I can highly recommend practising the "Ian Knot" on that site.
A few years back I decided to revert to that knot, and the first couple of dozen times was a little tricky, but now I can tie my shoelaces in about 2 seconds flat without looking.
A while ago I built my mythtv frontend, (based off a T-Online vision s100 box) and elected to use a CF card for storage within the unit - the box is entirely free of moving parts, so CF made sense.
I bought one of those IDE to CF adapters off ebay, and found that when I turned on DMA, the IDE bus would basically lock up, and pretty much end up useless.
After a lot of fiddling and digging around, I discovered that the adapter did not connect the required pins for DMA transfers to work. Old-skool CF never had DMA, so this extra pin is only a recent addition to the standard. Anyway, I soldered in a short wire to hook up this pin, and now I get respectable dma transfers.
The moral of the story - it might not be the CF card that is causing DMA failure, but the adapter it's hooked into.
The dark fibre under the ocean is SMF. MMF only has a useful range of a few hundred metres, beyond that, dispersion and loss come into play.
There is another reason why all this fibre is lying around unlit.
Its *expensive* to light undersea fibre.
A cable with 40 strands may only have a dozen of the strands lit, and it's not just a matter of putting something at each end to light it. Every 200km or so there are optical amplifiers boosting the signal. For each fibre, these amplifiers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. A long haul ocean span of 4000km will need 20 of these, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars per strand - also remember it costs a lot to install these expensive boxes.
So the fibre owners only put in a few amplifiers at a time - then when they need to boost capacity it is an expensive proposition, and the treacherous waters of the telco bureaucracy often drives someone to laying their own.
To do anything based on flows, routers would have to keep track of all the active flows, which amounts to all open TCP connections going through that router. For an active router, there would be millions of active flows at any one time, so the overhead would be huge. This would be like a NAT or stateful firewall device that could do line-rate forwarding at gigabit, 10G, or 100G port speeds. Bollocks.
Any modern router worth its salt, _especially_ ones used in large networks, use flow based mechanisms for routing.
Lets say a router has three possible, equal cost, paths to a destination network. Which path will it take? In the old days, it would pick one of those paths and stick with it. But that results in 2/3 of the network being unavailable.
In the case of many destination routes, it might seem to be even, but if one of the destination networks has a much higher traffic flow than the others, you will still get very uneven traffic.
So modern routers create a hash, based on source IP, destination IP, protocol, source port and destination port. The results of the hash are then used to determine the path to take. Using this mechanism, lots of flows between the same networks will actually follow multiple paths, and get maximum utilisation of the network.
And there's no reason to keep track of the actual flow, the results of hashing each packet dynamically determine flow behaviour. Keeping track of a few million flows isnt particularly hard, given how cheap ram is nowadays.
If the path changes, you just re-initialise your congestion control on the new routers, with little to no disruption to the TCP connection.
I admit, I'd have to check the details of the protocol to see if this is open to abuse by those with a modified TCP stack. The problem is that the packets are dropped in a predictable manner and a modified TCP stack could be designed to 'filter' the noise and yet still degrade when other packets are lost and provide a reliable connection. You'd have to modify the stack at both ends of the connection, as each end expects defined TCP behaviour. If you are a downloader, and a packet you're downloading gets lost, the other end will need to retransmit, and it _will_ slow down if it has to retransmit, so there's no way around this.
Of course, if you have access to both ends, then theres no reason at all for you to use a defined protocol (TCP), you could just blast data between them using any mechanism, and get around congestion control mechanisms dependent on TCP behaviour.
Routing does not change based on traffic on that short a timescale, it changes if a link goes down, or a policy agreement changes, an engineer changes some link allocation, etc. Doing traffic-sensitive routing is hard because of oscillations; in your example, would the perimeter nodes switch back to the now congestion-free router? Actually, many large scale networks *can* change routing based on congestion.
The mechanism used is MPLS, using RSVP TE.
Essentially, traffic is classified based on chosen parameters (protocol, port, etc) and placed into logical tunnels, and each can reach the same destination via a different path. Every so often (depending on administrator configuration, often 15 minutes), the router looks at utilisation of each tunnel on each interface, and can signal a different path for various tunnels in case of congestion.
With suitably fine grained tunnels and hysteresis configured, oscillations can be kept at bay.
For a large network with no defined central backbone, it can result in very even distribution of traffic, even when source and destination networks are the same.
Um, where in central europe? ICQ isn't the predominant IM protocol for all central europe. In the Netherlands, MSN is all the rage, with 'msn' having entered the standard dutch vocabulary as meaning 'to im someone'.
There's no need for some dumb.bank tld for users to hope to verify authenticity of a bank site. All we need is something akin to an electronic ATM card.
The card plugs into a USB port (or a reader plugs into USB and the card plugs into the reader). The card performs several functions:
Already exists in numerous countries. And it's a standalone device with no PC connection. Welcome to the present.:)
You get a calculator like crypto device, and plug your atm card into it (which has an embedded smartcard chip). Enter your pin + unique code (displayed on the bank login screen) into the device, then type in the returned one-time code.
Much harder to defraud (though remotely possible with a MITM attack).
Personally I'd rather see a "more legal" version of allofmp3.com...
But allofmp3.com is completely legal. They are doing nothing shady, legally, they are completely abiding by the law.
Oh you mean they don't comply with the laws of *your* country? Too bad. The US administration's references to them as illegal is absurd.
We might as well go around calling women drivers criminal too. After all, it's illegal for women to drive....well in some middle eastern countries anyway, but that doesn't matter, because Americans seem to believe that laws of one nation apply to others.
The DIY HTPC won't do CableCard, and your inexpensive tuner cards won't do HD. If you want that functionality the expensive Tivo is a good choice.
I don't know exactly what cablecard is, I presume it's just a CAM. In which case, mythtv supports DVB cards with CAM slots in them, so yes, encrypted broadcasts can be legally received on a homebrew HTPC.
Of course, one provider is refusing to provide a CAM for their encryption format, but many other providers have easily available CAMs.
After seeing and discussing a very interesting mythtv frontend at Lugradio, I went out and bought myself (on ebay) a T-Online Vision S100 set top box. These were built for a german VoD service, but they're easily available on ebay.
It is *totally* silent (no moving parts) and comes with wifi, ir remote, ide slots, a pci slot, tv/audio/spdif out, usb and runs linux beautifully. I can even use it as a Wifi AP. It's only 766MHz and the 128Mb DRAM is soldered on (non upgradeable) but this is all you need for a silent box.
And whereas most set-top-box PCs are reminiscent of a massive mid 80's VCR, this is actually no bigger than your average DVD player.
Note I say "frontend". You probably need a bigger case to get a PVR-150 into it, so it might work as a combined back/frontend, but in its natural form factor it's easier as a frontend. Though you can buy USB based DVB tuners, and assuming there's linux support, you've got your backend.
Requires some hardware hacking if you want to get a DVD drive or a 2.5" HDD into it (mine runs off a 1Gb USB stick), but remember - there are no moving parts, and it's got wifi built in!
An insecure, RFID-driven passport is the perfect thing for making it too dangerous for Americans to travel safely abroad. If an American had one of these in Lebanon, Hezbollah could walk through a public place with a RFID reader and discretely find some good targets of hostage-taking opportunity. It'd be easier for the Chinese police, for example, to track American visitors.
Bollocks. An RFID passport, when properly implemented, cannot be sniffed.
A secure RFID tag will NOT respond to a reader unless a specific crypto key has first been sent by the reader. This key would be printed in the passport and read by an OCR scanner by immigration, the same as they're currently scanned. Thus, criminals would need to actually look into the passport before they can access the RFID tag. Which reduces the problem to already-existing scenarios.
I don't know if this is how it's done. But this is how it should be done.
This is entirely possible now. My luggage ended up with an RFID tag attached after passing through Hong Kong airport, and I looked up the specs on that model (it had a brand/model printed on it) and discovered that it can be set to only respond when a code is sent first.
Like others said, these countries aren't third world and starved, but quite prosperous. The project is not aimed at helping only starving impoverished countries, but also helping countries that need to take the next technological step.
They have food and water (ever been to thailand? Food's the last thing they need help with), but they don't have access to technology.
A day's eating in Thailand can cost around $1. A good salary is anything over $200/month. Not much to you and me, but it's plenty for all of life's (biological) essentials there, including health care.
But $200/month limits people's access to technology. Sure, you can get broadband access and they seem to have more mobile phone shops than the rest of the world combined, Bangkok even has one of the world's largest computer shoping centres...but outside the cities, technology and salaries are more limited.
Therefore the OLPC project will help bridge this gap.
I couldn't disagree more. One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar. Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unneccesary extra box), I've switched. What do you possibly gain by having a separate search box? I just don't get it.
I assume then that you've been on Firefox for a while now. Keyword based searches have been in FF for many years.
In the properties for a bookmark, setting a keyword means that entering " " loads the bookmark with the literal '%s' replaced with .
But I guess now the extra context menu item makes this easier.
Everything else is stuck at 8khz, so unless your call uses this service end-to-end, there's going to be a downconversion if you're calling someone on a land line. And you'll be stuck with 8khz if you get any calls from someone not on this service.
Even more worrying is that you will get progressively worse audio quality through the telephony chain as the audio undergoes several up and down conversions in sample rate.
One of the really neat things about the common exiting audio codecs in use for telephony (G711, GSM, G729, etc) is that they are only lossy at the initial conversion. So if you get some device that's encoded the audio in GSM, then decompress it to G711 for the PSTN, and then re-compress it to GSM later on, the resulting GSM will be the same quality as the original GSM.
In other words, converting audio codecs back and forth between PSTN and (the same) compressed codec does not progressively degrade beyond the first compression, no matter how often you do it. This is a big difference to mp3 and other non-voice codecs, and vital for global telephony.
Acheiving them same with sample rate conversion will require developing similarly clever algorithms.
Actually, I've used Asterisk to pass through 24KHz Speex encoded audio - very impressive sound quality, but only works when the SIP channel is client to client.
In theory a SIP server doesn't need to know all of the codecs a client supports - the clients themselves negotiate any compatible protocol.
Of course, if the sip server puts itself in the path (such as when it needs to pass through to PSTN or firewalled clients), then 8KHz is the (till now) maximum supported rate.
Think about it - your conversation could arguably considered copyrighted information (as it's being recorded) - and the Skype protocol "effectively" protects it from being played back.
Not that the DMCA is relevant to me, yet (being outside the US), but I like this (currently) hypothetical topic...
Don't the anti-curcumvention provisions in the DMCA only protect the copyright holder? As the person doing the talking over Skype, presumably you are the copyright holder, and thus you are therefore allowed to decrypt your own copyrighted 'content'.
Or am I missing something? Does the Skype EULA transfer copyright of your conversation to Skype themselves? *scary*
We did have a blast the first day with the phones, and even found a couple of trick ways to get our own customized dial tones to the phones without paying for downloads. But, aha, Verizon was on to those tricks, didn't mention the surcharge for sending pictures to each other (actually they at least strongly implied within the "plan" we could send pictures back and forth free ad nauseum), and we found lots of nasty little extra charges to the tune of ~$20... all within the one week pro-rated new-phone period.
This was such an annoying and unexpected treatment, we've all pretty much retired the cameras for any use at all... Too bad, it was kind of fun, and I'd have been willing to even look at pricing plans, had they not sucked me in without any heads up.
Can't you just offload the photos with bluetooth/IR/cables? I'm not sure why you'd actually want to go the expensive route and send them over the network...
For me, the needles are the least worrying bit. When I was a kid I had some fillings done but always shut my eyes when they did "the deed". My sneaky dentist wiped some low strength anaesthetic on my gums always and I thought that was it - my eyes were always closed during the injection, so I never actually knew I was getting the needle - I didn't notice pain except a tiny cold touch.
Years later, I had a little dental work done and this time I opened my eyes just as the needle was coming out, also not having felt it. I was dumbfounded and asked the dentist if she really had used a needle.
"Yep - those little swabs were just a placebo - the only anaesthetic's in the needle.".
Ever since then, I've not feared the dentists needle one bit. Oddly enough, the thought of getting an injection outside my mouth, like on my arm, still terrifies me. So I think of a dentists needle and it calms me.
FWIW, the most painful part I find is the ultrasonic plaque remover during cleaning. That bastard stings. I'd rather have a filling thank you very much.
They have a solution to this in many European cities:
Wheelclamps.
To Mr RichBastard, paying a fine is no deterrent. Mr RichBastard having to wait an hour or two for the guys with the wheel clamp keys is gonna re-think his parking strategy.
Especially when they (purposely) take their time coming to unclamp you.
Slashdot Mirror
I can highly recommend practising the "Ian Knot" on that site.
A few years back I decided to revert to that knot, and the first couple of dozen times was a little tricky, but now I can tie my shoelaces in about 2 seconds flat without looking.
Old style tying == tedious and error prone.
A while ago I built my mythtv frontend, (based off a T-Online vision s100 box) and elected to use a CF card for storage within the unit - the box is entirely free of moving parts, so CF made sense.
I bought one of those IDE to CF adapters off ebay, and found that when I turned on DMA, the IDE bus would basically lock up, and pretty much end up useless.
After a lot of fiddling and digging around, I discovered that the adapter did not connect the required pins for DMA transfers to work. Old-skool CF never had DMA, so this extra pin is only a recent addition to the standard.
Anyway, I soldered in a short wire to hook up this pin, and now I get respectable dma transfers.
The moral of the story - it might not be the CF card that is causing DMA failure, but the adapter it's hooked into.
The dark fibre under the ocean is SMF. MMF only has a useful range of a few hundred metres, beyond that, dispersion and loss come into play.
There is another reason why all this fibre is lying around unlit.
Its *expensive* to light undersea fibre.
A cable with 40 strands may only have a dozen of the strands lit, and it's not just a matter of putting something at each end to light it. Every 200km or so there are optical amplifiers boosting the signal. For each fibre, these amplifiers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. A long haul ocean span of 4000km will need 20 of these, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars per strand - also remember it costs a lot to install these expensive boxes.
So the fibre owners only put in a few amplifiers at a time - then when they need to boost capacity it is an expensive proposition, and the treacherous waters of the telco bureaucracy often drives someone to laying their own.
Any modern router worth its salt, _especially_ ones used in large networks, use flow based mechanisms for routing.
Lets say a router has three possible, equal cost, paths to a destination network. Which path will it take? In the old days, it would pick one of those paths and stick with it. But that results in 2/3 of the network being unavailable.
In the case of many destination routes, it might seem to be even, but if one of the destination networks has a much higher traffic flow than the others, you will still get very uneven traffic.
So modern routers create a hash, based on source IP, destination IP, protocol, source port and destination port. The results of the hash are then used to determine the path to take.
Using this mechanism, lots of flows between the same networks will actually follow multiple paths, and get maximum utilisation of the network.
And there's no reason to keep track of the actual flow, the results of hashing each packet dynamically determine flow behaviour. Keeping track of a few million flows isnt particularly hard, given how cheap ram is nowadays.
If the path changes, you just re-initialise your congestion control on the new routers, with little to no disruption to the TCP connection.
Of course, if you have access to both ends, then theres no reason at all for you to use a defined protocol (TCP), you could just blast data between them using any mechanism, and get around congestion control mechanisms dependent on TCP behaviour.
The mechanism used is MPLS, using RSVP TE.
Essentially, traffic is classified based on chosen parameters (protocol, port, etc) and placed into logical tunnels, and each can reach the same destination via a different path. Every so often (depending on administrator configuration, often 15 minutes), the router looks at utilisation of each tunnel on each interface, and can signal a different path for various tunnels in case of congestion.
With suitably fine grained tunnels and hysteresis configured, oscillations can be kept at bay.
For a large network with no defined central backbone, it can result in very even distribution of traffic, even when source and destination networks are the same.
Uh...property lines *are* supported in Google Maps, take a look at one major city with street numbers and boundary lines.
Some locales don't have the data, but the support is already there.
Um, where in central europe? ICQ isn't the predominant IM protocol for all central europe. In the Netherlands, MSN is all the rage, with 'msn' having entered the standard dutch vocabulary as meaning 'to im someone'.
Already exists in numerous countries. And it's a standalone device with no PC connection. Welcome to the present.
You get a calculator like crypto device, and plug your atm card into it (which has an embedded smartcard chip). Enter your pin + unique code (displayed on the bank login screen) into the device, then type in the returned one-time code.
Much harder to defraud (though remotely possible with a MITM attack).
Didn't Sun already do this?.
Embrace and extend, indeed.
But allofmp3.com is completely legal. They are doing nothing shady, legally, they are completely abiding by the law.
Oh you mean they don't comply with the laws of *your* country? Too bad. The US administration's references to them as illegal is absurd.
We might as well go around calling women drivers criminal too. After all, it's illegal for women to drive....well in some middle eastern countries anyway, but that doesn't matter, because Americans seem to believe that laws of one nation apply to others.
I don't know exactly what cablecard is, I presume it's just a CAM. In which case, mythtv supports DVB cards with CAM slots in them, so yes, encrypted broadcasts can be legally received on a homebrew HTPC.
Of course, one provider is refusing to provide a CAM for their encryption format, but many other providers have easily available CAMs.
After seeing and discussing a very interesting mythtv frontend at Lugradio, I went out and bought myself (on ebay) a T-Online Vision S100 set top box. These were built for a german VoD service, but they're easily available on ebay.
It is *totally* silent (no moving parts) and comes with wifi, ir remote, ide slots, a pci slot, tv/audio/spdif out, usb and runs linux beautifully. I can even use it as a Wifi AP. It's only 766MHz and the 128Mb DRAM is soldered on (non upgradeable) but this is all you need for a silent box.
And whereas most set-top-box PCs are reminiscent of a massive mid 80's VCR, this is actually no bigger than your average DVD player.
Note I say "frontend". You probably need a bigger case to get a PVR-150 into it, so it might work as a combined back/frontend, but in its natural form factor it's easier as a frontend. Though you can buy USB based DVB tuners, and assuming there's linux support, you've got your backend.
Requires some hardware hacking if you want to get a DVD drive or a 2.5" HDD into it (mine runs off a 1Gb USB stick), but remember - there are no moving parts, and it's got wifi built in!
Bollocks. An RFID passport, when properly implemented, cannot be sniffed.
A secure RFID tag will NOT respond to a reader unless a specific crypto key has first been sent by the reader. This key would be printed in the passport and read by an OCR scanner by immigration, the same as they're currently scanned. Thus, criminals would need to actually look into the passport before they can access the RFID tag. Which reduces the problem to already-existing scenarios.
I don't know if this is how it's done. But this is how it should be done.
This is entirely possible now. My luggage ended up with an RFID tag attached after passing through Hong Kong airport, and I looked up the specs on that model (it had a brand/model printed on it) and discovered that it can be set to only respond when a code is sent first.
Like others said, these countries aren't third world and starved, but quite prosperous. The project is not aimed at helping only starving impoverished countries, but also helping countries that need to take the next technological step.
They have food and water (ever been to thailand? Food's the last thing they need help with), but they don't have access to technology.
A day's eating in Thailand can cost around $1. A good salary is anything over $200/month. Not much to you and me, but it's plenty for all of life's (biological) essentials there, including health care.
But $200/month limits people's access to technology. Sure, you can get broadband access and they seem to have more mobile phone shops than the rest of the world combined, Bangkok even has one of the world's largest computer shoping centres...but outside the cities, technology and salaries are more limited.
Therefore the OLPC project will help bridge this gap.
I assume then that you've been on Firefox for a while now. Keyword based searches have been in FF for many years.
In the properties for a bookmark, setting a keyword means that entering " " loads the bookmark with the literal '%s' replaced with .
But I guess now the extra context menu item makes this easier.
Even more worrying is that you will get progressively worse audio quality through the telephony chain as the audio undergoes several up and down conversions in sample rate.
One of the really neat things about the common exiting audio codecs in use for telephony (G711, GSM, G729, etc) is that they are only lossy at the initial conversion. So if you get some device that's encoded the audio in GSM, then decompress it to G711 for the PSTN, and then re-compress it to GSM later on, the resulting GSM will be the same quality as the original GSM.
In other words, converting audio codecs back and forth between PSTN and (the same) compressed codec does not progressively degrade beyond the first compression, no matter how often you do it. This is a big difference to mp3 and other non-voice codecs, and vital for global telephony.
Acheiving them same with sample rate conversion will require developing similarly clever algorithms.
Actually, I've used Asterisk to pass through 24KHz Speex encoded audio - very impressive sound quality, but only works when the SIP channel is client to client.
In theory a SIP server doesn't need to know all of the codecs a client supports - the clients themselves negotiate any compatible protocol.
Of course, if the sip server puts itself in the path (such as when it needs to pass through to PSTN or firewalled clients), then 8KHz is the (till now) maximum supported rate.
Not that the DMCA is relevant to me, yet (being outside the US), but I like this (currently) hypothetical topic...
Don't the anti-curcumvention provisions in the DMCA only protect the copyright holder? As the person doing the talking over Skype, presumably you are the copyright holder, and thus you are therefore allowed to decrypt your own copyrighted 'content'.
Or am I missing something? Does the Skype EULA transfer copyright of your conversation to Skype themselves? *scary*
This is just the beginning of the saga. Now with the evidence lost, 1000 years from now our ancestors will think whalers were the first on the moon..
Can't you just offload the photos with bluetooth/IR/cables? I'm not sure why you'd actually want to go the expensive route and send them over the network...
For me, the needles are the least worrying bit. When I was a kid I had some fillings done but always shut my eyes when they did "the deed". My sneaky dentist wiped some low strength anaesthetic on my gums always and I thought that was it - my eyes were always closed during the injection, so I never actually knew I was getting the needle - I didn't notice pain except a tiny cold touch.
Years later, I had a little dental work done and this time I opened my eyes just as the needle was coming out, also not having felt it. I was dumbfounded and asked the dentist if she really had used a needle.
"Yep - those little swabs were just a placebo - the only anaesthetic's in the needle.".
Ever since then, I've not feared the dentists needle one bit. Oddly enough, the thought of getting an injection outside my mouth, like on my arm, still terrifies me. So I think of a dentists needle and it calms me.
FWIW, the most painful part I find is the ultrasonic plaque remover during cleaning. That bastard stings. I'd rather have a filling thank you very much.
Network engineers talk about 'pipes' all the time when it comes to internet links. Tubes, pipes, same thing no?
Sounds like a good analogy to me.
If I buy blanks to archive data to which I own the copyright (eg photos, home videos, etc)...
can I claim a tax deduction?
They have a solution to this in many European cities:
Wheelclamps.
To Mr RichBastard, paying a fine is no deterrent. Mr RichBastard having to wait an hour or two for the guys with the wheel clamp keys is gonna re-think his parking strategy.
Especially when they (purposely) take their time coming to unclamp you.