Microsoft Security Essentials is all you need for non-enterprise A/V. It's free, it's unobtrusive and it works very well. What's more, commercial AV vendors, like Symantec, realise what a threat it is to their business model and have published a lot of FUD about you get what you pay for - however all the benchmarks I've seen have it ranking up there with the best of them.
The only reason to go for a commercial AV package is if you need a management and reporting console to manage a large number of computers.
I would assume that the licensing fees for MPEG are a part of the Windows and Mac OS X price tag.
And I would assume that of the total cost of my OS, the licensing fees for H.264 are at most a few cents, which I'm more than happy to pay if it supports formats that are out there to be used, are technically quite good and supported by a lot more than just video on the internet - things like video cameras, media centres, handheld devices, and a lot of these devices have hardware accelerated playback so all the better.
Note that a hearing aid can only amplify sounds so that your ear needs to be able to hear something in order for them to work. An implant on the other hand, bypasses the sound sensors in your ears and stimulates the nerves directly.
Also, the sound processors that are the external bit of an implant are upgradeable (and in fact generally only last around 5 years or so before they need to be upgraded) and they are the bits that, well, process the sound to transmit it to the implanted part.
I've done work for some government departments who have to create digital archives of artworks and old manuscripts and they all use very high end digital cameras and a controlled lighting environment.
Iff (if and only if) you have an environment where the camera is in a fixed position, and you have lights of a known intensity in fixed positions, then you can do a proper calibration on the camera, generate an ICC profile, and then scan away knowing that you're capturing an accurate representation of the colours in the artworks.
These cameras are $50k units - medium format with high quality prime lenses and digital backs - this will give you an idea of what can be done: PhaseOne and Hassleblad
I'll second the BBC's BASIC, going forwards from the Model B to the Archimedes and there was an amazingly powerful basic lurking under the hood there. It was in ROM, like the bulk of the OS, so it was always there and it was quite fast. Basic programs were saved to disk (transparently) in a tokenised format, and executed as such and, yes, there was the great renum command that would put everything back on a nice and neat increments of 10 line spacing...
Although the solutions like fail2ban and denyhosts are undeniably useful, you will cut down well over 90% of the drive-by ssh attempts by simply changing the port.
None of the scripts, that I'm aware of, actually portscan your machine looking for the SSH login headers, they all hit port 22 and try to log in. It takes too long to scan a machine so if nothing is listening on port 22, they will move on.
You will still get the odd attempt from someone who has portscanned you - these will be relatively rare. In these cases simply disable password logins altogether and use the public key authentication that is a LOT more secure (and convenient once it's all set up) anyway.
What on earth are the files on individual workstations for anyway? Why aren't they on a server, so that they can be shared properly and opened up from where they are. If they're on a server, it's also a hell of a lot easier to back them up.
Servers are now quite cheap. Mac mini Server + Promise RAID is damn cheap and very capable. Add in some external hard drives to back up to, and you've got a great entry level server for a few grand...
Not only are the heads parked away from the platters, but the bearings in the drive use fluid dynamic bearings, where the operating fluid is air, so there's very little lubrication in them to seize up as well...
OMG. You're not advocating the use of DDS tapes are you? DDS tapes are notoriously unreliable and temperamental. Tape needs to be done properly - that pretty much means LTO these days.
Yes, except Steve Gibson would develop this über-leet super seekret method for doing it, would call it by some funky name (Project Y?) and then boast about how it's hand-crafted by a virgin in 100% assembly language - all the while it just reproduces the functionality of something that already exists (dd)...
In a way, the provided answers show the current technically "watered down" slashdot community. I guess 10 years ago this questions would have given really interesting answers.
In this particular case, the ways in which modern hard drives operate is getting pretty close to magic. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in a modern hard drive controller and the drive is operating very close to the limits of what is currently possible. Even going back a number of years, writing ones and zeroes to the disk doesn't result in physical N and S magnetic domains that match the bit pattern that you write.
There needs to be transitions in the signal, which is how the signal clock is recovered, so (for instance with CDs) when you write 8 bits, 14 physical bits are written to the disc (EFM - Eight to Fourteen Modulation) such that even if you write a continuous series of zeroes (or ones) this is not the bit pattern that gets written to the disk.
This is a fundamental way that hard disks, CDs, floppy disks etc all operate, and it can't be changed and have the equipment operate reliably.
If you read the article, you'll see the car in question is a petrol/electric hybrid. It's got a regular petrol engine driving the rear wheels and electric motors driving the rear wheels. They use electrical energy to spin up the flywheel, and tap the kinetic energy in the flywheel as electrical energy to add a boost of power to the front wheels.
The energy density of ultracapacitors is not as good as a 40k rpm flywheel...
Interesting. Mac OS X uses Xnu (X is not Unix) which is based on Mach, but is not a pure microkernel like Mach, but rather it is a Hybrid Kernel. The Windows NT Kernel is apparently another example of a hybrid kernel approach as well...
No, the error correction happens at such a low level in the decoding of data from an optical disc, that it doesn't introduce any meaningful delays, and the recovered data is bit-for-bit identical to the data that should have been read. If it isn't you're doing it wrong. If there is enough unrecoverable data that the ECC can't do it's thing, then you will hear it, but it will be totally obvious that there are errors.
Have a look at Reed-Solomon Error Correction. When reading data off a CD, the entire block is read, ecc codes and all. It's not as if an error forces the transport to backtrack and re-read the block to get the ecc codes if it doesn't get the data right the first time around, unless the CD skips which is a tracking error, it reads each block once and only once.
No, speaker cables can have an adverse effect on the sound. If you take the typical super-thin wire supplied with a lot of even half-decent stereo systems, something like 20 or 24 AWG, and substitute it with something more hefty, even if it's your typical lamp cord, you will hear a (slight) improvement in sound. Going further to the "handmade in a high-altitude monastery, on the second full moon in the month, and only touched by the hands of virgins" speaker cable, there is no difference between that and coat-hanger wire.
24bit FLAC files on Computer via USB to DAC to AMP to SPEAKERS.
The FLAC sounds better than CD because of the error correction in the CD player accounting for defects in the CD, dust, finger prints, vagrant cruft, the fact that the discs aren't perfectly circular, etc.
OK, your credentials just went out the window with this statement. If the digital error correction is doing it's thing (being, you know, digital) it is a perfect reproduction of the data that was on the disk. If it's not doing it's thing, and is corrupting the digital signal, you'll hear it as pops and clicks. If the 24-bit FLAC sounds better than the 16-bit CD, it's because the FLAC has more dynamic range. It may also be at a higher sample rate as well, also generally giving better results.
Also, the SPDIF cable made a huge difference. The cheap plastic SPDIF lightpipe thingie sucked. It wreaked havoc with the soundstage. However, the SPDIF RCA style optical was WAY better. Why? No idea.
The plastic TOSLINK interface is immune to electrical interference, however I have heard numerous people claim it doesn't sound as good as a coaxial SPDIF interface. The RCA style interface you're using is definitely NOT optical, it's electrical.
This is a very good point. Yes, hotmail was at one stage, the best free email provider. Then Microsoft bought them and they went seriously downhill. These days they've really lifted their game and aren't too bad at all.
I know people who work in high-paying IT positions that maintain a hotmail address. They've probably had the same address for 10 or 15 years now, so why change it just for the image. If anything, a hotmail address is old-school cool, not like the young whippersnappers with their gmail and me.com addresses.
I don't know if you've looked at hotmail recently - I hadn't looked at it for years, but was pleasantly surprised when I was shoulder surfing and saw what it's up to these days - it's a nice, clean interface, the spam filtering is apparently quite good and you can (of course) use it in your email client as a POP or IMAP host as well. What's not to like?
Back in, from memory, NT4 days, you could name a folder with a GUID on the end of the name to get, for instance, your Control Panels folder directly on the desktop (without a pesky shortcut arrow)
Modern encryption algorithms all share a design goal of being fast to implement in hardware. Using a dedicated crypto chip to decrypt data can easily be faster than using a general purpose CPU to do it, particularly if the CPU is performing other tasks at the same time.
Either way, this argument is pretty much moot as the speed of decryption in these drives is probably bandwidth limited by the flash controller read speed anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Security Essentials is all you need for non-enterprise A/V.
It's free, it's unobtrusive and it works very well. What's more, commercial AV vendors, like Symantec, realise what a threat it is to their business model and have published a lot of FUD about you get what you pay for - however all the benchmarks I've seen have it ranking up there with the best of them.
The only reason to go for a commercial AV package is if you need a management and reporting console to manage a large number of computers.
I would assume that the licensing fees for MPEG are a part of the Windows and Mac OS X price tag.
And I would assume that of the total cost of my OS, the licensing fees for H.264 are at most a few cents, which I'm more than happy to pay if it supports formats that are out there to be used, are technically quite good and supported by a lot more than just video on the internet - things like video cameras, media centres, handheld devices, and a lot of these devices have hardware accelerated playback so all the better.
Note that a hearing aid can only amplify sounds so that your ear needs to be able to hear something in order for them to work. An implant on the other hand, bypasses the sound sensors in your ears and stimulates the nerves directly.
Also, the sound processors that are the external bit of an implant are upgradeable (and in fact generally only last around 5 years or so before they need to be upgraded) and they are the bits that, well, process the sound to transmit it to the implanted part.
I've done work for some government departments who have to create digital archives of artworks and old manuscripts and they all use very high end digital cameras and a controlled lighting environment.
Iff (if and only if) you have an environment where the camera is in a fixed position, and you have lights of a known intensity in fixed positions, then you can do a proper calibration on the camera, generate an ICC profile, and then scan away knowing that you're capturing an accurate representation of the colours in the artworks.
These cameras are $50k units - medium format with high quality prime lenses and digital backs - this will give you an idea of what can be done:
PhaseOne and Hassleblad
I'll second the BBC's BASIC, going forwards from the Model B to the Archimedes and there was an amazingly powerful basic lurking under the hood there. It was in ROM, like the bulk of the OS, so it was always there and it was quite fast. Basic programs were saved to disk (transparently) in a tokenised format, and executed as such and, yes, there was the great renum command that would put everything back on a nice and neat increments of 10 line spacing...
Although the solutions like fail2ban and denyhosts are undeniably useful, you will cut down well over 90% of the drive-by ssh attempts by simply changing the port.
None of the scripts, that I'm aware of, actually portscan your machine looking for the SSH login headers, they all hit port 22 and try to log in. It takes too long to scan a machine so if nothing is listening on port 22, they will move on.
You will still get the odd attempt from someone who has portscanned you - these will be relatively rare. In these cases simply disable password logins altogether and use the public key authentication that is a LOT more secure (and convenient once it's all set up) anyway.
What on earth are the files on individual workstations for anyway? Why aren't they on a server, so that they can be shared properly and opened up from where they are. If they're on a server, it's also a hell of a lot easier to back them up.
Servers are now quite cheap. Mac mini Server + Promise RAID is damn cheap and very capable. Add in some external hard drives to back up to, and you've got a great entry level server for a few grand...
Not only are the heads parked away from the platters, but the bearings in the drive use fluid dynamic bearings, where the operating fluid is air, so there's very little lubrication in them to seize up as well...
OMG. You're not advocating the use of DDS tapes are you? DDS tapes are notoriously unreliable and temperamental. Tape needs to be done properly - that pretty much means LTO these days.
Yes, except Steve Gibson would develop this über-leet super seekret method for doing it, would call it by some funky name (Project Y?) and then boast about how it's hand-crafted by a virgin in 100% assembly language - all the while it just reproduces the functionality of something that already exists (dd)...
In this particular case, the ways in which modern hard drives operate is getting pretty close to magic. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in a modern hard drive controller and the drive is operating very close to the limits of what is currently possible. Even going back a number of years, writing ones and zeroes to the disk doesn't result in physical N and S magnetic domains that match the bit pattern that you write.
There needs to be transitions in the signal, which is how the signal clock is recovered, so (for instance with CDs) when you write 8 bits, 14 physical bits are written to the disc (EFM - Eight to Fourteen Modulation) such that even if you write a continuous series of zeroes (or ones) this is not the bit pattern that gets written to the disk.
This is a fundamental way that hard disks, CDs, floppy disks etc all operate, and it can't be changed and have the equipment operate reliably.
It can not be done with off-the shelf equipment and software for many reasons, some of which are:
Line Codes
Error Correcting Codes
PRML
SMART
LBA
etc.
If you read the article, you'll see the car in question is a petrol/electric hybrid. It's got a regular petrol engine driving the rear wheels and electric motors driving the rear wheels. They use electrical energy to spin up the flywheel, and tap the kinetic energy in the flywheel as electrical energy to add a boost of power to the front wheels.
The energy density of ultracapacitors is not as good as a 40k rpm flywheel...
Interesting. Mac OS X uses Xnu (X is not Unix) which is based on Mach, but is not a pure microkernel like Mach, but rather it is a Hybrid Kernel. The Windows NT Kernel is apparently another example of a hybrid kernel approach as well...
A mythical desktop microkernel?
What, you mean like this?
No, the error correction happens at such a low level in the decoding of data from an optical disc, that it doesn't introduce any meaningful delays, and the recovered data is bit-for-bit identical to the data that should have been read. If it isn't you're doing it wrong. If there is enough unrecoverable data that the ECC can't do it's thing, then you will hear it, but it will be totally obvious that there are errors.
Have a look at Reed-Solomon Error Correction. When reading data off a CD, the entire block is read, ecc codes and all. It's not as if an error forces the transport to backtrack and re-read the block to get the ecc codes if it doesn't get the data right the first time around, unless the CD skips which is a tracking error, it reads each block once and only once.
No, speaker cables can have an adverse effect on the sound. If you take the typical super-thin wire supplied with a lot of even half-decent stereo systems, something like 20 or 24 AWG, and substitute it with something more hefty, even if it's your typical lamp cord, you will hear a (slight) improvement in sound. Going further to the "handmade in a high-altitude monastery, on the second full moon in the month, and only touched by the hands of virgins" speaker cable, there is no difference between that and coat-hanger wire.
24bit FLAC files on Computer via USB to DAC to AMP to SPEAKERS.
The FLAC sounds better than CD because of the error correction in the CD player accounting for defects in the CD, dust, finger prints, vagrant cruft, the fact that the discs aren't perfectly circular, etc.
OK, your credentials just went out the window with this statement. If the digital error correction is doing it's thing (being, you know, digital) it is a perfect reproduction of the data that was on the disk. If it's not doing it's thing, and is corrupting the digital signal, you'll hear it as pops and clicks. If the 24-bit FLAC sounds better than the 16-bit CD, it's because the FLAC has more dynamic range. It may also be at a higher sample rate as well, also generally giving better results.
Also, the SPDIF cable made a huge difference. The cheap plastic SPDIF lightpipe thingie sucked. It wreaked havoc with the soundstage. However, the SPDIF RCA style optical was WAY better. Why? No idea.
The plastic TOSLINK interface is immune to electrical interference, however I have heard numerous people claim it doesn't sound as good as a coaxial SPDIF interface. The RCA style interface you're using is definitely NOT optical, it's electrical.
What is this "e" mail you speak of? I get my mail in envelopes...
This is a very good point. Yes, hotmail was at one stage, the best free email provider. Then Microsoft bought them and they went seriously downhill. These days they've really lifted their game and aren't too bad at all.
I know people who work in high-paying IT positions that maintain a hotmail address. They've probably had the same address for 10 or 15 years now, so why change it just for the image. If anything, a hotmail address is old-school cool, not like the young whippersnappers with their gmail and me.com addresses.
I don't know if you've looked at hotmail recently - I hadn't looked at it for years, but was pleasantly surprised when I was shoulder surfing and saw what it's up to these days - it's a nice, clean interface, the spam filtering is apparently quite good and you can (of course) use it in your email client as a POP or IMAP host as well. What's not to like?
Back in, from memory, NT4 days, you could name a folder with a GUID on the end of the name to get, for instance, your Control Panels folder directly on the desktop (without a pesky shortcut arrow)
Modern encryption algorithms all share a design goal of being fast to implement in hardware. Using a dedicated crypto chip to decrypt data can easily be faster than using a general purpose CPU to do it, particularly if the CPU is performing other tasks at the same time.
Either way, this argument is pretty much moot as the speed of decryption in these drives is probably bandwidth limited by the flash controller read speed anyway...
http://bellard.org/
He's also the guy who launched ffmpeg and is working on Qemu, among other things...
Yeah, and if nothing else, watch out for the Michelin Man (Bibendum)
On his page with extracts of the digits of Pi, in the third column of the 799,999,951th digits, he's got a 2 where I think it should be a 5.
^_^