of their own?" I'm sure it would save them enough bandwidth to cover the cost of introducing the feature.
This is great! Pretty soon I can go through life without owning everything, and everything I use will essentially be rented. I will be relieved of the material need to own things. "Imagine a world with no posessions."
That's how the upper class live. Once you get past the "Wealthy Barber" level of financial planning, most books recommend creating an "incorporated self" that is, in essense, a single-shareholder holding company that owns all of your belongings, contracts out your services and diverts a substantial portion of the resulting income into tax-deferred investment accounts. The Porsche becomes a "company car", etc., etc. The "legitimate" reason for incorporating is to protect your assets from hungry lawyers, but the tax deferrals that come with that structure are arguably of more benefit.
The problem is that if you give a child a cellphone like this, it is the same as handing them your credit card.
The providers in my area all offer various "kid-proof" packages that feature a prepaid balance, usually don't permit added-cost services like SMS or web surfing, and either don't allow long-distance or limit it to a single pre-registered number (known as the "call-home option"). Once the kids use up their monthly quota they can only call 9-1-1 or the call-home number. This teaches kids to budget their time, and prevents the parents from getting a $200 invoice for exceeding the plan limits.
Have a CAPTCHA randomly spit out 10 words to the screen and have the user pick the 3 that are associated with one another,
say for example HOUSE, LOG, FRONT, CAT, BROWN, DOG, CART, RUNNING, HOUR, MOUSE.
F u cn red th mesg thn u r abl 2 d-cyfer non-wrds. Btteer yet, why not tkae avdnatge of humnas abliity to isntcnictvely rarreange ltteers to mkae wrods out of nnosesne?
Yet these companies/individuals know that their marketing hardly ever works (what's the reply rate of spam? Something like.0001%?). So why do they keep coming to work? Are they idiots?
While 0.0001% would be a poor reply rate for conventional advertising, the internet offers an economy of scale that makes this a financially viable business as the commission from the one-in-a-million people who respond is enough to pay for the cost of delivery (plus profit).
I submitted an article this week (rejected, of course) about a National Post Business Magazine article on the world's #4 spammer who says he realized the potential for income when his first batch of spam sold 40,000 decks of playing cards depicting Iraqi leaders the U.S.A. wanted to capture. He now boasts a sale rate of close to 0.2%, which is phenominal for his line of business.
The article also mentions that in just one spam run, 6000 people purchased penis-enlarging pills for US$50 per bottle. How many emails can a spammer send on the commission from $300,000 worth of orders for a product that is probably little more than sugar?
The reason people keep spamming is because other people keep buying their crap. If it wasn't profitable they wouldn't do it.
"Nor indeed will any spammers try suing us again after the very public fiasco Marin's junior ambulance-chaser endured..." So he's calling his lawyer who saved his ass an "ambulance chaser". jeebus. this guy is probably in ass in real life.
Marin is the spammer, right? The "ambulance chaser" would therefore be the lawyer that lost, not the one that saved the anti-spammer's ass.
The judge involved... has dismissed the case with prejudice, which means that all of the spammers arguments were denied.
The important bit is that it's with prejudice, which means that the judge not only ruled against the spammers but also ruled against their entire line of reasoning in a way that sets a precedent applicable to other cases.
Even if most spam does currently originate in America, if the U.S. somehow passes and enforces an effective anti-spam law, there is effectively zero cost involved in these spammers moving there business out of the States and still spamming Americans.
The solution there is fairly simple. Spammers have a product they want to sell. That product will usually originate in the country where the spam recipient lives (ie: U.S.A.), so even if the spammer hides behind foreign remailers you can still identify one of the parties that are within U.S. jurisdiction. The government can therefore lay a charge of "conspiracy to deliver spam" against John Doe and the U.S.-based company that contracted the spammer.
It sounds like something you would see on the Twilight Zone. Is there a plot archive online? (My favorite was the morality play where people were given a box with a button on it, and if they pressed the button they would get $1,000,000 but someone they didn't know would die....)
now show me someone living in a state with fluoridated water with excellent teeth despite no dental care
I grew up in a Canadian province that had flouride in the water (Nova Scotia). To say my dental habits were "lacking" throughout my teen years would be an understatement. When I recently moved to British Columbia (non-flouride province) the dentist took one look in my mouth and commented that he knew I was from out of province because my teeth were in remarkably good condition for my age. I'm a believer.
Slashdot Mirror
Canada started working on its replacements long after the FAA but it looks like we'll get there sooner. Like the FAA, we initially contracted a system called CAATS that would have done most of the things proposed by AAS. Somewhere in the mid-90's it became obvious that the proposal was pie-in-the-sky and the contractors would never be able to deliver -- every time the players sat down to review the situation they ended up reducing the goals of the project and delaying the acceptance date. Since the existing systems were starting to fall apart we switched to off-the-shelf systems (HP Unix boxes with Sony 2kx2k displays) running software that emulated the old vector tube displays. The main computers were essentially unaware that they were talking to modern hardware. The privatized ATC system also started rewriting the host software to run under Unix, and will be replacing the old hardware in 2004-2005. At that point we will have a new host emulating an old host, talking to new displays emulating old displays. Once a bug-for-bug clone is operational, we will be able to look at modernizing the software to take advantage of the increased computing power available. The original CAATS project has been scaled back to the point where it's little more than a shim layer that manipulates data passing between the host and the displays.
The British have already purchased a few ATC support systems from Canada and are considering more of them. Since they are running on similar hardware, there's a good chance that we will see common software running on both sides of the Atlantic by the end of the decade.
The FAA has looked at some of our systems. As the parent post said, however, they no longer know how their own system works and are terrified at the prospect of changing just a portion lest the whole house of cards falls down.
BTW, with reference to the topic at hand, we are just now replacing our 30-year-old ATC weather system. The original OIDS system ran on an Interdata-70 system with core storage and tape I/O. The only significant changes in the last 30 years was the switch to TTL memory and the addition of a floppy controller (that simulates a tape device). We still boot the machine using the binary switches on the front panel.... The replacement system runs on a network of NT4 machines and has been installed at about half of our facilities. I'm hoping the old system is donated to a computer museum.
One doesn't suggest the other. I think Canadians generally trust the system and sleep well knowing that the ballots are counted in the presence of people representing opposing sides. They get properly inflamed when the rules are violated (such as posting the eastern results before the western polls have closed), and many people stay up watching TV until after the winner is declared. You don't honestly expect people to stick around all afternoon just to watch their ballot box get counted, do you?
You also get the benefit of their purchase profiling system when you use a CC. I have had a few occasions to talk to the nice people at VISA after my card was used to make an atypical purchase. Most of the time it was me ordering something by phone or online, but once it WAS a fraudulent purchase (someone grabbed my card number in Canada and then tried to use it to buy luggage at a travel agency in Hong Kong). I have never heard of a debit purchase being questioned or refused (as long as there is funds available), which leads me to think the banks place a lot of trust in the PIN.
GateWay Canada used to sell machines with RedHat preinstalled. As I recall, the price was almost identical to the price with Windows installed. They also absolutely refused to sell the machine without any OS (I prefer Debian and don't want to pay for RedHat, either). All of this suggests that they are paying a Windows tax and will pass it on to you regardless of what OS you want.
I know of a place in Utah....
- If the same kilobyte-long web address keeps getting requested, it must be a worm.
The problem with this type of approach is that you won't recognize that "the same message keeps appearing" until you've seen it at least twice. That's too late since the first occurrence will infect the target machine. Once the virus is behind your IPS you may as well not have one.
One more reason to use a credit card: pre authorized
payments. I *never* give a company access to my bank (chequing)
account if I have the possibility of having them
bill my Visa card. The reason is that I can call
Visa and have a charge refused and discontinue the authorization,
whereas the banks make it difficult to recover errors (or fraud) and
insist that the customer contact the billing company to
have the payments discontinued.
That's why Microsoft is so committed to solving security through obscurity -- they believe that keeping the flaws secret will keep crackers from developing exploits.
The "study" will also no doubt find that Microsoft fixes their bugs much faster than open source programmers since the Windows bug and downloadable fix are often announced on the same day.
The One Man Star Wars Trilogy sells out just about every performance. When Charles was held-over for the "Best of the Vancouver Fringe Festival" the entire week was sold out almost immediately. He was then held-over after the "Best Of" run for another sold-out week. The only reason I got to go at all is because his brother arranged to have two family passes set aside for me.
The post said that some might quibble with the changes he made to a few memorable lines. I have to point out that he didn't make mistakes, but simply took license with them to add some humour. I loved the bit he added toward the end of the third movie where Mark Hamill realizes his acting career is over....
When "Highlander: Endgame" came out one of the people at work organized a group movie night. After the movie she apologized to the group right there in the lobby. I can't believe they're making a 5th movie in that series (due in 2004).
Try associating WinZip with the bz2 extension. I haven't tried opening a bz2 file yet, but I'm able to download .gz files and open them by double-clicking in Explorer -- WinZip pops up a message box saying that the compressed file contains a tar archive, and asks me if I would like to have the tar archive extracted to a tempdir and opened....
Not yet. Right now they're playing the game of "See how big it is?" The people buying shares now won't see the ropes and whips until it's too late.
Slashdot has been saying "use the mirrors" for every version of the kernel. Someone always posts a torrent link. Flamewars about the risk of using "unofficial" torrents ensues. This leads one to ask "why the heck doesn't kernel.org host a torrent of their own?" I'm sure it would save them enough bandwidth to cover the cost of introducing the feature.
That's how the upper class live. Once you get past the "Wealthy Barber" level of financial planning, most books recommend creating an "incorporated self" that is, in essense, a single-shareholder holding company that owns all of your belongings, contracts out your services and diverts a substantial portion of the resulting income into tax-deferred investment accounts. The Porsche becomes a "company car", etc., etc. The "legitimate" reason for incorporating is to protect your assets from hungry lawyers, but the tax deferrals that come with that structure are arguably of more benefit.
The providers in my area all offer various "kid-proof" packages that feature a prepaid balance, usually don't permit added-cost services like SMS or web surfing, and either don't allow long-distance or limit it to a single pre-registered number (known as the "call-home option"). Once the kids use up their monthly quota they can only call 9-1-1 or the call-home number. This teaches kids to budget their time, and prevents the parents from getting a $200 invoice for exceeding the plan limits.
That would be the "brown log house", right?
F u cn red th mesg thn u r abl 2 d-cyfer non-wrds.
Btteer yet, why not tkae avdnatge of humnas abliity to isntcnictvely rarreange ltteers to mkae wrods out of nnosesne?
While 0.0001% would be a poor reply rate for conventional advertising, the internet offers an economy of scale that makes this a financially viable business as the commission from the one-in-a-million people who respond is enough to pay for the cost of delivery (plus profit).
I submitted an article this week (rejected, of course) about a National Post Business Magazine article on the world's #4 spammer who says he realized the potential for income when his first batch of spam sold 40,000 decks of playing cards depicting Iraqi leaders the U.S.A. wanted to capture. He now boasts a sale rate of close to 0.2%, which is phenominal for his line of business.
The article also mentions that in just one spam run, 6000 people purchased penis-enlarging pills for US$50 per bottle. How many emails can a spammer send on the commission from $300,000 worth of orders for a product that is probably little more than sugar?
The reason people keep spamming is because other people keep buying their crap. If it wasn't profitable they wouldn't do it.
Marin is the spammer, right? The "ambulance chaser" would therefore be the lawyer that lost, not the one that saved the anti-spammer's ass.
The important bit is that it's with prejudice, which means that the judge not only ruled against the spammers but also ruled against their entire line of reasoning in a way that sets a precedent applicable to other cases.
The solution there is fairly simple. Spammers have a product they want to sell. That product will usually originate in the country where the spam recipient lives (ie: U.S.A.), so even if the spammer hides behind foreign remailers you can still identify one of the parties that are within U.S. jurisdiction. The government can therefore lay a charge of "conspiracy to deliver spam" against John Doe and the U.S.-based company that contracted the spammer.
It sounds like something you would see on the Twilight Zone. Is there a plot archive online? (My favorite was the morality play where people were given a box with a button on it, and if they pressed the button they would get $1,000,000 but someone they didn't know would die....)
I believe the word you're looking for is icons. :-P
I grew up in a Canadian province that had flouride in the water (Nova Scotia). To say my dental habits were "lacking" throughout my teen years would be an understatement. When I recently moved to British Columbia (non-flouride province) the dentist took one look in my mouth and commented that he knew I was from out of province because my teeth were in remarkably good condition for my age. I'm a believer.