> One solution could be to petition the government to upgrade the highway through town or build a ring road.
You've obviously never been to an English village before. You cannot 'upgrade the highway' in a village which has grade 2 listed buildings which are 9 feet apart. These buildings were built 200-300 years before the invention of the car. They are important historical buildings and are hardly going to be demolished just to put in a bigger road.
Does anybody have any idea why HDMI cables are copper, when with the bandwidths involved, you would think that a simple optical cable would be much better? When you're talking distances of a couple of meters max, even plastic kite line would probably work, so why to they keep making short cables out of copper? Even my 10 year old MiniDisc player supports an optical connection. If they'd made HDMI optical, then they probably wouldn't have had to make a new format of cable EVER.
I think in some cases it doesn't solely use signal strength. I seem to remember reading a couple of years back that on one network, it usesd the latency of the signal to estimate your distance from the tower if you're connecting from a 3G phone (eg it effectively pings your phone and measures the delay in microseconds). The masts themselves often have 3 aerials (which is sometimes easily visible) which are focused in three different directions. This means they also know roughly which side of the mast you are standing as your signal will be a different strength on each of the three aerials.
Combine this range and direction information together and you have the world's most primitive radar! On some networks, they claim to be able to position your phone to within 100m as long as it's in range of two masts. Even with just ONE mast visible, if the above technique is employed, they should still be able to get a reasonably accurate estimation of where you are.
Where does it say that they do that? This would be an extremely stupid idea. They already know EXACTLY where all the towers are and how best to triangulate the signals - they don't need to collect that from Blackberry users. Are you sure someone isn't having you on? Sounds made up to me. Please link to your source.
Yes. You make that sound like a stupid idea. Google already do FAR more complicated things. Try planning a route in maps.google.com and then dragging the suggested route line. Google recalculates a suitable route several times a second and updates the map with the new route in real-time as you're dragging the marker. That's FAR harder than what I was suggesting. My idea wouldn't be much harder to implement than Google Suggest. Especially as most of the results can be cached.
> wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.
Err, no. Wireless is very expensive to install. Even more expensive perhaps than mobile phone networks (mainly because you need 50-100 times more access points than you need for mobile phones (due to the very low transmission powers the standard permits).
Why do you think that there are almost no cities with city-wide wireless access, years after the technology became prevalent? Most people have problems getting WiFi working in their house - let alone trying to get it to work for a whole town without all the channels massively overlapping. Municipal WiFi won't take off until the standard (perhaps a NEW standard) allows higher transmission powers and a larger frequency band for extra channels.
I don't. Anyone off the street can then download kiddie porn over my connection and my ISP will gladly hand over my details when subpoenaed by the courts. Even if I'm miraculously NOT found guilty myself, I'm unlikely to get my computers back for some months - if ever. If people want to share their network, then you should use something like FON FON. But even then, I'm not sure they log exactly who used your network on what time/date etc so it may be of little help if you get taken to court. Leaving your network completely open by disabling the security features and therefore permitting ANONYMOUS usage of your personal connection that's in your name has to be one of the stupidest ideas I've come across.
I've just measured this: My Sky+ PVR (that's our standard satellite receiver for non UK ppl) uses 22W while turned on. It still uses 16-18W while in standby! I think this is because it has to keep the TV Guide updated and it also needs to listen for remote-record signals which arrive via satellite. This means for remote record to work, the Sky box must permanently be decoding the satellite signal just in case you want to record anything from your phone. Seems a bit of a waste to me and there should be some way of disabling the features that require the box to need to remain internally powered up. Turning the box off seems to just spin down the hard disk and doesn't really do anything else (you can tell by how fast it turns back on that it never really turned off).
I don't know how many Sky subscribers have Sky+ but I know Sky has more than 3 million subscribers in the UK. Lets assume half of these have Sky+ which I think is probably pessimistic. That means that even if EVERYONE turned their box off, then all our Sky boxes are consuming 24 megawatts of power in standby! That's ridiculous! Yet if you turn your box of at the mains, some features stop working and you can find Sky cut off your service as the box can't 'phone home' to report on what PPV movies you've been watching.
> As for Fujitsu's 0W-standby monitor, they conveniently omit the fact that this extra relay's coil > and related components will be drawing an extra 1W or so while the monitor/TV is on
Can you please post a link to the datasheet or page where you read that. I strongly suspect that you made that up because I've never come across a relay that requires 1 *WATT* to work. A relay only requires a few milliamps to work. A 1 watt relay would be a brick sized device that might be used to turn on some stadium lights or or several miles of highway lighting or something - not an LCD screen sat on your desk.
I doubt it adds any significant power consumption wattsoever (geddit?).
> Seagate SATA hard drive models, that tout a 3 Gb/s data rate (325 MB/s
Name just one of Seagates drives that can do anywhere NEAR 325MB/s for more than a few milliseconds. I think you must have mis-read the datasheet or something. That simply can't be true. Maybe as burst rate for tiny files which reside entirely in the cache and have previously already been read.
> And let's remember that in the big-dog multi domain server world, a Windows server fails.
Er no! It certainly doesn't. Millions of companies use Windows mail servers with no problems or complaints. It's only linux fanboys that think that Windows keeps crashing. Usually that's because they don't actually use it themselves and don't really have a clue if it crashes often or not. Personally, I've never seen a blue screen of death in my entire life. I've never had to reboot a server because it's just crashed (except for our one Linux box, which runs out of RAM every few weeks for reasons that not even RedHat are able to tell us). Even my Vista workstation hasn't been rebooted for three weeks (and even that was only so I could flash my RAID controller BIOS).
> So in essence your comparing "Current Crap (Windows)"
It's spelt "you're". Why do people stop taking English after the age of 8.
I'm not comparing any Windows "Crap". The mail server software I use on Windows is FAR from crap (no I'm not talking about Exchange). You're assuming the software I'm using is crap without even knowing what it is!
> But the time payoff comes from the machine being up for a year without incident- not the install time.
The only linux boxes I've seen which have uptimes of a year, are unmaintained ones which aren't being used. How can you patch a kernel without rebooting the machine? I've NEVER EVER seen a modern Windows server crash or lock up. The only reason my servers ever go down is because I've told them to. I think you're thinking of Windows 3.1 from 10 years ago which admittedly crashed fairly often.
Of course it's secure - it hardly does anything. To even get the most rudimentary features a mail server needs to have, you have to patch the living daylights out of it and link it up with loads of third party software. You end up losing the security anyway when you add these features. It's not a usable mail server in it's native form for most companies - it's just far too basic and takes too long to configure for most real-world setups.
Look at how much extra stuff and TIME it takes to get a small qmail based mail server usable:
> If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a > modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it
I strongly disagree. In my experience, someone that current experience with a certain Linux distro can easily have a very difficult time learning the basics on another Linux distro! The distributions and desktop environments available are all very different. On windows, everything remains pretty much the same as it was in Windows 95. If you knew how to schedule a task in Windows 95, then it's very likely that you could it on XP or Vista without needing any help. The same is hardly true of Linux where things like scheduling tasks usually has to be done from the command line.
> if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration, they could be an > entry-level sysadmin for a small company, while the other student would > be more or less a data entry clerk
Rubbish. The whole point is that on Windows you do not *NEED* to be a software developer to accomplish basic tasks that most Linux sysadmins need to do. Windows either already does what you want, or you can buy a program for a few dollars which will do it only using mouse clicks in half an hour. I bet you most handsomely paid sysadmins in the Windows world do not know how to write a website. Why spend ages writing scripts when there is so much software already available for Windows which is already fully developed and tested by other companies.
I recently tried to build a Linux mail server. After about two days of fidding around downloading patches to get the (basic) features I wanted, compiling, fixing problems, editing config files, patching, more compiling, I soon realised that it would be unmaintainable and some really basic features like webmail were still not working correctly. For a about $100 I purchased some Windows software which achieved the same thing. It was up and running in about 15 minutes and has been working perfectly ever since.
As I saw recently in someone's signature: "Linux is only free if your time has no value"
Windows market share: 92% Linux market share: 0.81%
Yeah linux is *really* successful.
This is slashdot, so I'll probably be modded to minus infinity in about 4 seconds, but even if linux is good/great, it certainly couldn't be described as "successful".
> I prefer film generally however I still want to get a DSLR, which are approaching the resolution of film
The resolution of a normal 35mm SLR is comparable to that of a 6MP DSLR - which have been out for quite a while now. Even the photos taken on my old Canon 300D are a lot better than those taken on my Canon 300 film camera in terms of both resolution and colour reproduction.
Most professional photographers made the switch to digital years ago.
Unless you want to enlarge your photos to bigger than A1, you do not need any more than 6-8MP. 8 megapixels is enough for 300DPI prints at 11 inches x 8 inches which is WAY bigger than most people usually get their pictures printed at.
What really annoys me is when (presumably for marketing reasons) phone companies put cameras with resolutions greater than about 3 megapixels in phones which have lenses about 3 mm wide and sometimes made out of plastic. This simply does not work - you cannot get a good enough image from a 3mm lens to justify a 4MP+ sensor in the phone. And then they go and JPEG compress the living shit out of the picture and save it as a 200K file when really a 4MP image needs about 2MB to look any good. It's all marketing bullshit and produces pictures no better than the older 2MP cameras.
In one of my lectures at university while studying Computer Science, the lecturer said:
People look at the TV and say things like "there's nothing on", "this is rubbish", "this film is so predictable", "surely not an ad break already". They don't often say, "I wish this TV had more pixels and a higher audio sampling rate".
Sometimes I think he's right. While I can see the merits of high definition and DTS, I've also seen plenty of films that seem to rely entirely on CGI and pretty graphics but have a weak plot (and plenty of games too for that matter). I hope this isn't going to make the developers spend even more time making textures, models and scenes just because you can see them so clearly.
I don't know which overlay you're using, but on my system, I see absolutely nothing at that location - just grass. What is everyone else seeing that I'm not seeing? I've definitely got the new Geoeye 1M Color overlay turned on and yet I can only see things which look like planes in about 10% of the previously posted coords. Is it that most people haven't read TFA and are looking for objects on the OLD map, or is it that the new colour map doesn't line up properly with the original B&W Geoeye map?
Why would there be detailed pictures of the search area BEFORE he got lost there? No 'before' picture exists to diff with. Even if it did, it would be a nightmare to correctly align the images with single pixel accuracy so that this could work with any level of accuracy. Even with a satellite, you can never take the picture from the exact same place and time and the terrain is very rugged. The pictures wouldn't even vaguely line up unless the satellite and the earth, were permanently stationary.
Slashdot Mirror
> One solution could be to petition the government to upgrade the highway through town or build a ring road.
You've obviously never been to an English village before. You cannot 'upgrade the highway' in a village which has grade 2 listed buildings which are 9 feet apart. These buildings were built 200-300 years before the invention of the car. They are important historical buildings and are hardly going to be demolished just to put in a bigger road.
Does anybody have any idea why HDMI cables are copper, when with the bandwidths involved, you would think that a simple optical cable would be much better? When you're talking distances of a couple of meters max, even plastic kite line would probably work, so why to they keep making short cables out of copper? Even my 10 year old MiniDisc player supports an optical connection. If they'd made HDMI optical, then they probably wouldn't have had to make a new format of cable EVER.
I think in some cases it doesn't solely use signal strength. I seem to remember reading a couple of years back that on one network, it usesd the latency of the signal to estimate your distance from the tower if you're connecting from a 3G phone (eg it effectively pings your phone and measures the delay in microseconds). The masts themselves often have 3 aerials (which is sometimes easily visible) which are focused in three different directions. This means they also know roughly which side of the mast you are standing as your signal will be a different strength on each of the three aerials.
Combine this range and direction information together and you have the world's most primitive radar! On some networks, they claim to be able to position your phone to within 100m as long as it's in range of two masts. Even with just ONE mast visible, if the above technique is employed, they should still be able to get a reasonably accurate estimation of where you are.
Where does it say that they do that? This would be an extremely stupid idea. They already know EXACTLY where all the towers are and how best to triangulate the signals - they don't need to collect that from Blackberry users. Are you sure someone isn't having you on? Sounds made up to me. Please link to your source.
Yes.
You make that sound like a stupid idea.
Google already do FAR more complicated things. Try planning a route in maps.google.com and then dragging the suggested route line. Google recalculates a suitable route several times a second and updates the map with the new route in real-time as you're dragging the marker. That's FAR harder than what I was suggesting. My idea wouldn't be much harder to implement than Google Suggest. Especially as most of the results can be cached.
Google Suggest is for suggesting things you are likely to search on. It has nothing at all to do with results.
> wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.
Err, no. Wireless is very expensive to install. Even more expensive perhaps than mobile phone networks (mainly because you need 50-100 times more access points than you need for mobile phones (due to the very low transmission powers the standard permits).
Why do you think that there are almost no cities with city-wide wireless access, years after the technology became prevalent? Most people have problems getting WiFi working in their house - let alone trying to get it to work for a whole town without all the channels massively overlapping. Municipal WiFi won't take off until the standard (perhaps a NEW standard) allows higher transmission powers and a larger frequency band for extra channels.
I've always thought they should add some AJAX so that you know where this button will take you before you actually click it.
eg if you type in "oxford" the button should change to say "Take me to www.ox.ac.uk"
> Current incarnations lack the resolution of a cheap laser printer
So do all existing monitors - but 6 billion people are happy to read the Internet on them every day.
How can a website *user* use a salted hash? They can't!
:) </lie>
The original suggestion to use a totally unique password is the correct answer.
Personally, I always use a GUID for my password and I use a different one for each site
> Seriously. I leave mine open
I don't. Anyone off the street can then download kiddie porn over my connection and my ISP will gladly hand over my details when subpoenaed by the courts. Even if I'm miraculously NOT found guilty myself, I'm unlikely to get my computers back for some months - if ever. If people want to share their network, then you should use something like FON FON. But even then, I'm not sure they log exactly who used your network on what time/date etc so it may be of little help if you get taken to court. Leaving your network completely open by disabling the security features and therefore permitting ANONYMOUS usage of your personal connection that's in your name has to be one of the stupidest ideas I've come across.
> Miliamps * Voltage = Power
milliamps * voltage = milliwatts.
or
amps * voltage = watts
20mA at 12v is therefore about 0.15 Watts or 150 milliwatts - which is hardly 1 WATT!
Nope. Wrong. It uses 160mA which is nothing like 1W.
I've just measured this: My Sky+ PVR (that's our standard satellite receiver for non UK ppl) uses 22W while turned on. It still uses 16-18W while in standby! I think this is because it has to keep the TV Guide updated and it also needs to listen for remote-record signals which arrive via satellite. This means for remote record to work, the Sky box must permanently be decoding the satellite signal just in case you want to record anything from your phone. Seems a bit of a waste to me and there should be some way of disabling the features that require the box to need to remain internally powered up. Turning the box off seems to just spin down the hard disk and doesn't really do anything else (you can tell by how fast it turns back on that it never really turned off).
I don't know how many Sky subscribers have Sky+ but I know Sky has more than 3 million subscribers in the UK. Lets assume half of these have Sky+ which I think is probably pessimistic. That means that even if EVERYONE turned their box off, then all our Sky boxes are consuming 24 megawatts of power in standby! That's ridiculous! Yet if you turn your box of at the mains, some features stop working and you can find Sky cut off your service as the box can't 'phone home' to report on what PPV movies you've been watching.
> As for Fujitsu's 0W-standby monitor, they conveniently omit the fact that this extra relay's coil
> and related components will be drawing an extra 1W or so while the monitor/TV is on
Can you please post a link to the datasheet or page where you read that. I strongly suspect that you made that up because I've never come across a relay that requires 1 *WATT* to work. A relay only requires a few milliamps to work. A 1 watt relay would be a brick sized device that might be used to turn on some stadium lights or or several miles of highway lighting or something - not an LCD screen sat on your desk.
I doubt it adds any significant power consumption wattsoever (geddit?).
> Seagate SATA hard drive models, that tout a 3 Gb/s data rate (325 MB/s
Name just one of Seagates drives that can do anywhere NEAR 325MB/s for more than a few milliseconds. I think you must have mis-read the datasheet or something. That simply can't be true. Maybe as burst rate for tiny files which reside entirely in the cache and have previously already been read.
> And let's remember that in the big-dog multi domain server world, a Windows server fails.
Er no! It certainly doesn't. Millions of companies use Windows mail servers with no problems or complaints. It's only linux fanboys that think that Windows keeps crashing. Usually that's because they don't actually use it themselves and don't really have a clue if it crashes often or not. Personally, I've never seen a blue screen of death in my entire life. I've never had to reboot a server because it's just crashed (except for our one Linux box, which runs out of RAM every few weeks for reasons that not even RedHat are able to tell us). Even my Vista workstation hasn't been rebooted for three weeks (and even that was only so I could flash my RAID controller BIOS).
> So in essence your comparing "Current Crap (Windows)"
It's spelt "you're". Why do people stop taking English after the age of 8.
I'm not comparing any Windows "Crap". The mail server software I use on Windows is FAR from crap (no I'm not talking about Exchange). You're assuming the software I'm using is crap without even knowing what it is!
> But the time payoff comes from the machine being up for a year without incident- not the install time.
The only linux boxes I've seen which have uptimes of a year, are unmaintained ones which aren't being used. How can you patch a kernel without rebooting the machine? I've NEVER EVER seen a modern Windows server crash or lock up. The only reason my servers ever go down is because I've told them to. I think you're thinking of Windows 3.1 from 10 years ago which admittedly crashed fairly often.
Of course it's secure - it hardly does anything. To even get the most rudimentary features a mail server needs to have, you have to patch the living daylights out of it and link it up with loads of third party software. You end up losing the security anyway when you add these features. It's not a usable mail server in it's native form for most companies - it's just far too basic and takes too long to configure for most real-world setups.
Look at how much extra stuff and TIME it takes to get a small qmail based mail server usable:
http://www.qmailrocks.org/install_rh.htm
I got a comparable Windows based server up and running in under 20 minutes. Try doing that with qmail.
Once again, it's only free if your time has no value.
> If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a
> modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it
I strongly disagree. In my experience, someone that current experience with a certain Linux distro can easily have a very difficult time learning the basics on another Linux distro! The distributions and desktop environments available are all very different. On windows, everything remains pretty much the same as it was in Windows 95. If you knew how to schedule a task in Windows 95, then it's very likely that you could it on XP or Vista without needing any help. The same is hardly true of Linux where things like scheduling tasks usually has to be done from the command line.
> if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration, they could be an
> entry-level sysadmin for a small company, while the other student would
> be more or less a data entry clerk
Rubbish. The whole point is that on Windows you do not *NEED* to be a software developer to accomplish basic tasks that most Linux sysadmins need to do. Windows either already does what you want, or you can buy a program for a few dollars which will do it only using mouse clicks in half an hour. I bet you most handsomely paid sysadmins in the Windows world do not know how to write a website. Why spend ages writing scripts when there is so much software already available for Windows which is already fully developed and tested by other companies.
I recently tried to build a Linux mail server. After about two days of fidding around downloading patches to get the (basic) features I wanted, compiling, fixing problems, editing config files, patching, more compiling, I soon realised that it would be unmaintainable and some really basic features like webmail were still not working correctly. For a about $100 I purchased some Windows software which achieved the same thing. It was up and running in about 15 minutes and has been working perfectly ever since.
As I saw recently in someone's signature: "Linux is only free if your time has no value"
Windows market share: 92%
Linux market share: 0.81%
Yeah linux is *really* successful.
This is slashdot, so I'll probably be modded to minus infinity in about 4 seconds, but even if linux is good/great, it certainly couldn't be described as "successful".
source
> I prefer film generally however I still want to get a DSLR, which are approaching the resolution of film
The resolution of a normal 35mm SLR is comparable to that of a 6MP DSLR - which have been out for quite a while now. Even the photos taken on my old Canon 300D are a lot better than those taken on my Canon 300 film camera in terms of both resolution and colour reproduction.
Most professional photographers made the switch to digital years ago.
Unless you want to enlarge your photos to bigger than A1, you do not need any more than 6-8MP.
8 megapixels is enough for 300DPI prints at 11 inches x 8 inches which is WAY bigger than most people usually get their pictures printed at.
What really annoys me is when (presumably for marketing reasons) phone companies put cameras with resolutions greater than about 3 megapixels in phones which have lenses about 3 mm wide and sometimes made out of plastic. This simply does not work - you cannot get a good enough image from a 3mm lens to justify a 4MP+ sensor in the phone. And then they go and JPEG compress the living shit out of the picture and save it as a 200K file when really a 4MP image needs about 2MB to look any good. It's all marketing bullshit and produces pictures no better than the older 2MP cameras.
Sometimes I think he's right. While I can see the merits of high definition and DTS, I've also seen plenty of films that seem to rely entirely on CGI and pretty graphics but have a weak plot (and plenty of games too for that matter). I hope this isn't going to make the developers spend even more time making textures, models and scenes just because you can see them so clearly.
If the missions are one-way, I think my boss would be an excellent candidate. I'll even fill out his application for him.
I don't know which overlay you're using, but on my system, I see absolutely nothing at that location - just grass.
What is everyone else seeing that I'm not seeing? I've definitely got the new Geoeye 1M Color overlay turned on and yet I can only see things which look like planes in about 10% of the previously posted coords. Is it that most people haven't read TFA and are looking for objects on the OLD map, or is it that the new colour map doesn't line up properly with the original B&W Geoeye map?
I'm mystified.
Why would there be detailed pictures of the search area BEFORE he got lost there? No 'before' picture exists to diff with.
Even if it did, it would be a nightmare to correctly align the images with single pixel accuracy so that this could work with any level of accuracy. Even with a satellite, you can never take the picture from the exact same place and time and the terrain is very rugged. The pictures wouldn't even vaguely line up unless the satellite and the earth, were permanently stationary.