There are two types of RFID: active and passive. Active meaning they have their own power supply to enable them to transmit. Passive is where there is no power supply but the chip is powered by the small amount of power generated by actually being scanned. The small tags that are put in labels and for palets are passive. These are the ones that will be made in the millions and are very cheap.
Car keys use active RFID so will not be affected much by the mass production.
Anyone who's desparate to surf pr0n will find a way around it.
I think you are missing the point. They are not trying to stop people in general from seeing porn. In fact, it says in the article that it is people's right to register for open access but the default will be restricted access. The point is about children unknowingly wondering into pornographic areas. For many parents, with myself included, this is a concern.
If a kid is intelligent enough to work away around the controls and bypassing them, which of course probably isn't difficult, then perhaps he is older enough to deal with what he finds. My 9 year old daughter though uses the Internet and I am happy for anything that will prevent her from walking into pornographic content by accident.
This would be inline with other content providers like television where there has to be some control over access to pornoghapic content.
Well, it is Thanksgiving weekend. Most people are out doing stuff with their physical world friends.
When you say most, I presume that you mean people in the US. Slashdot has a international following and readership so the editors should keep that in mind and should themselves be balanced from an international point of view. If that is not possible then perhaps we should fork off a slashdot international and leave this for US biased news.;)
What the hell is Thanksgiving anyway? (Rhetorical question) Does anyone else actually celebrate it apart from US/Canda?
This sort of thing has been done for ages. There are many enthusiasts around that drive car s from waste oil from fried food shops etc. What is different here is the cheap way of producing the catalyst which could make this something that could be done on a massive scale without the normal huge costs of mass producing the catalyst.
However, don't get too excited about this technology as it has a long way to go. The main problem of it is the inefficiency. To mass produce means mass farming. Which means agricutural equipement that needs to run on, yes you guessed, the biofuel that it is making. The low net energy coupled with the huge amount of land needed to produce any significant amout of fuel is what is going to make this fuel not worth while.
Many things (but not all) that are produced by fossil fuels can be produced by more earth friendly resources.
I really hope that this is true but I am not optimisitc. Sure, in theory many fossil fuel dependent things can be replaced but the main problem is the magnitude of the problem. For a start, with 80 odd million cars on the road in the US, how long is it going to take to build a whole new infrastructure for maintaining hydrogen fuel cell cars. The infrastrucutre includes, fuel cell generation, distribution, car manufacturer and maintenace of cars and fuel cell technology. This isn't something that can happend over night but would take at least 20-25 years. Then we are forgetting the real big fuel eaters are planes. For them, there is no easy substitution, at least nothing affordable. Trucks and lorries are another problem. Trains could be used but again, there isn't a good infrastructure in the US for trains now. Furthermore, all the new contruction needed to produce new cars, distributions networks, trains etc. needs energy. Which at the moment means fossil fuels, which is itself the problem. So we have to solve the problem by first making the problem bigger.
With the peak in oil and gas production only are few years around the corner (or perhaps we are already there for oil - only time will tell when we can look back and say "Yeah, we peaked"), we are in big trouble. Do we have the time and energy left to move to an alternative solution. In my opinion we possibly do, but it will be a bumpy ride.
In the meantime we can expect the neo-cons to fight more wars, with any excuse possible. Just so that they can secure more oil. Where next, Iran? Saudi?
And that is why I hope you are right. Living in a country where there is still plenty of oil, I guess we would be about number 4 or 5 on the US hit list. I hope fuel cells take off before "Shock and Awe" starts here.
In other words, a lot of stuff come together in Skype. The only point against I can think of is the missing interoperability with other software because of the proprietary protocols.
And personally I think this is the biggest downside which should be making all of us who like free software cringe. I dread to think of a world where phone calls on the net are dominated by one company and my Linux desktop is rubbish as my client is always one step behind the latest one for Windows. Also, a software where I have no control, no ability to bug fix, no ability to make improvements.
I suggest we try to help, develop and promote the free altenatives e.g. asterisk, gnomemeeting, linphone etc. and look to use VoIP providers using the standards. I have already hooked up many of my family and friends on SIP but there are more and more people hassling me to use Skype every day.:(
Yeah, strange, I just had some support calls from people using IE saying the same thing. I tried it with Lynx and also got garbage. My galeon works fine though. Hehe, you can see everyone is busy working in the company when/. goes down everyone starts complaining:)
Kernel developers today released the eagerly awaited linux kernel 1.2.14. Everyone should update to this latest version as soon as possible to make use of the security fixes that this update provides.
They say this is not true http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/03/05/0249257&mode=thread
You are right and I think if you read deeply both articles are saying the same thing. From the forbes one:
"Computer Associates said its license for Linux is part of a legal settlement with Canopy Group, SCO's major shareholder."
And from News Forge:
"Barrenechea claims that SCO has twisted a $40 million breach-of-contract settlement that CA paid last summer to the Canopy Group, SCO's biggest stockholder, and Center 7, another Canopy company, and has turned it into a purported Linux license."
It seems that SCO are once again desperately trying to twist the facts to sopport their case. In reality, SCO "just attached a transparent Linux indemnification to all UnixWare licenses"
The XFree team has changed their license policy two weeks ago, to something that isn't compatible to the GPL any longer. The Gentoo developers have already drawn their own conclusions from this, and will refrain from adding XFree86 versions under the new license scheme to the portage tree for the time being.
I am sure Enlightenment has done this for years. It provides a icon bar where mini-sized windows and applications are viewed and you can see all the windows on all your desktops at the same time. I am sure that it was available years ago - but not sure of the exact date. I was using it in 97 or 98.
Enlightenment also provided animation on changing virtual desktops in a similar way as claimed in this patent.
Why are actors paid $50,000,000 for doing a film instead of, say, $50,000 or $200,000?
There has been a cultrual shift in some ways. Years ago the entertainers where the jokers of society. The court jester. The clown. People who had no better skill in life than to act a fool to entertain others.
These days movie stars are often looked up to as some of the highest people of society. Some are virtually worshipped. I do sometimes wonder why. Are they really that different from the court jesters from years ago? I am sure that both generations worked hard on their act.
Perhaps in the future the trend could shift back again.
I've always been a bit worried about the security of a wireless keyboard. Doesn't it mean that anyone could sniff my keystrokes without even installing a key logger? Or is there a proper encryption system built into these devices?
I agree, it is always annoying when you see that something claims to work on "Linux" and then when you get down to it you find it is for a paricular Redhat distribution. Usually an old one at that.
If the distros could do more to follow the LSB it would allow us power users to stick to the really rocking distros like Gentoo and at the same time have more compatibility with the 'easier to use' distros for the newbies.
I would agree with you to an extent that Gentoo is a good path forward but I don't think it is for everyone.
The company I work for has about 8 Linux servers, 4 Linux Firewall/Routers, 10 Linux workstations and about 100 Windows work stations. We are in the process of replacing the Windows workstations with Linux workstations once we have finished porting our software.
We used to be an all Redhat Linux company and have been like that since the Redhat 3 days (before that we were Slackware). We are do now feel forced into the situation to move as we are not that big too afford the payments that Redhat expect. We are now in the process of moving all our servers to Gentoo and for me as the head sys admin I am pleased. It is making my job much easier especially since Gentoo provides the flexibility that my orgainisation requires. I find many software in Gentoo is easier to configure the way I want it (e.g. Freeswan enabled kernel with X.509 patch, Samba with LDAP auth). It is not without its problems though.
One problem is the time to compile things. Obviously it has it benefits to compile everything like better flexibility and better performance but then the time overhead is huge. A regular up2date on a Redhat system is usually over in a couple of minutes whereas keeping an emerge -UuD world on Gentoo can take some time.
The other problem which I expect will be the major problem for large organisations is the lack of commercial support. Personally I find the Gentoo support forums are excellent and have found solutions for the few problems I have had with Gentoo. However, this may be a nightmare for some companies for two reasons. First, Gentoo needs indepth knowledge of Linux. It is not like Redhat where everything is done for you and you just need to run up2date. With Gentoo you really need to KNOW Linux. This may be ok for some of us but in our company the main problem is if I am not around no one knows what the hell is going on anymore. The second problem is the fact that the gentoo packages have not been tried and tested as much as the Redhat ones. Part of the problem here is that Gentoo has so many possible configurations that it is very difficult for all of them to be tested. For the big cats who like someone to blame when things go wrong this might not be the perfect solution.
As a conclusion I would say, Gentoo is enterprise ready but only if you have Sys admin staff who really know Linux well and if you have the time and requirement to customise your packages to the extent that Gentoo allows you to. Otherwise, you might be better looking else where.
I have been using Gabber a Gnome Jabber client with its gpg support for sometime. I have quite a few people on my roaster who I can speak to with that extra level of privacy.
I think that case for privacy is strong. I don't like thinking that my personal conversations go in plain text across peoples' coporate networks. I have nothing to hide. What I say though is still private.
Many people don't see it as being an important issue but then would they send all their snail mail by postcard? I think the reason why they don't consider it important is that they are not fully aware of the possible implications.
So, I hope its clear to everyone that it runs on Red Hat 7.2 (6.1 only) too!
I think you'll find they mean that only version 6.1 of the Identity server will be supported under Redhat Linux 7.2 and this version 6.0 doesn't actually support Linux at all.
The solution from the page linked is to install MDAC 2.7. There is no mention of removing MS from the trusted list.
The page linked to, MS02-065, says...
What steps could I follow to prevent the control from being silently re-introduced onto my system?
The simplest way is to make sure you have no trusted publishers, including Microsoft.....
Of course, what they really mean is to only remove MS because since the control is only signed by MS then it is only their certificate that will allow the control to be installed again malicously.
I have nothing illegal to hide, and while I'd rather people didn't look through what I've been doing, it's all down to what's more important....
I wonder if they passed a law saying that the Post office had to keep a photocopy of all land mail you posted you would be so keen to comply.
The point is, keeping some logs isn't going to help much anyway. Terrorist are first of all going to be using cryptography or data-hiding techniques. It isn't as simple as just reading peoples email logs. There are so many ways around leaving evidence in log files. Heck, there are enough wide open machines on the Internet that take 5 seconds to hack into where you can delete all the log files yourself.
These laws do nothing but remove the privacy and freedom of common man. Aren't these the rights we are meant to be fighting the terrorists for!
Slashdot Mirror
There are two types of RFID: active and passive. Active meaning they have their own power supply to enable them to transmit. Passive is where there is no power supply but the chip is powered by the small amount of power generated by actually being scanned. The small tags that are put in labels and for palets are passive. These are the ones that will be made in the millions and are very cheap.
Car keys use active RFID so will not be affected much by the mass production.
Anyone who's desparate to surf pr0n will find a way around it.
I think you are missing the point. They are not trying to stop people in general from seeing porn. In fact, it says in the article that it is people's right to register for open access but the default will be restricted access. The point is about children unknowingly wondering into pornographic areas. For many parents, with myself included, this is a concern.
If a kid is intelligent enough to work away around the controls and bypassing them, which of course probably isn't difficult, then perhaps he is older enough to deal with what he finds. My 9 year old daughter though uses the Internet and I am happy for anything that will prevent her from walking into pornographic content by accident.
This would be inline with other content providers like television where there has to be some control over access to pornoghapic content.
Well, it is Thanksgiving weekend. Most people are out doing stuff with their physical world friends.
When you say most, I presume that you mean people in the US. Slashdot has a international following and readership so the editors should keep that in mind and should themselves be balanced from an international point of view. If that is not possible then perhaps we should fork off a slashdot international and leave this for US biased news. ;)
What the hell is Thanksgiving anyway? (Rhetorical question) Does anyone else actually celebrate it apart from US/Canda?
This sort of thing has been done for ages. There are many enthusiasts around that drive car s from waste oil from fried food shops etc. What is different here is the cheap way of producing the catalyst which could make this something that could be done on a massive scale without the normal huge costs of mass producing the catalyst. However, don't get too excited about this technology as it has a long way to go. The main problem of it is the inefficiency. To mass produce means mass farming. Which means agricutural equipement that needs to run on, yes you guessed, the biofuel that it is making. The low net energy coupled with the huge amount of land needed to produce any significant amout of fuel is what is going to make this fuel not worth while.
Many things (but not all) that are produced by fossil fuels can be produced by more earth friendly resources.
I really hope that this is true but I am not optimisitc. Sure, in theory many fossil fuel dependent things can be replaced but the main problem is the magnitude of the problem. For a start, with 80 odd million cars on the road in the US, how long is it going to take to build a whole new infrastructure for maintaining hydrogen fuel cell cars. The infrastrucutre includes, fuel cell generation, distribution, car manufacturer and maintenace of cars and fuel cell technology. This isn't something that can happend over night but would take at least 20-25 years. Then we are forgetting the real big fuel eaters are planes. For them, there is no easy substitution, at least nothing affordable. Trucks and lorries are another problem. Trains could be used but again, there isn't a good infrastructure in the US for trains now. Furthermore, all the new contruction needed to produce new cars, distributions networks, trains etc. needs energy. Which at the moment means fossil fuels, which is itself the problem. So we have to solve the problem by first making the problem bigger.
With the peak in oil and gas production only are few years around the corner (or perhaps we are already there for oil - only time will tell when we can look back and say "Yeah, we peaked"), we are in big trouble. Do we have the time and energy left to move to an alternative solution. In my opinion we possibly do, but it will be a bumpy ride.
In the meantime we can expect the neo-cons to fight more wars, with any excuse possible. Just so that they can secure more oil. Where next, Iran? Saudi?
And that is why I hope you are right. Living in a country where there is still plenty of oil, I guess we would be about number 4 or 5 on the US hit list. I hope fuel cells take off before "Shock and Awe" starts here.
In other words, a lot of stuff come together in Skype. The only point against I can think of is the missing interoperability with other software because of the proprietary protocols.
And personally I think this is the biggest downside which should be making all of us who like free software cringe. I dread to think of a world where phone calls on the net are dominated by one company and my Linux desktop is rubbish as my client is always one step behind the latest one for Windows. Also, a software where I have no control, no ability to bug fix, no ability to make improvements.I suggest we try to help, develop and promote the free altenatives e.g. asterisk, gnomemeeting, linphone etc. and look to use VoIP providers using the standards. I have already hooked up many of my family and friends on SIP but there are more and more people hassling me to use Skype every day. :(
Yeah, strange, I just had some support calls from people using IE saying the same thing. I tried it with Lynx and also got garbage. My galeon works fine though. Hehe, you can see everyone is busy working in the company when /. goes down everyone starts complaining :)
Kernel developers today released the eagerly awaited linux kernel 1.2.14. Everyone should update to this latest version as soon as possible to make use of the security fixes that this update provides.
Try this.
Well, the hackers will never think of using this one https://georgewbush.com/
They say this is not true http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/03 /05/0249257&mode=thread
You are right and I think if you read deeply both articles are saying the same thing. From the forbes one:
And from News Forge:
It seems that SCO are once again desperately trying to twist the facts to sopport their case. In reality, SCO "just attached a transparent Linux indemnification to all UnixWare licenses"
On the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter they say:
I am sure Enlightenment has done this for years. It provides a icon bar where mini-sized windows and applications are viewed and you can see all the windows on all your desktops at the same time. I am sure that it was available years ago - but not sure of the exact date. I was using it in 97 or 98.
Enlightenment also provided animation on changing virtual desktops in a similar way as claimed in this patent.
You might want to check the spaces are still there when you copied it
Can't think of anything else wrong...it should work. If I get access to the MSWin32 binary myself I will try it out
Why are actors paid $50,000,000 for doing a film instead of, say, $50,000 or $200,000?
There has been a cultrual shift in some ways. Years ago the entertainers where the jokers of society. The court jester. The clown. People who had no better skill in life than to act a fool to entertain others.
These days movie stars are often looked up to as some of the highest people of society. Some are virtually worshipped. I do sometimes wonder why. Are they really that different from the court jesters from years ago? I am sure that both generations worked hard on their act.
Perhaps in the future the trend could shift back again.
I've always been a bit worried about the security of a wireless keyboard. Doesn't it mean that anyone could sniff my keystrokes without even installing a key logger? Or is there a proper encryption system built into these devices?
I agree, it is always annoying when you see that something claims to work on "Linux" and then when you get down to it you find it is for a paricular Redhat distribution. Usually an old one at that.
If the distros could do more to follow the LSB it would allow us power users to stick to the really rocking distros like Gentoo and at the same time have more compatibility with the 'easier to use' distros for the newbies.
I would agree with you to an extent that Gentoo is a good path forward but I don't think it is for everyone.
The company I work for has about 8 Linux servers, 4 Linux Firewall/Routers, 10 Linux workstations and about 100 Windows work stations. We are in the process of replacing the Windows workstations with Linux workstations once we have finished porting our software.
We used to be an all Redhat Linux company and have been like that since the Redhat 3 days (before that we were Slackware). We are do now feel forced into the situation to move as we are not that big too afford the payments that Redhat expect. We are now in the process of moving all our servers to Gentoo and for me as the head sys admin I am pleased. It is making my job much easier especially since Gentoo provides the flexibility that my orgainisation requires. I find many software in Gentoo is easier to configure the way I want it (e.g. Freeswan enabled kernel with X.509 patch, Samba with LDAP auth). It is not without its problems though.
One problem is the time to compile things. Obviously it has it benefits to compile everything like better flexibility and better performance but then the time overhead is huge. A regular up2date on a Redhat system is usually over in a couple of minutes whereas keeping an emerge -UuD world on Gentoo can take some time.
The other problem which I expect will be the major problem for large organisations is the lack of commercial support. Personally I find the Gentoo support forums are excellent and have found solutions for the few problems I have had with Gentoo. However, this may be a nightmare for some companies for two reasons. First, Gentoo needs indepth knowledge of Linux. It is not like Redhat where everything is done for you and you just need to run up2date. With Gentoo you really need to KNOW Linux. This may be ok for some of us but in our company the main problem is if I am not around no one knows what the hell is going on anymore. The second problem is the fact that the gentoo packages have not been tried and tested as much as the Redhat ones. Part of the problem here is that Gentoo has so many possible configurations that it is very difficult for all of them to be tested. For the big cats who like someone to blame when things go wrong this might not be the perfect solution.
As a conclusion I would say, Gentoo is enterprise ready but only if you have Sys admin staff who really know Linux well and if you have the time and requirement to customise your packages to the extent that Gentoo allows you to. Otherwise, you might be better looking else where.
Just my two pence worth!
Go to Google UK and enter keywords "weapons of mass destruction" and hit "I'm feeling lucky"
I have been using Gabber a Gnome Jabber client with its gpg support for sometime. I have quite a few people on my roaster who I can speak to with that extra level of privacy.
I think that case for privacy is strong. I don't like thinking that my personal conversations go in plain text across peoples' coporate networks. I have nothing to hide. What I say though is still private.
Many people don't see it as being an important issue but then would they send all their snail mail by postcard? I think the reason why they don't consider it important is that they are not fully aware of the possible implications.
At the moment it is vapourware. If they ever finish it....it will really be vapourware.
I think they mean from version 6.1 of the indentity server Redhat 7.2 will be supported. Crap way of saying it though
So, I hope its clear to everyone that it runs on Red Hat 7.2 (6.1 only) too!
I think you'll find they mean that only version 6.1 of the Identity server will be supported under Redhat Linux 7.2 and this version 6.0 doesn't actually support Linux at all.
The solution from the page linked is to install MDAC 2.7. There is no mention of removing MS from the trusted list.
The page linked to, MS02-065, says...
Of course, what they really mean is to only remove MS because since the control is only signed by MS then it is only their certificate that will allow the control to be installed again malicously.
I have nothing illegal to hide, and while I'd rather people didn't look through what I've been doing, it's all down to what's more important....
I wonder if they passed a law saying that the Post office had to keep a photocopy of all land mail you posted you would be so keen to comply.
The point is, keeping some logs isn't going to help much anyway. Terrorist are first of all going to be using cryptography or data-hiding techniques. It isn't as simple as just reading peoples email logs. There are so many ways around leaving evidence in log files. Heck, there are enough wide open machines on the Internet that take 5 seconds to hack into where you can delete all the log files yourself.
These laws do nothing but remove the privacy and freedom of common man. Aren't these the rights we are meant to be fighting the terrorists for!