Single vendor? Since when has my Mac talking to random wireless access points been single vendor? Since when was my Mac talking (flawlessly) over bluetooth to my Nokia phone been single vendor? It just *works* regardless of the vendor of the wireless ethernet access point whether it's secured or not.
$6 a gallon will not stop people driving. That's what it costs here, yet everybody still drives and most families have multiple cars. You have to find an alternative to gasoline powered cars that is just as convenient, or people will still drive. I suspect most people would cut down on food before they cut down on driving.
Wireless ethernet has always 'just worked' on my PowerBook. So has bluetooth, and using bluetooth phones for GPRS dialup just worked too (a feat that required the sacrifice of live chickens on Redmondware).
These weren't vt100 (they were Videotex, a colour 40-column display including graphics - BBC Mode 7 if you know what that is) services - but Prestel/Micronet offered pretty much all that - there was a Marketplace (I bought a few things off other individuals through that), you could search for things you wanted, you could download both free and pay-for software, play online multi player games like 'Shades', you could publish your own pages - i.e. a blog or a personal set of home pages (it was called 'The Gallery'), there was chat forums similar in style to the prolific phpbb type things you see today. No VOIP of course (hardly possible on 1200 baud down, 75 baud up), but the telephone was perfectly functional for that.
This was in 1985.
Of course, the modern internet is a lot faster and a lot more noob-user friendly (and also a lot cheaper). The subscription cost for Prestel+Micronet was around GBP25 per quarter, and some things had time-based charges (which is what made it really expensive - multi user games usually cost 1p/minute to access off peak).
There wasn't just Prestel+Micronet either, there were plenty of dial-up BBS as well.
Where is this that has such stone-age on-demand heaters? Gas on-demand heaters have been able to cope with a pretty good range of flow rates for years. On my central on-demand gas heater (a modern condenser-type which also scavenges heat from the flue - so the exhaust gases are actually fairly cool), it lights fewer burners at low flow rates - I can turn the kitchen tap on a fairly slow dribble and it lights up, but very few burners. Turn the water on fast, and you hear it light a bunch more burners. The flow requirement to get it to kick in is probably a small fraction of a gallon/min, but if I use the (non-electric) shower in the bath, it can easily kick out enough power for a shower that practically hurts from the water pressure and at the same time be supplying the dishwasher. Mine is rated for a flow up to 14.3 litres/min (4 US gal/min) which is more than enough for my 4-bedroom house, and is made by Glow Worm (http://www.glow-worm.co.uk/)
It is fully thermostatically controlled, and you can control the hot water heat just by turning a knob on the front panel (and it'll consistently heat to that temperature regardless of whether you want just a dribble of water or whether you want it to come gushing out to fill a bath).
Looking at the schematic for this heater, it has a small closed hot water loop and a heat exchanger, and the water you're heating is the other side of this heat exchanger. The small hot water loop (I think it contains about a litre of water) acts as a buffer so you don't get wild temperature fluctuations as you change the flow rate. I'd expect that to be a pretty standard design.
Things like Kazaa and the deceased Napster were and are no good for finding independent music. The way the searches work, they are only any good for finding things that are popular, because you must know what you're searching for ahead of time. You can't just browse a genre to try and find independent music.
Things like Magnatune are about five orders of magnitude better for finding an independent artist that you like because you can browse and sample easily by category (and you know it will all be good quality recordings and files). Also, podcasts for independent artists such as 75 Minutes are more the marketing channel.
I lived in the US for 6 years. The one domestic thing that I didn't like was how you had to have two separate supplies - a special supply for the tumble dryer off two phases, and the available power from the regular wall sockets all over the house were too weedy to even run an electric kettle [0]. Not to mention the plugs themselves are not very substantial and if they take any wear are liable to just fall out of the socket. I never saw a switched socket either (apart from ones where you could plug the table lamp in, and the switch was on the wall).
Give me 240v 13amp switched sockets any day.
On the other hand, 120v is just about right for making a pickled gherkin discharge lamp. 240v is a bit much...
[0] yes you can get electric kettles in the US, but they are so slow boiling the water, you end up just using the stovetop.
I think you're misguided about electric showers. I have a 10kW model (which heats the water very nicely). It gets the water stream up to temperature in around 5 seconds. It cools off in seconds (if you're really worried about the efficiency, turn it to 'low' just as you're finishing your shower, but it gets cold pretty quickly). It radiates very little heat.
A microwave heater is only around 50% efficient at turning incoming electricity into microwaves. At least my electric shower converts it all into heat that goes into the water. It really seems a bit pointless, probably invented by someone who lives somewhere where on-demand electric heaters like my shower aren't sold.
Sorry, that's just wrong. I have electric showers which heat water on demand, and they have normal resistive heating elements. They get a decent stream of water to close to scalding heat if you let them (even in the wintertime, when the incoming water is very cold). These types of electric showers have been around for years, too (and will be much more efficient than an equivalent microwave-based device).
I have an electric shower. It is a small unit (about 8 inches tall, 5 inches wide and 3 inches deep, which has all the controls and houses the heater) and can adequately heat the water running through it to give a decent shower, and gets hot enough within seconds. It does draw around 10kW on full power, but for a microwave heater to heat the same volume of water would require much more than this (due to the inefficiencies noted).
So I really don't see what this microwave on-demand heater is solving here - we've had on-demand electric water heaters like my shower for decades.
There's no such thing as an unblockable IP. More likely, that if the OS detects that advertisments without the correct digital signature are getting downloaded and shown, the OS will halt.
That's because Sony are doing a public beta test. They don't want to use copy protection on anything popular until it's proven to be trouble free - so use some customers who you don't particularly care losing to do your testing for you.
No, I'm not 'stupid enough to belive [...] they will do something like that' because when I was at university, I asked precisely that question. And guess what - they did. I don't have to believe, because they did it. Despite the BOFHish reputation of most university admins, if you don't treat them as these scary daemons (actually, people with the root account at university are quite often human) they usually are pretty accomodating. You just have to ask nicely.
By the end of my *first year* (not third, not fourth), we had a student server which *we* administered so *we* could provide these sorts of student services. It was outside the university's firewall for the rest of the network so we had totally unfettered access to a very fat pipe.
You should try asking instead of kvetching about it here. You never know you might actually get somewhere.
If you don't like your university's internet access policy then: (a) go somewhere else or (b) live in private accomodation and get your own cable/DSL or (c) actually try and do something constructive about the situation.
My guess all the grousing about the lack of unfettered access to max out the university's expensive leased lines to the internet isn't really about not being able to download linux ISOs (as I demonstrated, university admins in the main are very accomodating to this sort of thing, because it's often something they are interested in, too) but rather that students can't go downloading music/movies at high speed on the university's net connection.
It's eminently practical for most offices. A simple policy is to not even route to the internet, all access must go via a proxy such as Squid for web access. It isn't hard to set up a proxy. All but the tiniest of offices can practically implement that kind of policy - and should if they are dealing with confidential information.
That is in addition to blocking all executable attachments and not allowing unauthorized software installation.
If you want any semblence of security, you don't even route to the internet from your normal office especially where there is confidential information. You absolutely use a proxy *with authentication*. The fact it's authenticated will frustrate all but highly targeted and determined attackers. They are very difficult to defend from (especially as the achilles heel is more likely your staff's susceptibility to social engineering).
We have a network at work where financial details are processed. I have it locked down to a strict default deny policy for both ingress and egress. _No_ web access is allowed on that network, and the only access to internet sites is to other organizations we deal with - and all traffic is encrypted. The policy is default deny to other networks within the organization too. Every single host outside the network must be documented. All transfers are logged.
So, basically - you'd effectively ban games from the Internet. Tens of thousands of gamers on a large ISP behind one small piece of address space doesn't really fly that well with NAT and UDP connections (which are stateless - it's a big hack and a lot of guesswork to try and keep state on more than a handful of users using UDP). And you'd be banning VOIP.
This is why you should use strong, default-deny egress rules on your network - especailly if you have confidential data.
Especially at small organizations, people think they are protected if they just have some ingress rules that (supposedly) stop the bad people getting in. However, you've got to stop your PCs from making connections *out* to random addresses.
Dress like a professional *what* though? A professional marketer?
IT often involves physical work, such as pulling cables, working inside servers (usually clean) or desktop computers (often laden with dust), lying on your back to reach some inaccessable place. HR and marketing types seem to think that 'dress like a professional' means suit. This is simply not suitable (pardon the pun) in many IT jobs - it's no more suitable than asking a plumber to wear a suit. Hard wearing clothes are a must. That doesn't necessarily equal jeans, but it DOES mean not a suit. (I don't wear jeans at work at the moment, and my day can involve a morning of C++ and an afternoon of struggling with recalcitrant hardware that keeps derailing from the rack).
Unlike yourself, I don't have my nose in the air and refuse to do hardware jobs.
I can spend some of my day writing C++, some of my day writing Perl scripts, and some of it lying on my back in the server room trying to pull through a piece of cat5e or reseat a particularly recalcitrant RAID card stuffed inside a hard to reach server.
Sharp slacks and shirts (and worse still, ties) are NOT compatible with that environment. Besides, wearing fancy clothes does not make me code better.
You know what, I've always wanted to get a radar reflector, put it in my backpack, take my bike to England and find a Gatso at the bottom of some hill somewhere - then repeatedly ride my bicycle past it, setting it off over and over again.
Completely pointless and arguably hazardous, but it'd be fun nonetheless.
Our licensing laws in the Isle of Man permit 24/7 sales of alcohol. It isn't a problem and we're all laughing at the silly debate over in the UK.
What happens is pubs close when landlords feel like closing. This means you don't get the last two rushed rounds in at closing time (because it happens much later, and people have generally stopped drinking anyway) - that last 'binge' that makes people really drunk. It also means the pubs throw out at more or less random different times during the night, so you don't get all the pubs disgorging simultaneously.
Since we only have three breweries and one distillery for a population of 76000, the rumour that we are all drunks is fal...oh, wait...
I heard that too on Radio 4 this morning. My thoughts - no, it's not to level the playing field, it's simply to get more money. Of course, there's nothing wrong with pricing a product to make more money, but then coming up with weasel words about 'leveling the playing field' instead of admitting the real goal is just slimy.
Slashdot Mirror
Single vendor? Since when has my Mac talking to random wireless access points been single vendor? Since when was my Mac talking (flawlessly) over bluetooth to my Nokia phone been single vendor? It just *works* regardless of the vendor of the wireless ethernet access point whether it's secured or not.
$6 a gallon will not stop people driving. That's what it costs here, yet everybody still drives and most families have multiple cars. You have to find an alternative to gasoline powered cars that is just as convenient, or people will still drive. I suspect most people would cut down on food before they cut down on driving.
You know PGP stands for 'Pretty Good Privacy'?
I think I've worked out what PHP stands for -- "Pretty Hopeless Privacy"
One word:
Macintosh.
Wireless ethernet has always 'just worked' on my PowerBook. So has bluetooth, and using bluetooth phones for GPRS dialup just worked too (a feat that required the sacrifice of live chickens on Redmondware).
These weren't vt100 (they were Videotex, a colour 40-column display including graphics - BBC Mode 7 if you know what that is) services - but Prestel/Micronet offered pretty much all that - there was a Marketplace (I bought a few things off other individuals through that), you could search for things you wanted, you could download both free and pay-for software, play online multi player games like 'Shades', you could publish your own pages - i.e. a blog or a personal set of home pages (it was called 'The Gallery'), there was chat forums similar in style to the prolific phpbb type things you see today. No VOIP of course (hardly possible on 1200 baud down, 75 baud up), but the telephone was perfectly functional for that.
This was in 1985.
Of course, the modern internet is a lot faster and a lot more noob-user friendly (and also a lot cheaper). The subscription cost for Prestel+Micronet was around GBP25 per quarter, and some things had time-based charges (which is what made it really expensive - multi user games usually cost 1p/minute to access off peak).
There wasn't just Prestel+Micronet either, there were plenty of dial-up BBS as well.
Where is this that has such stone-age on-demand heaters? Gas on-demand heaters have been able to cope with a pretty good range of flow rates for years. On my central on-demand gas heater (a modern condenser-type which also scavenges heat from the flue - so the exhaust gases are actually fairly cool), it lights fewer burners at low flow rates - I can turn the kitchen tap on a fairly slow dribble and it lights up, but very few burners. Turn the water on fast, and you hear it light a bunch more burners. The flow requirement to get it to kick in is probably a small fraction of a gallon/min, but if I use the (non-electric) shower in the bath, it can easily kick out enough power for a shower that practically hurts from the water pressure and at the same time be supplying the dishwasher. Mine is rated for a flow up to 14.3 litres/min (4 US gal/min) which is more than enough for my 4-bedroom house, and is made by Glow Worm (http://www.glow-worm.co.uk/)
It is fully thermostatically controlled, and you can control the hot water heat just by turning a knob on the front panel (and it'll consistently heat to that temperature regardless of whether you want just a dribble of water or whether you want it to come gushing out to fill a bath).
Looking at the schematic for this heater, it has a small closed hot water loop and a heat exchanger, and the water you're heating is the other side of this heat exchanger. The small hot water loop (I think it contains about a litre of water) acts as a buffer so you don't get wild temperature fluctuations as you change the flow rate. I'd expect that to be a pretty standard design.
Things like Kazaa and the deceased Napster were and are no good for finding independent music. The way the searches work, they are only any good for finding things that are popular, because you must know what you're searching for ahead of time. You can't just browse a genre to try and find independent music.
Things like Magnatune are about five orders of magnitude better for finding an independent artist that you like because you can browse and sample easily by category (and you know it will all be good quality recordings and files). Also, podcasts for independent artists such as 75 Minutes are more the marketing channel.
I lived in the US for 6 years. The one domestic thing that I didn't like was how you had to have two separate supplies - a special supply for the tumble dryer off two phases, and the available power from the regular wall sockets all over the house were too weedy to even run an electric kettle [0]. Not to mention the plugs themselves are not very substantial and if they take any wear are liable to just fall out of the socket. I never saw a switched socket either (apart from ones where you could plug the table lamp in, and the switch was on the wall).
Give me 240v 13amp switched sockets any day.
On the other hand, 120v is just about right for making a pickled gherkin discharge lamp. 240v is a bit much...
[0] yes you can get electric kettles in the US, but they are so slow boiling the water, you end up just using the stovetop.
I think you're misguided about electric showers. I have a 10kW model (which heats the water very nicely). It gets the water stream up to temperature in around 5 seconds. It cools off in seconds (if you're really worried about the efficiency, turn it to 'low' just as you're finishing your shower, but it gets cold pretty quickly). It radiates very little heat.
A microwave heater is only around 50% efficient at turning incoming electricity into microwaves. At least my electric shower converts it all into heat that goes into the water. It really seems a bit pointless, probably invented by someone who lives somewhere where on-demand electric heaters like my shower aren't sold.
Sorry, that's just wrong. I have electric showers which heat water on demand, and they have normal resistive heating elements. They get a decent stream of water to close to scalding heat if you let them (even in the wintertime, when the incoming water is very cold). These types of electric showers have been around for years, too (and will be much more efficient than an equivalent microwave-based device).
I didn't think that this was a problem anyway.
I have an electric shower. It is a small unit (about 8 inches tall, 5 inches wide and 3 inches deep, which has all the controls and houses the heater) and can adequately heat the water running through it to give a decent shower, and gets hot enough within seconds. It does draw around 10kW on full power, but for a microwave heater to heat the same volume of water would require much more than this (due to the inefficiencies noted).
So I really don't see what this microwave on-demand heater is solving here - we've had on-demand electric water heaters like my shower for decades.
There's no such thing as an unblockable IP. More likely, that if the OS detects that advertisments without the correct digital signature are getting downloaded and shown, the OS will halt.
That's because Sony are doing a public beta test. They don't want to use copy protection on anything popular until it's proven to be trouble free - so use some customers who you don't particularly care losing to do your testing for you.
No, I'm not 'stupid enough to belive [...] they will do something like that' because when I was at university, I asked precisely that question. And guess what - they did. I don't have to believe, because they did it. Despite the BOFHish reputation of most university admins, if you don't treat them as these scary daemons (actually, people with the root account at university are quite often human) they usually are pretty accomodating. You just have to ask nicely.
By the end of my *first year* (not third, not fourth), we had a student server which *we* administered so *we* could provide these sorts of student services. It was outside the university's firewall for the rest of the network so we had totally unfettered access to a very fat pipe.
You should try asking instead of kvetching about it here. You never know you might actually get somewhere.
If you don't like your university's internet access policy then:
(a) go somewhere else
or
(b) live in private accomodation and get your own cable/DSL
or
(c) actually try and do something constructive about the situation.
My guess all the grousing about the lack of unfettered access to max out the university's expensive leased lines to the internet isn't really about not being able to download linux ISOs (as I demonstrated, university admins in the main are very accomodating to this sort of thing, because it's often something they are interested in, too) but rather that students can't go downloading music/movies at high speed on the university's net connection.
It's eminently practical for most offices. A simple policy is to not even route to the internet, all access must go via a proxy such as Squid for web access. It isn't hard to set up a proxy. All but the tiniest of offices can practically implement that kind of policy - and should if they are dealing with confidential information.
That is in addition to blocking all executable attachments and not allowing unauthorized software installation.
No, I'm not kidding you in the slightest.
If you want any semblence of security, you don't even route to the internet from your normal office especially where there is confidential information. You absolutely use a proxy *with authentication*. The fact it's authenticated will frustrate all but highly targeted and determined attackers. They are very difficult to defend from (especially as the achilles heel is more likely your staff's susceptibility to social engineering).
We have a network at work where financial details are processed. I have it locked down to a strict default deny policy for both ingress and egress. _No_ web access is allowed on that network, and the only access to internet sites is to other organizations we deal with - and all traffic is encrypted. The policy is default deny to other networks within the organization too. Every single host outside the network must be documented. All transfers are logged.
So, basically - you'd effectively ban games from the Internet. Tens of thousands of gamers on a large ISP behind one small piece of address space doesn't really fly that well with NAT and UDP connections (which are stateless - it's a big hack and a lot of guesswork to try and keep state on more than a handful of users using UDP). And you'd be banning VOIP.
This is why you should use strong, default-deny egress rules on your network - especailly if you have confidential data.
Especially at small organizations, people think they are protected if they just have some ingress rules that (supposedly) stop the bad people getting in. However, you've got to stop your PCs from making connections *out* to random addresses.
Dress like a professional *what* though? A professional marketer?
IT often involves physical work, such as pulling cables, working inside servers (usually clean) or desktop computers (often laden with dust), lying on your back to reach some inaccessable place. HR and marketing types seem to think that 'dress like a professional' means suit. This is simply not suitable (pardon the pun) in many IT jobs - it's no more suitable than asking a plumber to wear a suit. Hard wearing clothes are a must. That doesn't necessarily equal jeans, but it DOES mean not a suit. (I don't wear jeans at work at the moment, and my day can involve a morning of C++ and an afternoon of struggling with recalcitrant hardware that keeps derailing from the rack).
Unlike yourself, I don't have my nose in the air and refuse to do hardware jobs.
I can spend some of my day writing C++, some of my day writing Perl scripts, and some of it lying on my back in the server room trying to pull through a piece of cat5e or reseat a particularly recalcitrant RAID card stuffed inside a hard to reach server.
Sharp slacks and shirts (and worse still, ties) are NOT compatible with that environment. Besides, wearing fancy clothes does not make me code better.
It's simple. A large proportion of the Slashdot crowd lives in the United States.
If a large proportion of the Slashdot crowd worked for Microsoft, I'm sure they'd cheer that monopoly on, too.
You know what, I've always wanted to get a radar reflector, put it in my backpack, take my bike to England and find a Gatso at the bottom of some hill somewhere - then repeatedly ride my bicycle past it, setting it off over and over again.
Completely pointless and arguably hazardous, but it'd be fun nonetheless.
Our licensing laws in the Isle of Man permit 24/7 sales of alcohol. It isn't a problem and we're all laughing at the silly debate over in the UK.
What happens is pubs close when landlords feel like closing. This means you don't get the last two rushed rounds in at closing time (because it happens much later, and people have generally stopped drinking anyway) - that last 'binge' that makes people really drunk. It also means the pubs throw out at more or less random different times during the night, so you don't get all the pubs disgorging simultaneously.
Since we only have three breweries and one distillery for a population of 76000, the rumour that we are all drunks is fal...oh, wait...
A type of speed camera.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatso
I heard that too on Radio 4 this morning. My thoughts - no, it's not to level the playing field, it's simply to get more money. Of course, there's nothing wrong with pricing a product to make more money, but then coming up with weasel words about 'leveling the playing field' instead of admitting the real goal is just slimy.