In fact, you're very right. I was reminded of this recently, when I was assembling a fast, SATA P4 Linux box and accidently gorfed something or other.
What happened was something so anachronistic that I thought it should well be impossible:
I turned the computer on, and the video card switched to its all-but-forgotten 40x25 wide-character textmode and loudly proclaimed "NO ROM BASIC - SYSTEM HALTED".
I nearly died laughing from the insanity of having BASIC bootstrap code still laying around in BIOS.
I run Keyring on my Palm Pilot. It works well. I carry my Palm with me literally everywhere but at rock concerts, and it's very nice to have every obscure, seldom-used password securely available wherever I happen to be.
All of my passwords are there, and a few other bits of even more important personal information.
Stuff is encrypted, and lives in the Palm's RAM where it will be destroyed instantly upon power loss. So, if left in a bus terminal, chances are that the data will be gone before the hapless thief finds a charger for it to keep the RAM alive, let alone manages to crack the database or even recognize its existance.
All I have to do is remember one passphrase.
Stuff is also backed up to the machine that I hotsync to, where it remains encrypted on disk. While non-volatile, the machine does have the advantage of vastly increased physical security.
And that isn't much of a backup regime, so all of the work-related passwords and data that might affect Other People get beamed via IR to a co-worker with a similar rig. This usually happens in the windowless basement I call "work," and is thus also reasonably secure despite its plaintext-edness.
I've used Keyring on everything from old-school black-and-green Handsprings, to Treo 650s. It Just Works(tm). It is free. It is GPL'd.
If I want to know what "caster" means in the context of automobile suspension alignment, I refer to an automotive text. The Webster definition is nearly useless in this application.
If I want to know what "exploit" means in the context of a computer program, I refer to the only fucking reference we have, as again, the Webster definition is plainly and obviously useless.
That said, if you wish to discredit the Jargon File, you'll also have to discredit ESR. And, er, well... good luck with that.
You gave three good uses of "exploit" in the form of a transitive verb.
But we're using it as a noun, not a verb. Your definitions are therefore meaningless.
The American Heritage, according to dictionary.com, has these kind words to say about what an exploit (as a downloaded thing) might consist of:
exploit, n. An act or deed, especially a brilliant or heroic one.
The Jargon File, which is certainly a better reference for technical slang, isn't so flowery:
exploit, n. [originally cracker slang]
1. A vulnerability in software that can be used for breaking security or otherwise attacking an Internet host over the network. The Ping O' Death is a famous exploit. 2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an exploit in sense 1.
Ya know, that's the same sort of argument I've been using to promote software RAID vs. hardware RAID.
I've learned this: Nobody cares. People will blindly spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars on specialized gear to offload their precious CPUs.
When it is explained to them that better system performance can be had for less money by simply buying a faster CPU, they throw up their hands and blindly reassert that dedicated hardware must be better, by simple virtue of the fact that it is dedicated. That such reasoning is plainly a crock of shit seems to escape them.
Van Jacobsen be damned, people are an illogical bunch. They're always doing stuff for all the wrong reasons, and trying to solve problems with solutions that are only vaguely related.
That all said, if the card manages to improve ethernet latency even a little bit, it might be worthwhile in some circumstances. I'm thinking of applications like Cobranet for professional audio (where latency is always critically important), or perhaps clustering.
I mean, can you imagine a Beowulf cluster with these?
Fact: Truetype has existed since at least Windows 3.11.
Fact: OS/2 Warp 3 was released in May of 1995. Windows 95 was released in August of 1995, concurrent with Microsoft Plus (which was all about subjective fun, and was included by many OEMs for "free").
That's only 3 months between the release of Warp, and 95. Whoopdie do. Definately not "much later". One might even say the releases happened right on top of eachother.
Windows 95 won the war, such as it were, because it offered more of what consumers wanted: Be it subjective fun, ease of use, the fact that it was on everyone's store-bought PC by default, or how it allowed access to a proliferation of pornography by way of the thousands of hours of AOL arriving for free each day in the mailbox; Windows 95 had it.
OS/2 died for so many bad reasons: This much is obvious. And, clearly, it's going to stay dead, no matter how cool HPFS was.
I am merely attempting to convey that it did not die because of the lousy 16-bit (plus win32s) Windows layer, as the notion is absurd.
That my 32-bit Xbox can play 16-bit SNES games better than an SNES does not mean that such functionality is killing the Xbox platform. That my XP machine can be talked into running Linux binaries natively does not mean that XP is going away. That my Linux box can be persuaded to run XP, or individual programs under WINE, does not mean that Linux is in the throes of death. So on, and so forth.
Warp's lousy 16-bit Windows emulation was outdated 3 months after it appeared. It therefore was not even a factor, let alone something to write home about. It was dead before it was even released, and IBM knew it. They did nothing.
Perhaps it is the profound lack of ability to properly run modern Windows programs which killed OS/2, and not the opposite as you suggest.
Whichever the case, the existance of WINE is not in any way indicative that MacOS X is going away any time soon, as was the implication above.
The Windows "emulation" in OS/2 was never good, and you'd recognize this if you'd ever spent any time dealing with it.
Truetype? DirectX?
(Oh, yes. I realize that Truetype formally existed in Warp 4, but by then, nobody cared anymore...)
OS/2 died because it was ugly. Windows had themes and expansions and (what many consider) fun. OS/2 was a drab shade of aqua marine with corporate grey highlights.
OS/2 died because it was hard to use (unless you call needing to install SIO into your config.sys in order to reliably get online easy, assuming you were able to stick with it even long enough to learn that much).
OS/2 died because it had horrible support for what ended up being the PC's true Killer Applications: Stealing music, watching porn, looking for someone to fuck, and playing stupid Shockwave games.
OS/2 didn't die because it happened to have Windows emulation: It died because the numbers were never big enough for large software developers to give a shit.
And when an incremental upgrade to Win32s froze OS/2's ability to handle 32-bit Windows programs, what happened? The authors requiring this newer Win32s didn't care that their software no longer ran under OS/2 -- even when prompted. They just carried on, selling record numbers of units for Windows-using world.
OS/2's Windows support didn't hamper OS/2 any more than Cygwin or UMLWIN32hampers Windows XP.
Don't start looking for a new item based on what you don't want, but instead try to find one that includes what you do want.
I had a few requirements for the last motherboard upgrade that I bought for my own personal use, so I made a list:
Support for the last of the Socket-A CPUs Dual-channel DDR 4 DIMM sockets At least 5 PCI slots Two regular IDE ports Two SATA ports AGP
I plugged some of these requirements into newegg's search engine, and found several that included all of these features.
It turns out that it was cheaper to buy one that also included on-board audio and a gigabit ethernet jack, than to buy one without.
So, I went with the cheaper one. I've been ignoring the on-board audio since day 1, and decided to just go ahead and use the built-in LAN and free up a NIC for better uses.
I might've chosen one that included Firewire, and on-board video, too, for all I care. I don't have a use for those functions, and I don't foresee having a use for them. But would it piss me off to have paid less for their inclusion, were that the case? Absolutely not.
I know how you feel. I got upset in the 90s when companies irrevocably started putting IDE, floppy, serial, and parallel ports onto motherboards. "What am I going to do with all of these expensive VESA local bus multi-I/O cards?"
Something similar also happened to me in the 80s I realized that the ISA clock card in my XT had been obsoleted by a part on the motherboard.
Needless to say, I got over the trauma of those transitions pretty quickly. You will, too, once you figure out what you're going to do with all those expensive 3c905 and genuine DEC Tulip cards...
[Hint: Local schools, libraries, friends-of-friends, and children-of-friends are all fine places to deposit good hardware which has been obsoleted by a motherboard upgrade. Just make sure you get it to them before time makes it completely fucking useless, and keep it appropriately packaged in antistatic bags or somesuch so it doesn't die all on its own before it gets a chance to be used again.]
Image backups certainly have their place for people who can understand their limitations. However, a good, automatic, versioning file backup is almost certainly a higher priority for most computer users.
Great. Now, could you please enlighten us as to what a good, automatic, versioning file-based backup system might consist of?
AFAICT, this doesn't seem to exist. It doesn't matter how much sense it makes, or how perfect the idea is. It is simply unavailable.
In fact, the glaring lack of such a capable system almost seems to indicate that it is a victim of the "pick any two" rule.
So where is it?
(And, no. A few programs tied together with a ream of Perl or shell script that needs modified in order to function does not constitute a working system, and nor does a HOWTO with instructions on coding one.
Non-programmers, believe it or not, often have important data to back up, too, and being able to code should not be a prerequisite for keeping important stuff backed up. That is, unless you programmers really do think that it'd be no big deal if your loan officer lost your mortgage just hours before closing, or when the accountant's machine trashes your financials.)
I've spent the past few days working in the dispatch center of an small county sheriff's office, installing some new gear.
Today, someone brought in chili, which was excellent. Someone else ordered a sack of hamburgers from the joint down the road (which were delivered, and were extraordinarily tasty). People were generally enjoying their servitude in that small, locked-down room.
On top of the dispatch console was some eccentric 911 industry trade rag. The cover story was about VOIP, and how it currently relates to 911 service as we know it.
Therefore, they're aware of it, and the possible problems it might have.
The 911 phone nearly never rings. And, at least today, it only rang once for an emergency. The rest of the calls (a half dozen, or so) were all from MCI, who were running tests on a new-ish overlay area code.
Every now and then, the radio would make some noise that the dispatcher would respond to.
The dispatchers spent the rest of their day waiting for the phone to ring and shooting the shit with eachother.
So, just to reassure anyone who's wary:
Go ahead and test your 911 service. Just make sure that you've informed them beforehand, and don't waste their time with superflous verbiage.
And if, for some reason, it doesn't work: Call them back, and explain that the test failed. If you think you can fix the problem, tell them that you might like to attempt another test later. Thank them, and hang up.
Believe me: Those are real people on the other end of the line. They're happy to invest a few minutes of their time, if that means a slim possibly saving someone's life.
They want this stuff to work correctly at least as much as you do.
You seem to be having trouble with your sarcasm detector. You should see a doctor before it becomes serious.
That said: It would seem that TOSlink, as used by Toshiba to transmit SP/DIF digital audio signals in 1983, predates ADAT by about nine years, and also (near as I can gather) Alesis, the company, by about two years.
I declare that this glaring anachronism lends itself to discredit the rest of your ill-concieved tirade in its entirety, and further that your original analogy remains warped.
Everyone knows that professional digital audio gear uses AES/EBU is balanced and uses 110-ohm shielded twisted pair, while consumer gear uses SP/DIF over 75-ohm coax or TOSlink plastic fiber.
News flash: Hard drives are not made of steel, though the top cover might sometimes be stainless (which, of course, has little to do with conventional steel...).
Second news flash: Even if they were, flat steel is a very poor way to provide magnetic shielding. It really does almost nothing at all...
Third news flash: Inside every modern hard drive is a set of bloody strong neodymium magnets, in order for the head mechanism to do its thing. The platters are RIGHT NEXT TO THESE, and things seem to work fine.
The Air Force anecdote might be valid, but backing it up with your own wild conjecture is not helpful to the reader. A better explanation for a crowd such as Slashdot should be to include a reference to magnetic permeability and Google, and let that be that (but then again, this is an article on using brackets to mount things).
So. The card number is always plaintext? What about for debit card transactions, when my ATM card acts like it is a Visa?
Because, I mean, I realize that an ATM-only card is useless without a PIN, but a Visa is very useful with only the card number, expiration date, and cardholder name (all of which are in the magstripe).
Please tell me that credit card transactions are handled differently from ATM transactions, that at least some of the information is encrypted somehow.
After being run through DVD Shrink, all such DVD "features" such as non-skippable ads disappear, along with a bunch of other configurable stuff.
It is often a very fun thing to remove EVERYTHING from the movie except for the movie itself.
I mean, imagine this: You insert a DVD into the player, and the movie begins playing. No menus, no boilerplate, no pushing Play, no nothing. And when the movie ends, the player goes back to idle and shuts off by itself after a few minutes.
And the best part: No hideously-loud 30-second repeating audio loop behind the menu to wake you up after a boring film.
Of course, you'll need a DVD burner. But those are cheap.
And you'll need some blank media. That's cheap too.
And I can hear you say: "But I want to do this with rented movies."
And to that, I can only retort that there must be some reason for Blockbuster to be hawking DVD+R blanks right beside the checkout counter, and that this is probably it.
Anyone care to convert this back over to a format usable by the rest of the world?
There's a plethora of Linux multitracking software (along with a healthy dose of it for every other platform), but it doesn't sound like anyone can get within 10 feet of this file without owning a Mac (including myself).
Who wants to be the first person to hammer out the Ardour-compatible "remix" of this thing?
WiMax supports huge distances, sure. But in order to avoid needing a line of sight with the tower, you need to use low frequencies - that multiple-tens-of-GHz mumbo-jumbo is useless for penetrating things like trees, buildings, and cars.
Thankfully, old analog TV spectrum (such as the lower 700MHz band) is suitable and available for use in this way.
But realize that there's only so much information bandwidth that can be squeezed out of a slice of spectrum, and that the further you cast your signal, the more devices that are likely to be competing for that available bandwidth. So, "30-50 mile" range may not be as advantageous as you might think.
And it's all licensed and auctioned off to the highest bidder, in much the same way as existing cellular frequencies were/are. The end-user equipment doesn't even exist yet, and there's certainly no economy of scale advantage over traditional cellular phones (and there may never be, depending on how this spectrum ends up actually being used).
To top it off, it's extremely likely that the existing rules governing handheld cellular telephones to 600 mW ERP will be carried over to the lower 700's devices, if the rules aren't applicable already.
And -that- means that you'll never get more than a few miles of range. Which means again a landscape peppered with hideously expensive towers for reasonable coverage patterns.
Which is just like cellular phones operate, today. Except it's WiMax instead of CDMA.
On the other hand, it will open up the market to new players. Which will increase competition, and probably lower prices overall.
And in any event, the technology itself is not any cheaper simply by virtue of NOT being CDMA, GSM, or PCS. It's still governed by physics, the FCC, and market forces.
The specific system that I'm familiar with operates at ~900MHz, using two extremely long (like, 9 feet long) omni antennas atop a tall building.
The patrol cars have a pair of rather small (a few inches), low-gain omnis mounted on their trunk lid.
Speed is low, and maxes at 19.2kbps (system-wide), but:
Range is intense. Something like 25 miles, varying considerably near the edges along with the landscape (which is predominantly flat). One central location covers the entire county with ease.
The cars are equipped with GPS recievers, and dispatch does have a neat videogame street map of who's-where that they can gawk at.
IP is supported, at least within the confines of the connected machine.
Data is encrypted with triple DES, and I doubt the hardware would let one get enough of a peak at it to even begin decoding it.
On my systems, I have a software RAID-1 "boot drive."
If one drive in the pair fails, things keep ticking along smoothly. They're really just identical partitions with identical data on different disks.
LILO merrily writes boot code to the array without episode. Meanwhile, the machine's BIOS is happy to boot from disks other than primary-master, all by itself.
I've booted the system after randomly unplugging devices. It works just fine.
Why do all of you 3ware goons think that the world wants to buy hardware which offers no clear advantage over having no hardware at all? (As if I want to add -more- potential points of failure to my systems . ..)
Re:So Vonage can now listen to me and my girlfrien
on
VoIP Wiretapping
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· Score: 1
Nobody with the capability to do so has enough time to bother waiting for a credit card number to be spoken over the phone, unless they're targetting a certain individual.
I'll say it again: Nobody has time for that shit. There's just way too much noise.
If they're just fishing, they'd do better with a part-time job at one of any number of retail establishments which:
a) accepts credit cards or checks b) lacks security cameras
And they know it.
And if someone is being targeted for fraud or identity theft or whatever, then there's so many other ways to gather goods. Public records, trash, and mailboxes are all such wealthy and available sources of such information and materials that listening to phone calls is rather passe' by comparison.
So. I guess I'm just not very worried, with current technology, about civilian snoopage on my telephone. I'm not uncomfortable relaying anything over it.
And try though I might, I don't know why any law-abiding person would be.
But we're not doing cable television here. We're running component video cables from a DVD player to a TV. Does anyone ever read the fucking articles anymore?
Thanks again, and HAND.
(Oh. And my RG-59-cabled house works justfine, thankyouverymuch. Who knows what you, or previous occupants, have gotten wrong.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're not wrong.
In fact, you're very right. I was reminded of this recently, when I was assembling a fast, SATA P4 Linux box and accidently gorfed something or other.
What happened was something so anachronistic that I thought it should well be impossible:
I turned the computer on, and the video card switched to its all-but-forgotten 40x25 wide-character textmode and loudly proclaimed "NO ROM BASIC - SYSTEM HALTED".
I nearly died laughing from the insanity of having BASIC bootstrap code still laying around in BIOS.
It's sad, really.
WPS uses ATM fonts, sure.
But Postscript, proper? AFAIK, it's just plain old Adobe Type Manager...
And X has supported ATM fonts for a decade or more.
I'd adore the chance to use the WPS (which is plainly the most visible portion of OS/2) on Linux.
I run Keyring on my Palm Pilot. It works well. I carry my Palm with me literally everywhere but at rock concerts, and it's very nice to have every obscure, seldom-used password securely available wherever I happen to be.
All of my passwords are there, and a few other bits of even more important personal information.
Stuff is encrypted, and lives in the Palm's RAM where it will be destroyed instantly upon power loss. So, if left in a bus terminal, chances are that the data will be gone before the hapless thief finds a charger for it to keep the RAM alive, let alone manages to crack the database or even recognize its existance.
All I have to do is remember one passphrase.
Stuff is also backed up to the machine that I hotsync to, where it remains encrypted on disk. While non-volatile, the machine does have the advantage of vastly increased physical security.
And that isn't much of a backup regime, so all of the work-related passwords and data that might affect Other People get beamed via IR to a co-worker with a similar rig. This usually happens in the windowless basement I call "work," and is thus also reasonably secure despite its plaintext-edness.
I've used Keyring on everything from old-school black-and-green Handsprings, to Treo 650s. It Just Works(tm). It is free. It is GPL'd.
I'd go on, but I shouldn't have to...
Zero credibility?
Shucks.
If I want to know what "caster" means in the context of automobile suspension alignment, I refer to an automotive text. The Webster definition is nearly useless in this application.
If I want to know what "exploit" means in the context of a computer program, I refer to the only fucking reference we have, as again, the Webster definition is plainly and obviously useless.
That said, if you wish to discredit the Jargon File, you'll also have to discredit ESR. And, er, well... good luck with that.
But we're using it as a noun, not a verb. Your definitions are therefore meaningless.
The American Heritage, according to dictionary.com, has these kind words to say about what an exploit (as a downloaded thing) might consist of:
The Jargon File, which is certainly a better reference for technical slang, isn't so flowery:
Ya know, that's the same sort of argument I've been using to promote software RAID vs. hardware RAID.
I've learned this: Nobody cares. People will blindly spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars on specialized gear to offload their precious CPUs.
When it is explained to them that better system performance can be had for less money by simply buying a faster CPU, they throw up their hands and blindly reassert that dedicated hardware must be better, by simple virtue of the fact that it is dedicated. That such reasoning is plainly a crock of shit seems to escape them.
Van Jacobsen be damned, people are an illogical bunch. They're always doing stuff for all the wrong reasons, and trying to solve problems with solutions that are only vaguely related.
That all said, if the card manages to improve ethernet latency even a little bit, it might be worthwhile in some circumstances. I'm thinking of applications like Cobranet for professional audio (where latency is always critically important), or perhaps clustering.
I mean, can you imagine a Beowulf cluster with these?
What?
Fact: Truetype has existed since at least Windows 3.11.
Fact: OS/2 Warp 3 was released in May of 1995. Windows 95 was released in August of 1995, concurrent with Microsoft Plus (which was all about subjective fun, and was included by many OEMs for "free").
That's only 3 months between the release of Warp, and 95. Whoopdie do. Definately not "much later". One might even say the releases happened right on top of eachother.
Windows 95 won the war, such as it were, because it offered more of what consumers wanted: Be it subjective fun, ease of use, the fact that it was on everyone's store-bought PC by default, or how it allowed access to a proliferation of pornography by way of the thousands of hours of AOL arriving for free each day in the mailbox; Windows 95 had it.
OS/2 died for so many bad reasons: This much is obvious. And, clearly, it's going to stay dead, no matter how cool HPFS was.
I am merely attempting to convey that it did not die because of the lousy 16-bit (plus win32s) Windows layer, as the notion is absurd.
That my 32-bit Xbox can play 16-bit SNES games better than an SNES does not mean that such functionality is killing the Xbox platform. That my XP machine can be talked into running Linux binaries natively does not mean that XP is going away. That my Linux box can be persuaded to run XP, or individual programs under WINE, does not mean that Linux is in the throes of death. So on, and so forth.
Warp's lousy 16-bit Windows emulation was outdated 3 months after it appeared. It therefore was not even a factor, let alone something to write home about. It was dead before it was even released, and IBM knew it. They did nothing.
Perhaps it is the profound lack of ability to properly run modern Windows programs which killed OS/2, and not the opposite as you suggest.
Whichever the case, the existance of WINE is not in any way indicative that MacOS X is going away any time soon, as was the implication above.
I call bullshit.
The Windows "emulation" in OS/2 was never good, and you'd recognize this if you'd ever spent any time dealing with it.
Truetype? DirectX?
(Oh, yes. I realize that Truetype formally existed in Warp 4, but by then, nobody cared anymore...)
OS/2 died because it was ugly. Windows had themes and expansions and (what many consider) fun. OS/2 was a drab shade of aqua marine with corporate grey highlights.
OS/2 died because it was hard to use (unless you call needing to install SIO into your config.sys in order to reliably get online easy, assuming you were able to stick with it even long enough to learn that much).
OS/2 died because it had horrible support for what ended up being the PC's true Killer Applications: Stealing music, watching porn, looking for someone to fuck, and playing stupid Shockwave games.
OS/2 didn't die because it happened to have Windows emulation: It died because the numbers were never big enough for large software developers to give a shit.
And when an incremental upgrade to Win32s froze OS/2's ability to handle 32-bit Windows programs, what happened? The authors requiring this newer Win32s didn't care that their software no longer ran under OS/2 -- even when prompted. They just carried on, selling record numbers of units for Windows-using world.
OS/2's Windows support didn't hamper OS/2 any more than Cygwin or UMLWIN32hampers Windows XP.
Why would it be any different for OS X?
Don't start looking for a new item based on what you don't want, but instead try to find one that includes what you do want.
I had a few requirements for the last motherboard upgrade that I bought for my own personal use, so I made a list:
Support for the last of the Socket-A CPUs
Dual-channel DDR
4 DIMM sockets
At least 5 PCI slots
Two regular IDE ports
Two SATA ports
AGP
I plugged some of these requirements into newegg's search engine, and found several that included all of these features.
It turns out that it was cheaper to buy one that also included on-board audio and a gigabit ethernet jack, than to buy one without.
So, I went with the cheaper one. I've been ignoring the on-board audio since day 1, and decided to just go ahead and use the built-in LAN and free up a NIC for better uses.
I might've chosen one that included Firewire, and on-board video, too, for all I care. I don't have a use for those functions, and I don't foresee having a use for them. But would it piss me off to have paid less for their inclusion, were that the case? Absolutely not.
I know how you feel. I got upset in the 90s when companies irrevocably started putting IDE, floppy, serial, and parallel ports onto motherboards. "What am I going to do with all of these expensive VESA local bus multi-I/O cards?"
Something similar also happened to me in the 80s I realized that the ISA clock card in my XT had been obsoleted by a part on the motherboard.
Needless to say, I got over the trauma of those transitions pretty quickly. You will, too, once you figure out what you're going to do with all those expensive 3c905 and genuine DEC Tulip cards...
[Hint: Local schools, libraries, friends-of-friends, and children-of-friends are all fine places to deposit good hardware which has been obsoleted by a motherboard upgrade. Just make sure you get it to them before time makes it completely fucking useless, and keep it appropriately packaged in antistatic bags or somesuch so it doesn't die all on its own before it gets a chance to be used again.]
Yes. It's called the non-emergency phone number. I think this was spelled out pretty clearly:
Call it and ask them. If they have a problem with it, they'll be the first to tell you.
Geez. Nobody suggested that you make a bunch of 911 phone calls without permission.
Image backups certainly have their place for people who can understand their limitations. However, a good, automatic, versioning file backup is almost certainly a higher priority for most computer users.
Great. Now, could you please enlighten us as to what a good, automatic, versioning file-based backup system might consist of?
AFAICT, this doesn't seem to exist. It doesn't matter how much sense it makes, or how perfect the idea is. It is simply unavailable.
In fact, the glaring lack of such a capable system almost seems to indicate that it is a victim of the "pick any two" rule.
So where is it?
(And, no. A few programs tied together with a ream of Perl or shell script that needs modified in order to function does not constitute a working system, and nor does a HOWTO with instructions on coding one.
Non-programmers, believe it or not, often have important data to back up, too, and being able to code should not be a prerequisite for keeping important stuff backed up. That is, unless you programmers really do think that it'd be no big deal if your loan officer lost your mortgage just hours before closing, or when the accountant's machine trashes your financials.)
I've spent the past few days working in the dispatch center of an small county sheriff's office, installing some new gear.
Today, someone brought in chili, which was excellent. Someone else ordered a sack of hamburgers from the joint down the road (which were delivered, and were extraordinarily tasty). People were generally enjoying their servitude in that small, locked-down room.
On top of the dispatch console was some eccentric 911 industry trade rag. The cover story was about VOIP, and how it currently relates to 911 service as we know it.
Therefore, they're aware of it, and the possible problems it might have.
The 911 phone nearly never rings. And, at least today, it only rang once for an emergency. The rest of the calls (a half dozen, or so) were all from MCI, who were running tests on a new-ish overlay area code.
Every now and then, the radio would make some noise that the dispatcher would respond to.
The dispatchers spent the rest of their day waiting for the phone to ring and shooting the shit with eachother.
So, just to reassure anyone who's wary:
Go ahead and test your 911 service. Just make sure that you've informed them beforehand, and don't waste their time with superflous verbiage.
And if, for some reason, it doesn't work: Call them back, and explain that the test failed. If you think you can fix the problem, tell them that you might like to attempt another test later. Thank them, and hang up.
Believe me: Those are real people on the other end of the line. They're happy to invest a few minutes of their time, if that means a slim possibly saving someone's life.
They want this stuff to work correctly at least as much as you do.
You seem to be having trouble with your sarcasm detector. You should see a doctor before it becomes serious.
That said: It would seem that TOSlink, as used by Toshiba to transmit SP/DIF digital audio signals in 1983, predates ADAT by about nine years, and also (near as I can gather) Alesis, the company, by about two years.
I declare that this glaring anachronism lends itself to discredit the rest of your ill-concieved tirade in its entirety, and further that your original analogy remains warped.
Your Olympus camera wouldn't be one that requires that strange XD memory card format, would it?
Might it also be the model which only supports "panoramic" cropping when using proprietary Olympus-branded XD cards?
If not, you might want to be aware that Olympus isn't as consumer-friendly as you think.
Just thought I'd bring up the P word for you. And a bit of I for you, too.
Your analogy is a bit warped.
;)
Everyone knows that professional digital audio gear uses AES/EBU is balanced and uses 110-ohm shielded twisted pair, while consumer gear uses SP/DIF over 75-ohm coax or TOSlink plastic fiber.
And, oddly enough, the adapter to go between AES/EBU and SP/DIF costs about $200.
HTH. HAND.
News flash: Hard drives are not made of steel, though the top cover might sometimes be stainless (which, of course, has little to do with conventional steel...).
Second news flash: Even if they were, flat steel is a very poor way to provide magnetic shielding. It really does almost nothing at all...
Third news flash: Inside every modern hard drive is a set of bloody strong neodymium magnets, in order for the head mechanism to do its thing. The platters are RIGHT NEXT TO THESE, and things seem to work fine.
The Air Force anecdote might be valid, but backing it up with your own wild conjecture is not helpful to the reader. A better explanation for a crowd such as Slashdot should be to include a reference to magnetic permeability and Google, and let that be that (but then again, this is an article on using brackets to mount things).
I give you a C.
So. The card number is always plaintext? What about for debit card transactions, when my ATM card acts like it is a Visa?
Because, I mean, I realize that an ATM-only card is useless without a PIN, but a Visa is very useful with only the card number, expiration date, and cardholder name (all of which are in the magstripe).
Please tell me that credit card transactions are handled differently from ATM transactions, that at least some of the information is encrypted somehow.
Thank you.
After being run through DVD Shrink, all such DVD "features" such as non-skippable ads disappear, along with a bunch of other configurable stuff.
It is often a very fun thing to remove EVERYTHING from the movie except for the movie itself.
I mean, imagine this: You insert a DVD into the player, and the movie begins playing. No menus, no boilerplate, no pushing Play, no nothing. And when the movie ends, the player goes back to idle and shuts off by itself after a few minutes.
And the best part: No hideously-loud 30-second repeating audio loop behind the menu to wake you up after a boring film.
Of course, you'll need a DVD burner. But those are cheap.
And you'll need some blank media. That's cheap too.
And I can hear you say: "But I want to do this with rented movies."
And to that, I can only retort that there must be some reason for Blockbuster to be hawking DVD+R blanks right beside the checkout counter, and that this is probably it.
Anyone care to convert this back over to a format usable by the rest of the world?
There's a plethora of Linux multitracking software (along with a healthy dose of it for every other platform), but it doesn't sound like anyone can get within 10 feet of this file without owning a Mac (including myself).
Who wants to be the first person to hammer out the Ardour-compatible "remix" of this thing?
Not to piss on your wet dream, but:
WiMax supports huge distances, sure. But in order to avoid needing a line of sight with the tower, you need to use low frequencies - that multiple-tens-of-GHz mumbo-jumbo is useless for penetrating things like trees, buildings, and cars.
Thankfully, old analog TV spectrum (such as the lower 700MHz band) is suitable and available for use in this way.
But realize that there's only so much information bandwidth that can be squeezed out of a slice of spectrum, and that the further you cast your signal, the more devices that are likely to be competing for that available bandwidth. So, "30-50 mile" range may not be as advantageous as you might think.
And it's all licensed and auctioned off to the highest bidder, in much the same way as existing cellular frequencies were/are. The end-user equipment doesn't even exist yet, and there's certainly no economy of scale advantage over traditional cellular phones (and there may never be, depending on how this spectrum ends up actually being used).
To top it off, it's extremely likely that the existing rules governing handheld cellular telephones to 600 mW ERP will be carried over to the lower 700's devices, if the rules aren't applicable already.
And -that- means that you'll never get more than a few miles of range. Which means again a landscape peppered with hideously expensive towers for reasonable coverage patterns.
Which is just like cellular phones operate, today. Except it's WiMax instead of CDMA.
On the other hand, it will open up the market to new players. Which will increase competition, and probably lower prices overall.
And in any event, the technology itself is not any cheaper simply by virtue of NOT being CDMA, GSM, or PCS. It's still governed by physics, the FCC, and market forces.
The system is called Dataradio.
The specific system that I'm familiar with operates at ~900MHz, using two extremely long (like, 9 feet long) omni antennas atop a tall building.
The patrol cars have a pair of rather small (a few inches), low-gain omnis mounted on their trunk lid.
Speed is low, and maxes at 19.2kbps (system-wide), but:
Range is intense. Something like 25 miles, varying considerably near the edges along with the landscape (which is predominantly flat). One central location covers the entire county with ease.
The cars are equipped with GPS recievers, and dispatch does have a neat videogame street map of who's-where that they can gawk at.
IP is supported, at least within the confines of the connected machine.
Data is encrypted with triple DES, and I doubt the hardware would let one get enough of a peak at it to even begin decoding it.
On my systems, I have a software RAID-1 "boot drive."
.)
If one drive in the pair fails, things keep ticking along smoothly. They're really just identical partitions with identical data on different disks.
LILO merrily writes boot code to the array without episode. Meanwhile, the machine's BIOS is happy to boot from disks other than primary-master, all by itself.
I've booted the system after randomly unplugging devices. It works just fine.
Why do all of you 3ware goons think that the world wants to buy hardware which offers no clear advantage over having no hardware at all? (As if I want to add -more- potential points of failure to my systems . .
Nobody with the capability to do so has enough time to bother waiting for a credit card number to be spoken over the phone, unless they're targetting a certain individual.
I'll say it again: Nobody has time for that shit. There's just way too much noise.
If they're just fishing, they'd do better with a part-time job at one of any number of retail establishments which:
a) accepts credit cards or checks
b) lacks security cameras
And they know it.
And if someone is being targeted for fraud or identity theft or whatever, then there's so many other ways to gather goods. Public records, trash, and mailboxes are all such wealthy and available sources of such information and materials that listening to phone calls is rather passe' by comparison.
So. I guess I'm just not very worried, with current technology, about civilian snoopage on my telephone. I'm not uncomfortable relaying anything over it.
And try though I might, I don't know why any law-abiding person would be.
Right-o, man.
But we're not doing cable television here. We're running component video cables from a DVD player to a TV. Does anyone ever read the fucking articles anymore?
Thanks again, and HAND.
(Oh. And my RG-59-cabled house works justfine, thankyouverymuch. Who knows what you, or previous occupants, have gotten wrong.)
Think back to the last time you installed Windows (any version will do). Think about that little guy called a EULA that you clicked "I agree" under.
Among other things, you agreed that Microsoft would never be accountable for any Bad Stuff that their software might endeavour to produce.
So, they're obviously not accountable, either. What's the difference?