Good luck sueing the slovak police... there were cases were real harm was done and it took years to sort it out, sometimes at the european level (I am a Slovak living in Slovakia and following the local news).
Here it looks like the slovak police botched their job, but it took irish officers to make a royal mess of it;)
The local media coverage (by any means _not_ government friendly) says that
1) the slovak authorities informed the pilot who was still waiting for takeoff and he decided that this is not a threat and continued the flight
2) the Dublin airport was informed during the flight. They later reported back that they did not find any explosive, but the officer informed his boss two days (!) later, triggering the a bit chaotic operation.
From the information circulating I tend to believe that the Dublin airport was sitting on the failed catching of the "parcel" for two days and is doing damage control now.
I do see a point. There are applications that require a compiler - maybe not C on input, maybe not x86 on output, but if the compiler is written nicely, there are clearly reusable parts. Products of both my previous and current company include non-trivial compilers.
Unfortunately gcc is such complex project that there is nobody to speak to if we want to buy (parts of) it relicensed. We did this with another GPL product where the number of authors was small and we were able to negotiate. A BSD-licensed code would be a great advantage.
I understand that GPL people don't like the idea of using code in closed-source products. Fine, no problem with this, I contributed to quite a few GPL products - they help me to do the job, so I give something back. But my stance is that using a BSD-type licensed code in closed-source product is ethically OK as long as one gives back all patches and ideas or helps the product in other ways.
I would assume that this device can also detect when the cell phone does its intermittent "reaffiliation" with the network
Yup - normally it does it every few hours. It is possible to force the phone to do this - just jam the frequencies causing it to lose the network. Of course, this would be illegal, as this is a licensed band.
All network standards worth mentioning include the ability for the transmitters to adapt their power.
AFAIR at least GSM uses the full power when negotiating with the network - the adaptation schemes work during the call, but not during the control messages. The effects on my loudspeakers seem to support this theory:-)
> Make great stuff and you don't need protectionism.
Exactly.
I am living in one of the new European Union members (Slovakia), so I am of course biased in the opposite direction than the U.S. readers are. We need investments from big strong companies and we are trying to attract them as much as possible - lowering taxes, investing into infrastructure,... As long as there is no direct subvencing from the state (no idea how it is in China), it is fair competition and if you are really trusting in the free market, you can't really be principially against it.
Remember: a better living standard in the now poor countries will bring more potential customers also to the american companies.
Detailed calculations of NT7's orbit suggest that this asteroid already has impacted the Earth three times in the past, the last one being Mar 2, 1997... oops, all continents still here? Guess we should upgrade those Pentiums.
This is why it's an outstanding way to test people's knowledge.
It is not. In the real life your goal is to solve a problem with the tools at hand. Syntax is quite unimportant, the compiler will catch your typos and after a few days you don't make this type of mistakes. What is important is to know what your environment provides - e.g. what libraries there are and which methods are appropriate for the particular problem.
I don't know perl - it's hard to admit it on slashdot:-), but it is a fact. But I wrote a few utilities in perl. I don't remember every aspect of sh, csh, awk etc., but I did solve problems in these languages. I analyse, design and code in C++ - there was at least 6 months to 1 year between knowing the syntax well enough and knowing how to use C++ efficiently.
Written exams are okay, if the examiner ignores minor syntax errors, accepts the same number of bugs he/she would make and concentrates on the approach to the problem. Otherwise he/she is a bad examiner and shouldn't be examining others.
Those who read the article would realize that you're going to use antennae that focus the signal (i.e., use hyperbolic dishes)
At the provider side? For a few point-to-point customers yes, but normally you have an omnirange at the provider and (more or less ugly) directionals at the customer side.
I live in Slovakia, where there still is a monopoly for the wired local loop to the end of this year. We have no commercially available DSL yet. Of course the wireless is cheaper and everyone and his brother is using it for everything and does not give a sh*t about the regulations.
The band already is clogged in the bigger cities. It does not matter how one company plan the network - there are many and they are not going to plan it together.
The reach is no problem - I know of a few 20 km point-to-point links. The density is and the unregulated band is not a way. There are technologies in the regulated bands (FWA at 3.5 and 26 GHz here) that are meant to provide a high-speed local loop. WiFi as a last mile is a kludge - it will work but...
many folks won't be able to pay their May bills with only half their salary
I don't know whether this is typical for the U.S. lifestyle, but in the Europe you don't usually have such low reserve cash (not necessarily on the correct account, but accessible). The paycut was at least announced in advance...
I think it is still better than to be fired - at least you can search for another company while still having some income.
Last time I tested 2.4.18 the USB support was severely broken (uhci doesn't work, usb-uhci lockups right when inserting the module (or the other way round)). It worked fine in 2.4.17... Another example: half a year ago the fresh installation of Mandrake took my data for a breakfast. The reason was USB combined with devfs, it was actually quite reproducible. Alan Cox said something along "we have a reason why we don't enable devfs in Red Hat" after I reported the problems on linux-kernel.
I don't know whether Debian also quality-assures the kernel and makes own patches as the commercial distros do. If they don't, their concerns about stability are quite valid.
The 2.2 default with the ability to choose seems like a wise solution right now.
It could be that by leaking their knowledge of Chinese plans, the CIA is betting that they'll elect not to try it.
It could be that by manufacturing the information the CIA is betting that they'll elect not to try it.
Clever using of an information is a weapon, regardless of whether it is true or not. Having lived in a communist country until the commies fell in 1989 I know of quite many examples of how our and western propaganda manipulated the masses - the information of what was behind the iron curtain was comparably falsified on both sides of the fence...
Frankly, we have no idea what is and is not true. All we can is to speculate and that's what these hundreds of comments do.
Just what am I supposed to do with this - am I missing something? The already existing handhelds are smaller, lighter and even if I buy every type of accessory and CF card out there they are probably still cheaper. And there are some of them that are able to run Linux.
At $200 I would say "OK, nice platform for embedded solutions". But for an order of magnitude more I just don't see the gap that the CharmIT is trying to fill.
The people buying computer games are not living on a $17/month food budget. No. But where I live the new copy of MS Office XP Standard costs more than two average monthly net wages. And this is a country that hopes to get into the European Union in the next few years, not some thirld-world country.
The people know very well that warez is illegal, there is no big need to educate them. But until the economy grows enough the piracy is unavoidable.
Using of the alternatives is normally not an option because of interoperability. When our premier minister meets Bill Gates and is excited about how much he is "donating" when he gives the schools the software for much less price, we can only expect that the open formats don't have much priority in our country... Hell, the media of the neighbour state called Gates "the father of the Internet"!
The fact that they all have to fire off simultaneously, generating electromagnetic interference
Hmm... But in an async setup they maybe fire simultaneously - you simply don't know, it's up to the statistics. I fear that in that complex chips you will end with a system that works by pure coincidence - some picosecond fluctuation somewhere and you get one glitch per 1000 hours of operation.
It is probably not that simple and as someone wrote, the more proper name would be globally or locally synced. I fully agree with you that there is no reason to tie the bigger units to a single universal clock. But I think that on the lower levels you can get a more reliable design by using traditional approach.
I have no experience in chip design (so I don't know specific problems of trying to stuff tens of millions transistors onto a square inch), but I designed some non-trivial circuits.
Well, I think that the reason the async chips are not being used is quite simple - a clocked system is much easier to design and verify. You know how long before and after a clock edge your signal needs to be there to be recognised. You know that if these constraints match across your system, it will work. Yes, this makes the system as fast as its slowest link - some circuits operate near their limits, some are actually wasting the time. But it works. An asynchronous design would be a pure hell to debug - that's probably why the industry doesn't (yet) mess with it.
BTW, does anybody here remember analog computing? A bunch of cleverly connected operating amplifiers? These things were asynchronous, just as mother nature is. If you can get the physics work for you, bingo - compare the time the nature needs for raytracing a complex scene compared to a digital model:-) The only drawback is that the most of us prefer slow digital model of thermonuclear reaction and similar problems...
TCP waits for some time, whether it can stuff more bytes into the current packet, saving bandwidth - as far as I remember it is called Nagle algorithm and the usual timeout is 200 milliseconds with the maximum of 500 msec.
The overwhelming majority of people knowing important passwords should be able to type two to three characters in a 200 msec window and the whole password in 500 msec, making this hole less exploitable:-)
Why do you think they have no mobiles? Do a search for +Serbia +GSM and note the dates. In the Europe we started much later than in the U.S., but there are ex-communist countries (e.g. Czechia), where the penetration is 50% now.
BTW, as far as I remember the F-117 was spotted using the oldest detection technology available - human ears and eyes:-)
Actually the basic technology was demostrated more than ten years ago. It is called Tamara and it was developed in former Czechoslovakia for the communist block. I have no idea who owns the technology now, there were some legal battles (and LOTS of money) involved.
Tamara is a passive locator utilizing the signals emitted by the aircraft. And there are always some signals, it is a complex device with lot of electronics and it is a problem to ground the thing to properly shield them:-).
The locator consists of three mobile antennas spaced a few (tens of) km apart and a quite sophisticated statistical processing. This allows it to pull the signals from quite far below the noise level. Correlate the signals from the three antennas, match over the time and with possible vectors and you get a probability of an aircraft being here or there.
If you have signals from the external sources (so they, and not you get bombed), e.g. from the cellular towers, even better. This thing needs far less reflection than a normal radar.
A virus expert (one of makers of antivirus software AVG) I have never seen f2f but whom I know for 10 years from czech&slovak FIDO network confirmed that it exists. He also added that we can expect to see much more press articles regarding the virus as the actual instances of it:-) So as the title says, don't panic. The author is 19-year old student and apparently all he wants is publicity (how many of you hit the news in 19?:-))
It is quite bogus to link unemployment in former East Germany with encouraging software development in the Germany. Right now Germany is hungry for the software developers and tries to attract them from the whole world - East Europe, India,... There are green cards for 5 years and similar programs and if Germany does this, they must really see this as a problem.
I don't think the Bundeswehr really wants to switch from american software to software written by a bunch of Russians, Indians etc. I worked at Siemens Austria (I am a Slovak) and our team was two Slovaks, one Hungarian and our boss was from Iran. Now I work for another austrian company and the situation is not very different.
I think they will develop some security modules by their own staff and that will pretty much be it.
I guess they did it mosty to prevent RH itself from taking their work and use it without contributing.
Well, the whole discussion on the czech mailing list started after a company, that is distributing CDs of popular Linux software (RedHat, Debian, KDE,...) inclusive actualization service, tried to distribute the RPM in a form that allows to install it on the Red Hat 7.0 system.
The only change in the SuSE code was an updated spec file. Now the manager of SuSE CZ jumped in and wrote them that they are not allowed to do it.
I would kind of agree with them to place restrictions on the distribution of the package (it is better to do this than not having the code at all), but I don't agree with dividing the users into 'good', 'acceptable' and 'bad' based on what distribution they use.
Maybe they just want to release it for SuSE for debugging
No, the intent really is to lock out the competition. I cannot quote (it was a private e-mail), but the person (who has the right to speak for SuSE CZ) admitted it quite clearly.
Re:Health Effects of caffeine
on
Caffeine Vault
·
· Score: 1
ever wonder why Excedrin and some of the other headache medicines have caffeine in them? In part, it's because caffeine withdrawal in addicted patients (half of America it seems) can give you headaches.
AFAIK it's because of its effects on peripheral veins which then result in a changed blood circulation in the brain.
Why to take headache medicine when a cup of coffee is enough?
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck sueing the slovak police... there were cases were real harm was done and it took years to sort it out, sometimes at the european level (I am a Slovak living in Slovakia and following the local news).
Here it looks like the slovak police botched their job, but it took irish officers to make a royal mess of it ;)
The local media coverage (by any means _not_ government friendly) says that
1) the slovak authorities informed the pilot who was still waiting for takeoff and he decided that this is not a threat and continued the flight
2) the Dublin airport was informed during the flight. They later reported back that they did not find any explosive, but the officer informed his boss two days (!) later, triggering the a bit chaotic operation.
From the information circulating I tend to believe that the Dublin airport was sitting on the failed catching of the "parcel" for two days and is doing damage control now.
I do see a point. There are applications that require a compiler - maybe not C on input, maybe not x86 on output, but if the compiler is written nicely, there are clearly reusable parts. Products of both my previous and current company include non-trivial compilers.
Unfortunately gcc is such complex project that there is nobody to speak to if we want to buy (parts of) it relicensed. We did this with another GPL product where the number of authors was small and we were able to negotiate. A BSD-licensed code would be a great advantage.
I understand that GPL people don't like the idea of using code in closed-source products. Fine, no problem with this, I contributed to quite a few GPL products - they help me to do the job, so I give something back. But my stance is that using a BSD-type licensed code in closed-source product is ethically OK as long as one gives back all patches and ideas or helps the product in other ways.
I would assume that this device can also detect when the cell phone does its intermittent "reaffiliation" with the network
:-)
Yup - normally it does it every few hours. It is possible to force the phone to do this - just jam the frequencies causing it to lose the network. Of course, this would be illegal, as this is a licensed band.
All network standards worth mentioning include the ability for the transmitters to adapt their power.
AFAIR at least GSM uses the full power when negotiating with the network - the adaptation schemes work during the call, but not during the control messages. The effects on my loudspeakers seem to support this theory
> Make great stuff and you don't need protectionism.
... As long as there is no direct subvencing from the state (no idea how it is in China), it is fair competition and if you are really trusting in the free market, you can't really be principially against it.
Exactly.
I am living in one of the new European Union members (Slovakia), so I am of course biased in the opposite direction than the U.S. readers are. We need investments from big strong companies and we are trying to attract them as much as possible - lowering taxes, investing into infrastructure,
Remember: a better living standard in the now poor countries will bring more potential customers also to the american companies.
It was HP Jornada, not Compaq iPAQ, and they were forced to offer taking the units back for the refund if the customer wishes so.
Please, check your facts before posting.
Detailed calculations of NT7's orbit suggest that this asteroid already has impacted the Earth three times in the past, the last one being Mar 2, 1997 ... oops, all continents still here? Guess we should upgrade those Pentiums.
This is why it's an outstanding way to test people's knowledge.
:-), but it is a fact. But I wrote a few utilities in perl. I don't remember every aspect of sh, csh, awk etc., but I did solve problems in these languages. I analyse, design and code in C++ - there was at least 6 months to 1 year between knowing the syntax well enough and knowing how to use C++ efficiently.
It is not. In the real life your goal is to solve a problem with the tools at hand. Syntax is quite unimportant, the compiler will catch your typos and after a few days you don't make this type of mistakes. What is important is to know what your environment provides - e.g. what libraries there are and which methods are appropriate for the particular problem.
I don't know perl - it's hard to admit it on slashdot
Written exams are okay, if the examiner ignores minor syntax errors, accepts the same number of bugs he/she would make and concentrates on the approach to the problem. Otherwise he/she is a bad examiner and shouldn't be examining others.
At the provider side? For a few point-to-point customers yes, but normally you have an omnirange at the provider and (more or less ugly) directionals at the customer side.
I live in Slovakia, where there still is a monopoly for the wired local loop to the end of this year. We have no commercially available DSL yet. Of course the wireless is cheaper and everyone and his brother is using it for everything and does not give a sh*t about the regulations.
The band already is clogged in the bigger cities. It does not matter how one company plan the network - there are many and they are not going to plan it together.
The reach is no problem - I know of a few 20 km point-to-point links. The density is and the unregulated band is not a way. There are technologies in the regulated bands (FWA at 3.5 and 26 GHz here) that are meant to provide a high-speed local loop. WiFi as a last mile is a kludge - it will work but...
many folks won't be able to pay their May bills with only half their salary
I don't know whether this is typical for the U.S. lifestyle, but in the Europe you don't usually have such low reserve cash (not necessarily on the correct account, but accessible). The paycut was at least announced in advance...
I think it is still better than to be fired - at least you can search for another company while still having some income.
Last time I tested 2.4.18 the USB support was severely broken (uhci doesn't work, usb-uhci lockups right when inserting the module (or the other way round)). It worked fine in 2.4.17... Another example: half a year ago the fresh installation of Mandrake took my data for a breakfast. The reason was USB combined with devfs, it was actually quite reproducible. Alan Cox said something along "we have a reason why we don't enable devfs in Red Hat" after I reported the problems on linux-kernel.
I don't know whether Debian also quality-assures the kernel and makes own patches as the commercial distros do. If they don't, their concerns about stability are quite valid.
The 2.2 default with the ability to choose seems like a wise solution right now.
It could be that by leaking their knowledge of Chinese plans, the CIA is betting that they'll elect not to try it.
It could be that by manufacturing the information the CIA is betting that they'll elect not to try it.
Clever using of an information is a weapon, regardless of whether it is true or not. Having lived in a communist country until the commies fell in 1989 I know of quite many examples of how our and western propaganda manipulated the masses - the information of what was behind the iron curtain was comparably falsified on both sides of the fence...
Frankly, we have no idea what is and is not true. All we can is to speculate and that's what these hundreds of comments do.
Just what am I supposed to do with this - am I missing something? The already existing handhelds are smaller, lighter and even if I buy every type of accessory and CF card out there they are probably still cheaper. And there are some of them that are able to run Linux.
At $200 I would say "OK, nice platform for embedded solutions". But for an order of magnitude more I just don't see the gap that the CharmIT is trying to fill.
The people buying computer games are not living on a $17/month food budget.
No. But where I live the new copy of MS Office XP Standard costs more than two average monthly net wages. And this is a country that hopes to get into the European Union in the next few years, not some thirld-world country.
The people know very well that warez is illegal, there is no big need to educate them. But until the economy grows enough the piracy is unavoidable.
Using of the alternatives is normally not an option because of interoperability. When our premier minister meets Bill Gates and is excited about how much he is "donating" when he gives the schools the software for much less price, we can only expect that the open formats don't have much priority in our country... Hell, the media of the neighbour state called Gates "the father of the Internet"!
The fact that they all have to fire off simultaneously, generating electromagnetic interference
Hmm... But in an async setup they maybe fire simultaneously - you simply don't know, it's up to the statistics. I fear that in that complex chips you will end with a system that works by pure coincidence - some picosecond fluctuation somewhere and you get one glitch per 1000 hours of operation.
It is probably not that simple and as someone wrote, the more proper name would be globally or locally synced. I fully agree with you that there is no reason to tie the bigger units to a single universal clock. But I think that on the lower levels you can get a more reliable design by using traditional approach.
I have no experience in chip design (so I don't know specific problems of trying to stuff tens of millions transistors onto a square inch), but I designed some non-trivial circuits.
Well, I think that the reason the async chips are not being used is quite simple - a clocked system is much easier to design and verify. You know how long before and after a clock edge your signal needs to be there to be recognised. You know that if these constraints match across your system, it will work. Yes, this makes the system as fast as its slowest link - some circuits operate near their limits, some are actually wasting the time. But it works. An asynchronous design would be a pure hell to debug - that's probably why the industry doesn't (yet) mess with it.
:-) The only drawback is that the most of us prefer slow digital model of thermonuclear reaction and similar problems...
BTW, does anybody here remember analog computing? A bunch of cleverly connected operating amplifiers? These things were asynchronous, just as mother nature is. If you can get the physics work for you, bingo - compare the time the nature needs for raytracing a complex scene compared to a digital model
TCP waits for some time, whether it can stuff more bytes into the current packet, saving bandwidth - as far as I remember it is called Nagle algorithm and the usual timeout is 200 milliseconds with the maximum of 500 msec.
:-)
The overwhelming majority of people knowing important passwords should be able to type two to three characters in a 200 msec window and the whole password in 500 msec, making this hole less exploitable
They do this in some parts of the world - the country where I am from (Slovakia) is an example. There are different prices for business and home use.
I wonder if it isn't appropriate to have a little (eek) government regulation
Guess what? The reason is the government regulation :-)
BTW, as far as I remember the F-117 was spotted using the oldest detection technology available - human ears and eyes :-)
Tamara is a passive locator utilizing the signals emitted by the aircraft. And there are always some signals, it is a complex device with lot of electronics and it is a problem to ground the thing to properly shield them :-).
The locator consists of three mobile antennas spaced a few (tens of) km apart and a quite sophisticated statistical processing. This allows it to pull the signals from quite far below the noise level. Correlate the signals from the three antennas, match over the time and with possible vectors and you get a probability of an aircraft being here or there.
If you have signals from the external sources (so they, and not you get bombed), e.g. from the cellular towers, even better. This thing needs far less reflection than a normal radar.
Please, don't. The Russians got one in 1917 and then followed more than 70 years of communism :-)
For the lucky ones that never heard of this: a cannon shot from a ship called Aurora started the communist revolution there.
A virus expert (one of makers of antivirus software AVG) I have never seen f2f but whom I know for 10 years from czech&slovak FIDO network confirmed that it exists. He also added that we can expect to see much more press articles regarding the virus as the actual instances of it :-) So as the title says, don't panic. The author is 19-year old student and apparently all he wants is publicity (how many of you hit the news in 19? :-))
I don't think the Bundeswehr really wants to switch from american software to software written by a bunch of Russians, Indians etc. I worked at Siemens Austria (I am a Slovak) and our team was two Slovaks, one Hungarian and our boss was from Iran. Now I work for another austrian company and the situation is not very different.
I think they will develop some security modules by their own staff and that will pretty much be it.
Well, the whole discussion on the czech mailing list started after a company, that is distributing CDs of popular Linux software (RedHat, Debian, KDE, ...) inclusive actualization service, tried to distribute the RPM in a form that allows to install it on the Red Hat 7.0 system.
The only change in the SuSE code was an updated spec file. Now the manager of SuSE CZ jumped in and wrote them that they are not allowed to do it.
I would kind of agree with them to place restrictions on the distribution of the package (it is better to do this than not having the code at all), but I don't agree with dividing the users into 'good', 'acceptable' and 'bad' based on what distribution they use.
No, the intent really is to lock out the competition. I cannot quote (it was a private e-mail), but the person (who has the right to speak for SuSE CZ) admitted it quite clearly.
AFAIK it's because of its effects on peripheral veins which then result in a changed blood circulation in the brain.
Why to take headache medicine when a cup of coffee is enough?