> That's true, cause once it bluescreens you can't use CAD
I've never seen Windows 2000/XP bluescreen. Neither have any of my colleagues in the software development business. If you have decent branded hardware with decent drivers you simply do not get bluescreens.
In fact in a previous slashdot debate, a few people were actually arguing that XP didn't even have the code in it to render a bluescreen - and it looked like they were winning the argument until someone managed to dig out a screenshot from somewhere. So don't go telling me that an XP bluescreen is any more common than a linux kernel panic...
I have a sense of humour - a good one. But jokes about Windows being unstable are really boring now. Windows hasn't been unstable since Windows 98 and that's 7-8 years old. Nobody who uses Win2k or XP has to keep pressing the beloved Ctrl-Alt-Delete-Vulcan-Nerve-Death-Grip key combination...
OK - maybe to some people it was funny - and I've seen one (hundred) too may Windows is unstable jokes on here...
Thats a totally stupid idea. What's the point of bouncing it? The person that sent the message (the spammer) will never get to read it. When was a spam every REALLY sent by the person in the "from" field of an email? As a sysadmin (amongst other things) the amount of bounces I get from messages we never sent is in the order of hundreds a day.
You should never under any circumstances bounce a message that you think might be a spam. It just adds to the problem and fills some innocent person's mailbox with a bounce for a message which they never sent.
Sure - REJECT the level at MTA level, but sending out a new e-mail (a bounce) is always a waste of time unless the incoming message was totally legitmate.
> I lived in england and I never saw any such lights there.
In that case it MUST be an urban myth! Please mod parent "-1, Mythical" The fact that I could get it to work every single time within a few seconds was obviously a million to one co-incidence. I'd better go and buy a lottery ticket because obviously I'm just really lucky.
Besides, unless you actually tried it on every single light you drove past, how would you know whether or not you've "seen" them? They don't look any different to any other lights.
> I bet you think that pressing that close door button on the > elevator actually does something.
On some elevators, if you press the "hold door" button, the doors will then NEVER close until someone calls the lift at another floor or unless you press the close button. But if you press the close button, the doors *immedately* close within a fraction of a second. Go figure.
> Just because it has worked for you doesn't mean that that most > (or even some) traffic lights will change because you flash > your high-beams at them.
I never said it did! In fact as far as I'm aware, this system has only ever been implemented in Hampshire (UK) as part of the ROMANSE Intelligent Traffic System. So if you don't live in Hampshire, you won't have seen it anyway. I never said it worked everywhere if you had actually read my post.
> It honestly amazes me that people can reject what they > see and instead believe what they want to believe.
It amazes me that people are so stubborn that when someone tells them something works, they refuse to believe it just because they themselves haven't seen it. Many people in the 3rd world probably think that Snow is made up (why the fuck would white power suddenly start falling from the sky?). The fact that they haven't seen it and can't ever see it where they live doesn't mean it doesn't happen for someone else. Don't try telling me that it never rains just because YOU live in the Sahara.
It certainly is NOT an urban legend. There are plenty of lights on major roads near my local hospital that work like this. If there are no other cars around, you can easily get the light to green quite quickly by flashing your lights very quickly. I even used to live in a house which was on a junction with those lights, and I could demonstrate it to my friends using just a powerful torch out of my lounge window.
HOWEVER in the UK it seems that all lights with this system also have a jump-camera which takes a photograph of any vehicle that activates this feature (you will see the flashes in your rear view mirror! I would expect (although I've never heard of it) that in theory you could be prosecuted for repeatedly activating this feature, but I'm not sure in the UK if there's a law to support that prosecution.
If you've tried it and it hasn't worked for *you* then that doesn't mean it's an urban legend.
No, but at some stage, the device relies on a raw GPS signal. All I was wondering is, what would happen if you spoofed that signal somehow... Maybe the rest of the encryption process won't notice and it will be happy to show you the data.
As we've seen many times before on Slashdot, lots of new encryption techniques turn out to be gimmicks or marketing ploys designed to sell one specific product. How often do these weird encryption mechanisms actually become mainstream? Not very often.
Not having a device to examine, none of us can really say yet, but if the GPS part of this system has been done to woo naieve company directors into buying their products who are excited by the buzzwords and technology, then maybe that'll be enough for this company to sell a few products and then disappear off the face of the earth before the first workaround or crack for it appears on BitTorrent and eMule:)
> This allows the device to at least estimate where I am if it > has a weak signal somehow. I don't really get all the details... > but it works so I don't complain.
Well a GPS receiver has about 8-12 channels with which to look for the satellites. If it knows roughly where you are, then it can use that information, together with stored almanac data (info relating to the orbital positions of the satellites over time) in order to better guess *which* satellites it should try locking on to. It basically speeds up the process of getting the all important 'first fix'. If you didn't tell it where it was, it would simply take longer to get the fix - but it would still get there eventually.
I must admit, I wasn't too impressed when I received my first GPS and the very first question it asked me when I turned it on is "Please select the location of this device using the map below". I was like, "huh, aren't you supposed to tell me that?!".:)
All GPS devices I've come across simply stream out NMEA data from a serial port (or over a bluetooth connection). What would stop someone that really desperate to get the data from hacking the GPS module or the dongle so they can stream in their own forged (or recorded) NMEA data which reports the laptops current position to be where they stole it from (after all, they should remember)? Usually anything these days that requires a GPS uses a standard GPS module, and at some stage, the position data from it ends up in an interceptable form on the edge interface of some module. Hardly bulletproof security?
> any people dont use mail client any more. > Most people use webmail, even when a mail client is avalible.
What utter bulls**t. I presume you just made that up as you were typing it. How on earth that got modded UP I really don't know.
MOST people obviously do NOT use webmail. In fact MOST people use Outlook or Outlook Express (neither of which, could you pursuade me is "webmail").
Somebody recently sent me some survey results via e-mail which showed the following usage stats:
Outlook - 29% Outlook Express - 18% AOL - 10% Eudora - 10% Lotus - 7% Netscape - 5.5% Yahoo mail - 4% Hotmail - 2.5% Other - 14%
So even if the entire of the "Other" category was webmail, that would still add up to only about 20%. If you don't want to believe these stats, then do a Google on the web and you'll find that many other surveys have very similar results.
> I am sure other people who use this form of google ad can confirm this.
No I certainly can't. I use it all the time and paying $20 would be a ridiculous waste of cash! I've no idea where you got that lucicrous figure from, but it's fairly obvious if you had to pay $20 per click that nobody would ever use it! If it was $20 per click and 1 in every 50 people bought your product (optimistic), that's $1000 per sale that you're paying to Google. What if all your selling is a piece of shareware worth $30 or a digital camera at $200? No items worth less than several thousand would ever be advertised on Google. Better still, Google charge you nothing to display your ad. No click - no fee.
You don't have to pay even one hundredth of that most of the time. A typical per-click payment is between 0.05 and 0.30 (I've just logged in to my adwords account to confirm this). The more you pay, the higher up your ad will be on the right hand side. Google even shows you an estimation of where your ad will be for each amount of money you type in.
If you see the spammers websites, you'll probably want to click on some of their ads and view their pr0n or take our their loan. Which kind of defeats the entire point of the screensaver. The screensaver can only work if the spammer gets almost NO return on their investment (their time and bandwidth bill) - the only way to ensure that is to ensure that there is a zero click-through ratio. The only way to ensure that is to not give ANY users of the screensaver ANYTHING to click on.
I might have fallen for your troll I guess, but I'll post this just in case you actually believe what you said.
No - a 60mph collision obviously means both cars were going 30mph. Otherwise I would have said 120mph as you suggested. Except I wouldn't - because I'd be dead:)
> btw, name one car that would not make you rather ill after > a 60mph head-on collision.
It's funny you should say that... I drove my P reg Mazda 323 head on into another car on a complex junction writing both cars off instantly. My mazda had massive front end damage (to the point where both wheels had been smashed off the car) but there was absolutely ZERO visible damage behind the engine firewall (apart from really minor things like the glove box hinges and some light fittings on the ceiling). The doors closed perfectly and everything. The car I hit (a fiat Cinquecento - probably not dissimilar to a Smart) was massively deformed and many of the windows had smashed due to the whole car warping in the collision. I walked away with some burns from the airbag and a very sore nose (airbags are hard!) but I was basically OK and got the train home. The other guy is currently suing me for head injuries.
In fact probably MOST modern cars would leave you OK after a head on collision (providing it really is head on and not at a weird angle).
I couldn't afford another 323 after the accident, so I hope my Ford Focus is as well built as the Mazda was when it comes to crashing:)
Incidentally, they said that the 323 wouldn't have even been a write off had it not been for the huge cost of mazda parts (eg the airbags alone cost nearly £1800 for the pair - whereas on my ford it would only be £650). The entire front end is apparently fairly easily replacable and the engine itself hadn't really been damaged.
Slashdot Mirror
> That's true, cause once it bluescreens you can't use CAD
I've never seen Windows 2000/XP bluescreen. Neither have any of my colleagues in the software development business. If you have decent branded hardware with decent drivers you simply do not get bluescreens.
In fact in a previous slashdot debate, a few people were actually arguing that XP didn't even have the code in it to render a bluescreen - and it looked like they were winning the argument until someone managed to dig out a screenshot from somewhere. So don't go telling me that an XP bluescreen is any more common than a linux kernel panic...
I have a sense of humour - a good one. But jokes about Windows being unstable are really boring now. Windows hasn't been unstable since Windows 98 and that's 7-8 years old. Nobody who uses Win2k or XP has to keep pressing the beloved Ctrl-Alt-Delete-Vulcan-Nerve-Death-Grip key combination...
OK - maybe to some people it was funny - and I've seen one (hundred) too may Windows is unstable jokes on here...
As it doesn't run Windows, and .NET is widely accepted to be very stable, your joke really isn't very funny.
Thats a totally stupid idea. What's the point of bouncing it? The person that sent the message (the spammer) will never get to read it. When was a spam every REALLY sent by the person in the "from" field of an email? As a sysadmin (amongst other things) the amount of bounces I get from messages we never sent is in the order of hundreds a day.
You should never under any circumstances bounce a message that you think might be a spam. It just adds to the problem and fills some innocent person's mailbox with a bounce for a message which they never sent.
Sure - REJECT the level at MTA level, but sending out a new e-mail (a bounce) is always a waste of time unless the incoming message was totally legitmate.
> I lived in england and I never saw any such lights there.
In that case it MUST be an urban myth! Please mod parent "-1, Mythical" The fact that I could get it to work every single time within a few seconds was obviously a million to one co-incidence. I'd better go and buy a lottery ticket because obviously I'm just really lucky.
Besides, unless you actually tried it on every single light you drove past, how would you know whether or not you've "seen" them? They don't look any different to any other lights.
> I bet you think that pressing that close door button on the
> elevator actually does something.
On some elevators, if you press the "hold door" button, the doors will then NEVER close until someone calls the lift at another floor or unless you press the close button. But if you press the close button, the doors *immedately* close within a fraction of a second. Go figure.
> Just because it has worked for you doesn't mean that that most
> (or even some) traffic lights will change because you flash
> your high-beams at them.
I never said it did! In fact as far as I'm aware, this system has only ever been implemented in Hampshire (UK) as part of the ROMANSE Intelligent Traffic System. So if you don't live in Hampshire, you won't have seen it anyway. I never said it worked everywhere if you had actually read my post.
> It honestly amazes me that people can reject what they
> see and instead believe what they want to believe.
It amazes me that people are so stubborn that when someone tells them something works, they refuse to believe it just because they themselves haven't seen it. Many people in the 3rd world probably think that Snow is made up (why the fuck would white power suddenly start falling from the sky?). The fact that they haven't seen it and can't ever see it where they live doesn't mean it doesn't happen for someone else. Don't try telling me that it never rains just because YOU live in the Sahara.
It certainly is NOT an urban legend. There are plenty of lights on major roads near my local hospital that work like this. If there are no other cars around, you can easily get the light to green quite quickly by flashing your lights very quickly. I even used to live in a house which was on a junction with those lights, and I could demonstrate it to my friends using just a powerful torch out of my lounge window.
HOWEVER in the UK it seems that all lights with this system also have a jump-camera which takes a photograph of any vehicle that activates this feature (you will see the flashes in your rear view mirror! I would expect (although I've never heard of it) that in theory you could be prosecuted for repeatedly activating this feature, but I'm not sure in the UK if there's a law to support that prosecution.
If you've tried it and it hasn't worked for *you* then that doesn't mean it's an urban legend.
> Don't appologize.
If you're going to be pedantic, it's spelt: apologise or apologize.
> I'm assuming didn't actually speak to the device, correct?
(I'm assuming *you*...)
No I'm pretty sure I did actually say that out loud, but it was a rhetorical question.
Sorry - I've just watched Finding Nemo and those turtles must have really got to me :)
No, but at some stage, the device relies on a raw GPS signal. All I was wondering is, what would happen if you spoofed that signal somehow... Maybe the rest of the encryption process won't notice and it will be happy to show you the data.
:)
As we've seen many times before on Slashdot, lots of new encryption techniques turn out to be gimmicks or marketing ploys designed to sell one specific product. How often do these weird encryption mechanisms actually become mainstream? Not very often.
Not having a device to examine, none of us can really say yet, but if the GPS part of this system has been done to woo naieve company directors into buying their products who are excited by the buzzwords and technology, then maybe that'll be enough for this company to sell a few products and then disappear off the face of the earth before the first workaround or crack for it appears on BitTorrent and eMule
> This allows the device to at least estimate where I am if it
:)
> has a weak signal somehow. I don't really get all the details...
> but it works so I don't complain.
Well a GPS receiver has about 8-12 channels with which to look for the satellites. If it knows roughly where you are, then it can use that information, together with stored almanac data (info relating to the orbital positions of the satellites over time) in order to better guess *which* satellites it should try locking on to. It basically speeds up the process of getting the all important 'first fix'. If you didn't tell it where it was, it would simply take longer to get the fix - but it would still get there eventually.
I must admit, I wasn't too impressed when I received my first GPS and the very first question it asked me when I turned it on is "Please select the location of this device using the map below". I was like, "huh, aren't you supposed to tell me that?!".
All GPS devices I've come across simply stream out NMEA data from a serial port (or over a bluetooth connection). What would stop someone that really desperate to get the data from hacking the GPS module or the dongle so they can stream in their own forged (or recorded) NMEA data which reports the laptops current position to be where they stole it from (after all, they should remember)? Usually anything these days that requires a GPS uses a standard GPS module, and at some stage, the position data from it ends up in an interceptable form on the edge interface of some module. Hardly bulletproof security?
> any people dont use mail client any more.
> Most people use webmail, even when a mail client is avalible.
What utter bulls**t. I presume you just made that up as you were typing it. How on earth that got modded UP I really don't know.
MOST people obviously do NOT use webmail. In fact MOST people use Outlook or Outlook Express (neither of which, could you pursuade me is "webmail").
Somebody recently sent me some survey results via e-mail which showed the following usage stats:
Outlook - 29%
Outlook Express - 18%
AOL - 10%
Eudora - 10%
Lotus - 7%
Netscape - 5.5%
Yahoo mail - 4%
Hotmail - 2.5%
Other - 14%
So even if the entire of the "Other" category was webmail, that would still add up to only about 20%. If you don't want to believe these stats, then do a Google on the web and you'll find that many other surveys have very similar results.
You and your mates are not "most" people.
> I am sure other people who use this form of google ad can confirm this.
No I certainly can't. I use it all the time and paying $20 would be a ridiculous waste of cash! I've no idea where you got that lucicrous figure from, but it's fairly obvious if you had to pay $20 per click that nobody would ever use it! If it was $20 per click and 1 in every 50 people bought your product (optimistic), that's $1000 per sale that you're paying to Google. What if all your selling is a piece of shareware worth $30 or a digital camera at $200? No items worth less than several thousand would ever be advertised on Google. Better still, Google charge you nothing to display your ad. No click - no fee.
You don't have to pay even one hundredth of that most of the time. A typical per-click payment is between 0.05 and 0.30 (I've just logged in to my adwords account to confirm this). The more you pay, the higher up your ad will be on the right hand side. Google even shows you an estimation of where your ad will be for each amount of money you type in.
Mod: -1, Seriously Uninformed!
If you see the spammers websites, you'll probably want to click on some of their ads and view their pr0n or take our their loan. Which kind of defeats the entire point of the screensaver. The screensaver can only work if the spammer gets almost NO return on their investment (their time and bandwidth bill) - the only way to ensure that is to ensure that there is a zero click-through ratio. The only way to ensure that is to not give ANY users of the screensaver ANYTHING to click on.
I might have fallen for your troll I guess, but I'll post this just in case you actually believe what you said.
I wasn't. I was pretending to moderate the guy who (like you) didn't understand the incredibly obvious joke.
Well no-one can be expected to account for Mac users ;)
Pressing F5 reloads the page in Firefox, Internet Explorer and every other browser I can think of.
It looks like they forgot to go to windowsupdate.com this mo... Oh wait...
-1 stupid
..and sco.com is hacked. Therefore IIS is more secure :)
Damn - it won't go "Slashdotted"... ...everyone keep pressing F5 until it no longer reloads ;)
Google doesn't cache images, so how can google possibly "have it" when the hack is merely a modified image?
Look at the properties of the image concerned. You'll see it's coming directly from sco.com and not from any google cache.
...it looks like SCO has been hacked?!
:))
http://www.sco.com/ (see graphic - "we own all your code")
(yes I know this is horribly off topic. But you have to admit, it's kind of interesting..
No - a 60mph collision obviously means both cars were going 30mph. Otherwise I would have said 120mph as you suggested. Except I wouldn't - because I'd be dead :)
> btw, name one car that would not make you rather ill after
:)
> a 60mph head-on collision.
It's funny you should say that... I drove my P reg Mazda 323 head on into another car on a complex junction writing both cars off instantly. My mazda had massive front end damage (to the point where both wheels had been smashed off the car) but there was absolutely ZERO visible damage behind the engine firewall (apart from really minor things like the glove box hinges and some light fittings on the ceiling). The doors closed perfectly and everything. The car I hit (a fiat Cinquecento - probably not dissimilar to a Smart) was massively deformed and many of the windows had smashed due to the whole car warping in the collision. I walked away with some burns from the airbag and a very sore nose (airbags are hard!) but I was basically OK and got the train home. The other guy is currently suing me for head injuries.
In fact probably MOST modern cars would leave you OK after a head on collision (providing it really is head on and not at a weird angle).
I couldn't afford another 323 after the accident, so I hope my Ford Focus is as well built as the Mazda was when it comes to crashing
Incidentally, they said that the 323 wouldn't have even been a write off had it not been for the huge cost of mazda parts (eg the airbags alone cost nearly £1800 for the pair - whereas on my ford it would only be £650). The entire front end is apparently fairly easily replacable and the engine itself hadn't really been damaged.