I've seen very few portscans against any of my internet connected boxes. The usual unsolicited connection attempts tend to be for well-known exploits (18 months ago, port 111 was *really* popular with several attempts a day). I'm not really sure whether it's worth the effort going out of your way to do things to change the OS fingerprint that nmap comes up with (even under good conditions, I've never found nmap's fingerprint particularly reliable or accurate anyway)
I had the same problem with ONE person at a $ORKPLACE where I was the sysadmin. Since it was a small business, we only had 512K/bit sec to start with - and guess what, the good 'ol port switching version of Kazaa did its dirty deed.
To deal with Kazaa, you need to use traffic shaping. If you shape port 1214 to the speed of a 28.8K modem, it won't port switch and it won't suck up much bandwidth either. If the user cottons on and manually changes the port and they start using excessive bandwidth again, the answer is simple: limit them to port 80 (via a transparent proxy so *ONLY* http traffic can be used) and haul them up in front of the network management team. If they continue to use excessive bandwidth, well, the best filter is to unplug them at the patch panel.
(Yes, when I was at university, I got hauled up in front of the BOFH - but that was for running a MUD. After a damned good telling off I didn't do it again. A personal grilling by the BOFH usually works as an effective nonviolent LART)
Unfortunately, you can't conceal who your ISP is. It is easy to do a whois lookup on your IP address which will show who the IP belongs to. If you end up getting your own netblock, a combination of traceroute and whois will tell the complainer who your upstream provider is.
I had to chuckle when I saw this Slashdot article - looking like they'd discovered some 'new thing'. In Britain, Radio 4 has had radio dramas for decades, and even long running radio soap operas. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy started as a radio play (and the radio version IMHO is the best).
The thing about radio dramas is they create special effects in your mind that would cost tens of millions to create in a film...on a budget many orders of magnitude lower than a film. You still need good actors for radio drama - but they don't have to look pretty. Also, a good actor can easily play three or four parts in a radio drama.
There are some excellent radio plays put out by the BBC - those people who live in deprived countries can get them on the internet, I'm sure:-)
Most airports have a plane "gas station". Often, a fuel truck is used (the airport operator will drive the truck to your plane, and pump the fuel in) and sometimes there are self-serve credit card fuel pumps, just like you use to fill your car up with. Go to any local general aviation airfield and you'll probably see this in action.
Most GA aircraft take 100LL (100 octane avgas), but many can run on unleaded fuel too.
Novatech in the UK sell PCs and laptops with no OS installed. They cost less than the PCs/laptops shipped with Windows - and they are sold for a very good price.
I had a long, nostalgic evening going over all the old FidoNet stuff the other night. I used to run a Fido BBS (node 2:252/204) in 1991, when Fido was just reaching 10,000 nodes (and I thought that was massive!) Looking at Fido's nodelist, it hit a maximum of 37,000 nodes in 1995 then went into a decline. However, Fido still has 10,000 nodes!
Looking through a recent nodelist, I noticed quite a few familiar names from 1991. My BBS ran RA with BinkleyTerm as a front-end, and DesqView as the multitasker (on a 386 with 2.5MB RAM). I later put Linux on that machine (I started using Linux when distros didn't exist, it was just a boot/root disk, format the hard disk and cp -r from the root disk).
In many cases, downloading MP3s without the copyright holder's consent whilst at work is usually serious professional misconduct. I don't know of many employers who say "You may break the law on company time".
I was named 'Dylan' after the cool dude rabbit in the Magic Roundabout (a British kids show in the 70s). Well, my Dad claims it was Dylan Thomas, but I had to face endless torture at school by being named after a rabbit who was always stoned on marajuana.
Unfortunately, I've found out that an actor shares my name (Dylan Smith). I'm just wondering when I will get the first UDRP attack on my domain dylansmith.net (if the little puke tries to get dylansmith.co.im off me he's got a fight on his hands as I live right next door to nic.im)
For me - I don't care if someone's looking over my shoulder or not (my last big software development project had plenty of peer-reviews). I just hate being the one doing the looking over the shoulder.
It's probably some stupid thing hardcoded in my brain, but if I'm not actually the one at the keyboard, my mind tends to drift within minutes and I'm thinking of something else completely unrelated. For some reason I just don't remain focused if I'm looking over someone's shoulder. Same with meetings - I have a hard time staying awake in a meeting unless I'm the one presenting or actively discussing.
There's a good article why NAT (and private address space) is bad here and I agree with him. IPv6 would solve this problem. What if you have two companies, who only have one public IP address who want to connect their two networks, and they both decided on 172.16.0.0/16 for their internal network? They get to renumber all their hosts if they want to internetwork.
There's always CIPE (which comes with RedHat 7.x and 8 at least) which works with Linux and Windows 2000. It uses UDP, and you select the port it uses.
My beef with USB isn't with USB itself (which I agree - is nice), it's the implementations. If you buy an external serial port ISDN TA or modem, you know it'll just plug in and work with your Linux or *BSD server. However, with USB, for some reason the manufacturers insist on instead of making their device ACM (which Linux, *BSD can access with no additional drivers) they make their own, proprietary way of accessing the device. I can't quite understand why they do this - make a custom protocol for talking to the device meaning they have to write custom drivers (instead of using the standard ACM support - I assume Windows understands ACM devices) and of course meaning it's highly unlikely to work under *NIX at all.
I started with Linux at kernel 0.12, IIRC. At that stage, Linux not only didn't have a GUI of any sort (when other Unices had at least X + twm), it didn't even have init/getty/login. No one was seriously discussing adding those at the time, either!
However, Linux not only got init/getty/login, it also could start X six months after version 0.12. I would suspect the ReactOS people are trying to get the basic OS kernel etc. in a reasonable degree of working-ness before starting on the GUI.
Well, Lord Kelvin (or those other two) hardly rank as the "hundreds" you originally claimed.
It still says nothing about the approaches that Moller is taking and the Wrights took. As I said, the Wrights did have wind-tunnels, they did incrementally build up to their first powered flight by solving the problems not in a random way, but methodical and documented way. The other thing to remember about the vast majority of scientists is that they have less knowledge of aerodynamics than the typical private pilot.
The thing is - what Moller is trying to do is NOT impossible. But Moller still hasn't reached the stage that the Hiller Flying Platform reached decades ago. Moller has said time and time again in the press that he was six months away. Years later he is still six months away. If he was taking a true engineering approach, he'd have at least made it as far as getting helicopter-style performance out of it - but all Moller has achieved is periodic newspaper articles about being 'six months away from flight'.
You missed the point entirely. Have you never seen the claims hundreds of famous scientists made about flight? They said it would break the laws of physics!
Name ten famous scientists who said that flight would break the laws of physics.
The Wright brothers were not famous scientists, just a couple of dudes. They used TLAR engineering. What you think they had wind tunnels and CAD programs?
This statement is wrong in every important respect, and it shows your lack of understanding of the differences between the Wrights and Moller.
No, the Wrights weren't scientists. They were real engineers and they did NOT use TLAR engineering. They used a proper, methodical engineering approach, and a proper, methodical experimentation approach, slowly building up to the Wright Flyer. They didn't construct something that 'looked nice' then tried to fly it. They did have wind tunnels and extensively used them in research. Their wind tunnel still exists and can be seen at the Wright-Patterson Air Force museum in Ohio. They might not have had CAD programs, but they did know how to make a technical drawing.
That is the difference between the Wrights and most of the other people trying for powered flight at the time. The Wrights had a proper engineering approach - the others didn't. That's why the Wrights succeeded and the others didn't.
The difference between the Wright brothers and Moller is like night and day. I think it is you who miss the point entirely.
The Wrights were true engineers with a methodical approach. So was Sikorsky. The naysayers in those cases were naysayers probably for the heck of it.
But Moller?
I'm well aware of making progress not being easy etc. Moller isn't even a wacky inventor, in my opinion he's a charlatan who's been taking a lot of people for a lot of money for far too long. Even Jim Bede, who's engineering talents have been questioned by many, has produced worthwhile flying machines. Moller exemplifies all that's wrong about TLAR (That Looks About Right) engineering. His claims aren't even realistic - they actually break the laws of physics. The efficiency figures he cites for his 8 Wankel-type engines are numbers that are not achievable in this universe.
That's the difference. An engineer could critically evaluate what the Wrights were trying to achieve, and see it was actually within the laws of physics and realms of possibility. But Moller? Bwahahahahahahaha!
Moller's Skycar has been "six months away from flight" for longer than I've been alive. The thing is a nightmare from an inteference drag standpoint, and his figures for fuel consumption are totally unrealistic (especially as the BSFC for the type of engine he's using is worse than traditional spark-ignition reciprocating engines).
Based on Moller's track record, the thing will _never_ fly. All it does is suck investment money. He's even worse than Bede (at least a few of Bede's aircraft actually flew and were successful).
My airplane (a Cessna 140, admittedly unable to haul an SUV into the sky) has better gas mileage than my old F-150 truck. My friend's Europa XS light aircraft gets similar MPG to a midsize car (120 ktas on 4 USG/hr = 30 nm/g or 34.5 statute mpg). But it's doing that at 120 knots (138 mph) rather than 55 mph. Throttle it back a bit and it can beat a Honda Civic.
I wonder whether we would all be better off if programmers designed their own personal languages just to suit their own personal styles. Yes, there would be portability problems but wouldn't we be more productive?
No we wouldn't. I have a little experience of writing a language (quite recently in fact). It was just a macro language to add macro features to a legacy terminal emulation program. It was written using flex and bison to make the parser (so writing the parser was actually quick and easy) compiling to a bytecode. It has simple conditions, loops etc. - anything I though would be useful in a terminal macro language. The problem was that I kept thinking of new things to tweak or add, and spent much more time than necessary on the macro language:-) It was fun though.
Depending how heavy the equipment is, the design change for aircraft wings (especially light aircraft) probably wouldn't be significant. Already, many aircraft types can have pneumatic de-ice boots retrofitted and hot props retrofitted or TKS 'weeping wing' glycol deicers fitted. Assuming this system weighs no more than the usual deicing stuff and can fit the leading edges of wings/tailplanes/propellors it could be a LOT better than boots (high maintenance), weeping wing (lots of fluid to carry around) or hot props (lots of amps off the alternator).
The real problem would probably be regulatory. The FAA is slow to approve things. Company lawyers are frightened of aircraft (because for some insane reason, plaintiffs have this misplaced belief that planes should be absolutely safe with no risk of crashing, and if there's ever an accident they sue anyone who has even touched the airframe). Also, the limited market tends to mean that new innovations in aviation tend to get limited to things that can be adapted from something else. The only thing that's really advanced in general aviation (i.e. non-airlines/military) has been avionics because of this.
It's trivially easy to explain why crosshairs sometimes appeared obscured by a nearby object - it's basic photography that you can reproduce here on Earth quite happily.
Bright objects will bleed over onto thin black lines on film. It's as simple as that. The effect gets more pronounced the brighter the object and the wider the aperture.
Now let's suppose this bleeding effect didn't exist (which it does - you can demonstrate it here on Earth), if NASA was faking the photographs, and this was an issue, don't you think they would have fixed the problem so you couldn't prove the image was faked?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen very few portscans against any of my internet connected boxes. The usual unsolicited connection attempts tend to be for well-known exploits (18 months ago, port 111 was *really* popular with several attempts a day). I'm not really sure whether it's worth the effort going out of your way to do things to change the OS fingerprint that nmap comes up with (even under good conditions, I've never found nmap's fingerprint particularly reliable or accurate anyway)
What has a violin-like musical instrument have to do with it?
I had the same problem with ONE person at a $ORKPLACE where I was the sysadmin. Since it was a small business, we only had 512K/bit sec to start with - and guess what, the good 'ol port switching version of Kazaa did its dirty deed.
To deal with Kazaa, you need to use traffic shaping. If you shape port 1214 to the speed of a 28.8K modem, it won't port switch and it won't suck up much bandwidth either. If the user cottons on and manually changes the port and they start using excessive bandwidth again, the answer is simple: limit them to port 80 (via a transparent proxy so *ONLY* http traffic can be used) and haul them up in front of the network management team. If they continue to use excessive bandwidth, well, the best filter is to unplug them at the patch panel.
(Yes, when I was at university, I got hauled up in front of the BOFH - but that was for running a MUD. After a damned good telling off I didn't do it again. A personal grilling by the BOFH usually works as an effective nonviolent LART)
Unfortunately, you can't conceal who your ISP is. It is easy to do a whois lookup on your IP address which will show who the IP belongs to. If you end up getting your own netblock, a combination of traceroute and whois will tell the complainer who your upstream provider is.
I had to chuckle when I saw this Slashdot article - looking like they'd discovered some 'new thing'. In Britain, Radio 4 has had radio dramas for decades, and even long running radio soap operas. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy started as a radio play (and the radio version IMHO is the best).
:-)
The thing about radio dramas is they create special effects in your mind that would cost tens of millions to create in a film...on a budget many orders of magnitude lower than a film. You still need good actors for radio drama - but they don't have to look pretty. Also, a good actor can easily play three or four parts in a radio drama.
There are some excellent radio plays put out by the BBC - those people who live in deprived countries can get them on the internet, I'm sure
It's quite ironic that Todd Wanke is a complete wanker :-)
Most airports have a plane "gas station". Often, a fuel truck is used (the airport operator will drive the truck to your plane, and pump the fuel in) and sometimes there are self-serve credit card fuel pumps, just like you use to fill your car up with. Go to any local general aviation airfield and you'll probably see this in action.
Most GA aircraft take 100LL (100 octane avgas), but many can run on unleaded fuel too.
Novatech in the UK sell PCs and laptops with no OS installed. They cost less than the PCs/laptops shipped with Windows - and they are sold for a very good price.
I had a long, nostalgic evening going over all the old FidoNet stuff the other night. I used to run a Fido BBS (node 2:252/204) in 1991, when Fido was just reaching 10,000 nodes (and I thought that was massive!) Looking at Fido's nodelist, it hit a maximum of 37,000 nodes in 1995 then went into a decline. However, Fido still has 10,000 nodes!
:-)
Looking through a recent nodelist, I noticed quite a few familiar names from 1991. My BBS ran RA with BinkleyTerm as a front-end, and DesqView as the multitasker (on a 386 with 2.5MB RAM). I later put Linux on that machine (I started using Linux when distros didn't exist, it was just a boot/root disk, format the hard disk and cp -r from the root disk).
Aaah, the memories
In many cases, downloading MP3s without the copyright holder's consent whilst at work is usually serious professional misconduct. I don't know of many employers who say "You may break the law on company time".
I was named 'Dylan' after the cool dude rabbit in the Magic Roundabout (a British kids show in the 70s). Well, my Dad claims it was Dylan Thomas, but I had to face endless torture at school by being named after a rabbit who was always stoned on marajuana.
Unfortunately, I've found out that an actor shares my name (Dylan Smith). I'm just wondering when I will get the first UDRP attack on my domain dylansmith.net (if the little puke tries to get dylansmith.co.im off me he's got a fight on his hands as I live right next door to nic.im)
For me - I don't care if someone's looking over my shoulder or not (my last big software development project had plenty of peer-reviews). I just hate being the one doing the looking over the shoulder.
It's probably some stupid thing hardcoded in my brain, but if I'm not actually the one at the keyboard, my mind tends to drift within minutes and I'm thinking of something else completely unrelated. For some reason I just don't remain focused if I'm looking over someone's shoulder. Same with meetings - I have a hard time staying awake in a meeting unless I'm the one presenting or actively discussing.
He also has an essay about why ATM is bad for computer networks here.
There's always CIPE (which comes with RedHat 7.x and 8 at least) which works with Linux and Windows 2000. It uses UDP, and you select the port it uses.
My beef with USB isn't with USB itself (which I agree - is nice), it's the implementations. If you buy an external serial port ISDN TA or modem, you know it'll just plug in and work with your Linux or *BSD server. However, with USB, for some reason the manufacturers insist on instead of making their device ACM (which Linux, *BSD can access with no additional drivers) they make their own, proprietary way of accessing the device. I can't quite understand why they do this - make a custom protocol for talking to the device meaning they have to write custom drivers (instead of using the standard ACM support - I assume Windows understands ACM devices) and of course meaning it's highly unlikely to work under *NIX at all.
Remember, ReactOS is at v0.10.
I started with Linux at kernel 0.12, IIRC. At that stage, Linux not only didn't have a GUI of any sort (when other Unices had at least X + twm), it didn't even have init/getty/login. No one was seriously discussing adding those at the time, either!
However, Linux not only got init/getty/login, it also could start X six months after version 0.12. I would suspect the ReactOS people are trying to get the basic OS kernel etc. in a reasonable degree of working-ness before starting on the GUI.
Well, Lord Kelvin (or those other two) hardly rank as the "hundreds" you originally claimed.
It still says nothing about the approaches that Moller is taking and the Wrights took. As I said, the Wrights did have wind-tunnels, they did incrementally build up to their first powered flight by solving the problems not in a random way, but methodical and documented way. The other thing to remember about the vast majority of scientists is that they have less knowledge of aerodynamics than the typical private pilot.
The thing is - what Moller is trying to do is NOT impossible. But Moller still hasn't reached the stage that the Hiller Flying Platform reached decades ago. Moller has said time and time again in the press that he was six months away. Years later he is still six months away. If he was taking a true engineering approach, he'd have at least made it as far as getting helicopter-style performance out of it - but all Moller has achieved is periodic newspaper articles about being 'six months away from flight'.
Name ten famous scientists who said that flight would break the laws of physics.
The Wright brothers were not famous scientists, just a couple of dudes. They used TLAR engineering. What you think they had wind tunnels and CAD programs?This statement is wrong in every important respect, and it shows your lack of understanding of the differences between the Wrights and Moller.
No, the Wrights weren't scientists. They were real engineers and they did NOT use TLAR engineering. They used a proper, methodical engineering approach, and a proper, methodical experimentation approach, slowly building up to the Wright Flyer. They didn't construct something that 'looked nice' then tried to fly it. They did have wind tunnels and extensively used them in research. Their wind tunnel still exists and can be seen at the Wright-Patterson Air Force museum in Ohio. They might not have had CAD programs, but they did know how to make a technical drawing.
That is the difference between the Wrights and most of the other people trying for powered flight at the time. The Wrights had a proper engineering approach - the others didn't. That's why the Wrights succeeded and the others didn't.
The difference between the Wright brothers and Moller is like night and day. I think it is you who miss the point entirely.
The difference between, say, Wright and Moller?
The Wrights were true engineers with a methodical approach. So was Sikorsky. The naysayers in those cases were naysayers probably for the heck of it.
But Moller?
I'm well aware of making progress not being easy etc. Moller isn't even a wacky inventor, in my opinion he's a charlatan who's been taking a lot of people for a lot of money for far too long. Even Jim Bede, who's engineering talents have been questioned by many, has produced worthwhile flying machines. Moller exemplifies all that's wrong about TLAR (That Looks About Right) engineering. His claims aren't even realistic - they actually break the laws of physics. The efficiency figures he cites for his 8 Wankel-type engines are numbers that are not achievable in this universe.
That's the difference. An engineer could critically evaluate what the Wrights were trying to achieve, and see it was actually within the laws of physics and realms of possibility. But Moller? Bwahahahahahahaha!
Moller's Skycar has been "six months away from flight" for longer than I've been alive. The thing is a nightmare from an inteference drag standpoint, and his figures for fuel consumption are totally unrealistic (especially as the BSFC for the type of engine he's using is worse than traditional spark-ignition reciprocating engines).
Based on Moller's track record, the thing will _never_ fly. All it does is suck investment money. He's even worse than Bede (at least a few of Bede's aircraft actually flew and were successful).
My airplane (a Cessna 140, admittedly unable to haul an SUV into the sky) has better gas mileage than my old F-150 truck. My friend's Europa XS light aircraft gets similar MPG to a midsize car (120 ktas on 4 USG/hr = 30 nm/g or 34.5 statute mpg). But it's doing that at 120 knots (138 mph) rather than 55 mph. Throttle it back a bit and it can beat a Honda Civic.
I wonder whether we would all be better off if programmers designed their own personal languages just to suit their own personal styles. Yes, there would be portability problems but wouldn't we be more productive?
No we wouldn't. I have a little experience of writing a language (quite recently in fact). It was just a macro language to add macro features to a legacy terminal emulation program. It was written using flex and bison to make the parser (so writing the parser was actually quick and easy) compiling to a bytecode. It has simple conditions, loops etc. - anything I though would be useful in a terminal macro language. The problem was that I kept thinking of new things to tweak or add, and spent much more time than necessary on the macro language
I prefer
:-)
emacs = Eight hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping
or
Eventually Mallocs All Core Storage
Depending how heavy the equipment is, the design change for aircraft wings (especially light aircraft) probably wouldn't be significant. Already, many aircraft types can have pneumatic de-ice boots retrofitted and hot props retrofitted or TKS 'weeping wing' glycol deicers fitted. Assuming this system weighs no more than the usual deicing stuff and can fit the leading edges of wings/tailplanes/propellors it could be a LOT better than boots (high maintenance), weeping wing (lots of fluid to carry around) or hot props (lots of amps off the alternator).
The real problem would probably be regulatory. The FAA is slow to approve things. Company lawyers are frightened of aircraft (because for some insane reason, plaintiffs have this misplaced belief that planes should be absolutely safe with no risk of crashing, and if there's ever an accident they sue anyone who has even touched the airframe). Also, the limited market tends to mean that new innovations in aviation tend to get limited to things that can be adapted from something else. The only thing that's really advanced in general aviation (i.e. non-airlines/military) has been avionics because of this.
It's trivially easy to explain why crosshairs sometimes appeared obscured by a nearby object - it's basic photography that you can reproduce here on Earth quite happily.
Bright objects will bleed over onto thin black lines on film. It's as simple as that. The effect gets more pronounced the brighter the object and the wider the aperture.
Now let's suppose this bleeding effect didn't exist (which it does - you can demonstrate it here on Earth), if NASA was faking the photographs, and this was an issue, don't you think they would have fixed the problem so you couldn't prove the image was faked?