"I got that beat.. On Robson St. in Vancouver, there is a corner with 3 coffee shops, and 2 of them are Starbucks."
I can one-up you on that... in the office tower where I used to work in Toronto, there were 3 coffee shops in the building and two of them were on the same floor.
"However, with so many consumer-based 802.11 access points out there, I doubt that Joe Homeoffice will even realize how to lock down their networks. In this case, the vendors should start by having as much default security as possible, as well as some helpful reading in the instruction manuals for how to secure your wireless setup."
I agree. There is a similar lack of security on ResNets by clueless students. Basically at the start of each semester, some of by buddies scan the resnets for insecure machines and print out some security documentation on the printer of the insecure person or deposit a helpful security document on the person's Windows desktop. (I don't actually do this because I don't live in university residence.)
If people did that on wardrives, you might call it 'drive-by security consulting' .
"Cool, now when I go to Toronto, I have a map of all of the Starbucks downtown..."
You don't need a map. If you're in the core, all you have to do is turn yourself around 360 degrees and you will most likely see a coffe shop, probably a Starbucks or Timothy's (not to be confused with Tim Horton's.)
"I wonder how long it will take spammers to clue in on this? It is a wonderful deal for spammers; as they are untraceable via this method. There are steps that people running these networks could do to prevent spammers, but still allow legit users. But, you all know how well some admins look after security..."
"Mac 4% Linux 1% Other 4% the rest being windows."
Yeah but how many of those 'other windows machines' are actually linux users using opera faking itself as MSIE or, perhaps some other user agent morphing tool?
Why, just recently, according to my useragent, I was using the miniature-giant-spacehamster-browser-v0.26 on on WheatonixOS.
"Not to be rude, but what the fuck are you talking about? How much trouble is it to download and install another plugin for their players? No one has to reencode anything they don't want to."
I challenge you to write an explanation for how to do this that my mother could follow. Or maybe my boss. Installing a plugin is still a convoluted 37 step process to those people where they need to take 3 pages of notes to learn how to do it themselves.
"Computer monitors. I run XFree86 4 in dual-head mode. My two monitors take up 2.6 Amps = 300 watts while they are on, and a whopping 70 watts when they are turned off at the switch. It's worth noting that they produce about a third of the light, and twice the heat, of two 150W light bulbs."
How old are your monitors? My Sony G400 is a TCO99 compliant monitor and it (according to the manual) takes a maximum of 1.5W when powered down.
"Computer hardware. The power strip supporting my 1.6Ghz Athlon and 1Ghz Duron draws a whopping 4.4 Amps, or 500 watts, while both systems sit at zero load! Apparently, AMD expended significantly more effort making sure their processors were well-equipped to start house fires when the heatsink falls off, rather than making those Linux kernel "CPU idle" calls actually do anything."
The Athlon is simply more power-hungry than the P4. Of course you get more bang-per cycle. Perhaps in the winter (assuming winter exists where you are) this could be used in place of a furnace for some of the time. I know that many a dorm-dweller here in Canada gets all the heating they need from their trusty 19" monitor.
And back in the day, my dad heated his lunch at work on his computer case which had a defective power supply that generated exess heat. Alas, there was a power outage and the PSU died. No more warm lunch for him. (This was back in the days before microwaves were commonplace.)
Damn I'm tired... some of the text on the screen looks like it's blinking red but it's not...
"Now, imagine you take modern commodity hardware (which changes periodically - look at how often Intel silently release new steppings of their CPUs). You're not going to have a guarantee of consistency there. You're going to have to boot an OS off it - and even the simplest RTOSes are still much, much bigger than the whole platform currently. Then you need an emulator. Then you need the system. And the only problem you've solved with all that work is the unavailablility of the old hardware - you still have a old machine language on a tiny platform which can't be easily extended for new functionality."
Might I suggest using FPGAs to emulate the hardware old system so the software doesn't have to be thrown out?
Assuming that circuit layouts are available for these old chips, it would be a piece of cake to emulate them in VHDL (a hardware description language) because they are comparatively simple to today's integrated circuits. Once the chip descriptions are written in VHDL, it would be relatively easy to 'port' the hardware over to a new FPGA if the old one dies or whatever. Then it would not be necessary to truly port or re-code any of the currently working code, and it would be much easier to fix bugs and extend it because you don't have the memory and speed limitations of the old system.
Now I have been considering doing something like this for a long time. It's a twist on some traditional spam avoidance techniques:
A lot of people use myname.NOSPAM@isp.com to avoid spam. I often use myname.anti-spam@mydomain.biz to avoid spam myself. But it might be interesteing to actually set up an e-mail alias for myname.anti-spam@mydomain.biz and have everything sent to it automatically bounced to uce@ftc.gov and to myself to see if it's working. It might be an interesting experiment.
"Remember Micropolis, Miniscribe, Quantum, Conner, and Rodime (to name a few)? We are down to a field of two major players: Western Digital and Maxtor. If one of those goes away, what do you think will happen to hard drive prices?"
Didn't IBM sell 80% of its hard drive division to Hitachi? Hitachi's still gotta be in the game.
Didn't IBM subsequently announce new breakthroughs in storage technology? They are not exactly rolling over and dying.
Isn't Fujitsu, the biggest computer company in Japan still in the game, especially in the area of notebook computer hard drives?
I expect that Seagate, a giant in the SCSI drive business and current maker of the quietest IDE drive on the market, the Barracuda IV series would have something to say about this. They recently reported significant progeress in overcoming the superparamagnetic limit.
As you can see, there are more than two players in the hard drive market, although Maxtor and WD are clearly the most visible on the consumer product front. But if one of them dies, there will be by no means a monopoly. Frankly, I am willing to pay for a more expensive drive from Seagate or Fujitsu to get a longer warranty. Although I expect the masses will always go for the product with the largest size for least dollars, there will always be a high end market for businesses, professionals, servers, etc where reliability and support are truly part of the equation. This is where those who are ready to put their money where their mouth is and put quality over quantity will buy their HDDs.
"In that case, I back out very slowly. Most people are reasonable and can see that the driver of the car pulling out can't see, so they stop (or hey, even honk and I will stop until you pass). It's generally the really impatient people that will cause the accidents.
I've never had an accident in a parking lot (unless you count all the assholes dinging my car "accidents")."
I agree with you... impatience both on the part of the backer-outers and the people driving around looking for spots are big factors in parking lot fender-benders. As to getting your car dinged... there are too many fools who don't understand what it is to take care of a car, or don't care because their car is pretty crappy already so they just fling their doors open.
My reasoning is that if someone has a well-maintained, shiny car then they know what it is to take care of a car so they will be careful not to ding you. This is a problem at my university because students in general have such stretched finances (thank goodness for scholarships) that most of us who need to drive for our jobs or whatever can only afford POS cars.
This is why I try to find those shiny, well-cared-for cars and park between/beside them.
"People who do know that drinking steals your reflexes will pay MORE attention while driving. If, on the rare occasions that I am driving and drunk (on Guinness of course) I deliberately become more alert, checking mirrors, speed limits, blindspots, indicators, lights, road signs, etc very carefully. There's only so much 'attention' to go around so when I'm drunk, I temporarily heighten the 'pool of attention' that is available so I don't flatten some pedestrian by accident.""
Your analogy is flawed because being smashed is fundamentally different than mobile phone useage. Having some beer/wine/etc before you drive provides a chemically induced impairement in your brain. Things just aren't hooked up right when you're drunk, and no matter how you try to be careful, you can't because your perceptions and the way your head processes data are fundamentally flawed to begin with (until you sober up.) This obviously is why I don't drink and drive...
"Now, don't you think EVERY SINGLE drunk guy who gets into an accident thinks he is capable of driving home if he's just extra careful? I don't think the extra confidence here is healthy. Besides, should't you be paying full attention to the road to begin with?"
They thought that they would be extra careful at the same time they were drunk. That is a bad argument on their part because they used impaired reasoning to deduce that they have no problem driving.
I decide to be smart and keep the dang phone out of use as much as possible when driving and then only use it with the headset on straight, sparsely driven road or stoplights or just plain pull over if it's busy and I'm not in a rush.
Clearly, driving and talking on the phone is less safe (for everyone, including the cyclist who bikes up the same road I drive) than driving with an earpiece in your ear doing nothing. But I do believe that mobile phones can be used safely in cars when used with a headset, when you know the risks and therefore try to be more alert, and minimise the useage to the conditions I mentioned above.
Drinking after having a bunch of beer... well that's just plain stupid.
Sorry... I can't help it... I was brought up by a multilingual language teacher and an oldschool unix admin. Thus I both read slashdot and have a greater knowledge of grammar and spelling rules than CmdrTaco:-)
"The second time I was going through a parking lot and this woman backed out. She said I was speeding, I said she was an idiot not to look back before reversing. Insurance said neither party was at fault, so I had no access to her damage figure. Mine was $1100 because she scraped 3 side panels."
Parking lots are not government regulated roads and insurance doesn't cover it if your car gets creamed in one of them. (IANAL) If she said you were speeding in a parking lot, you might have wanted to ask her what the speed limit was. As far as I know, only governments can set legally enforcable speed limits on their roads.
I know this one girl who has had 3 accidents and they were all in parking lots and insurance did not cover any of it.
As to backing out, I think that there ARE too many fools who look around BEFORE they get into the car, and then back out assuming that the place is still clear. Your only defence in a parking lot is to be alert and keep your horn-hand at the ready. (does that sound dirty?)
"I took it as a serious lesson. Before, I had "kept the talking/driving to a minimum." Now I won't EVER talk while I drive. Do cell phones make people stupid? No, but it's most certainly a distraction, "hands-free" or not, and those little details that slip one's preoccupied mind are often the most important ones."
Lucky for you, you learned this lesson the 'safe' way. Now that you know what can happen, you will be more careful.
People who do know that cell phones steal your attention will pay MORE attention while driving. If, on the rare occasions that I am driving and taking a call (with my hands free set of course) I deliberately become more alert, checking mirrors, speed limits, blindspots, indicators, lights, road signs, etc very carefully. There's only so much 'attention' to go around so when I'm on the phone, I temporarily heighten the 'pool of attention' that is available so I don't flatten some pedestrian by accident.
Those fools who use their phone and drive like mad people have never had a close call where they could have gotten injured, or gotten in trouble with the law because of a cellphone related driving offence and will keep driving badly until they realise firsthand that they drove over a pedestrian and their insurance bill doubled.
"I see it almost every day with my own two eyes: a young man in a suit, busily yapping away on his cell phone, totally ambivilous to the fact that he is crossing against a green light."
I am ambivalent on this one -- I can't decide whether you're slightly unskilled or just oblivious when it comes to English vocabulary...
"The teacher asked the student to take the phone out and call the person back. The student did so and then at the teacher's request turned on the speaker phone aspect and pretended to be the student. Much to the amusement of the class, the student and the teacher, the person on the other end was a college friend of the student who was completely drunk and had no idea what he was doing or saying. Needless to say it was an entertaining class."
Smart teacher. After that escapade, I suspect that the student *never* forgot to disable the ringer or completely turn off the phone for school again.
" What amazes me are the people who dont realize it's their phone that's ringing. During lecture once last winter, a student's phone started ringing very loudly. The prof normally ignores these, as they usually silence in about 2.4 seconds.
After about 10 secnods, he started to get annoyed. Finally, someone front row center leans over to her bookbag, and takes her sweet time shutting the phone off. The look on her face was "oh, that's my phone!""
She knew it was her phone all along. She was hoping that if she ignored it, nobody would realise that it was hers and she would be spared the ridicule and embarassment of everyone knowing that her phone rang in the lecture. I suspect that this is the same problem in movie theaters when a phone rings. Not being identified/embarassed is more important that shutting the thing off.
"I also will concede that it is unbelievably irritating hearing an endless chorus of ringtones by people who don't realize that yes, there is a volume setting other than superloud."
If only it were true... my phone actually has a small number of very annoying eccentricities, one of them being that the ring is either on super-loud or turned off. (You can change the volume setting, but it has no effect.) Still, I chose the phone because it is otherwise all-around excellent.
"I would guess that this product is intended to fail. When no one buys it, the RIAA and MPAA will go to Congress and plead that such technology must be required..."
Plead? No, they just need a reason to prevent themselves from looking bad when they BUY the laws they want. That industry already owns enough congresspeople - they just don't want it to look obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
I can one-up you on that ... in the office tower where I used to work in Toronto, there were 3 coffee shops in the building and two of them were on the same floor.
Registrant:
Brady (PALLADIUMSUCKS-COM-DOM)
Moritz
4040 San Felipe Suite 224
Houston, Texas 77027
United States
713 871 8668
brady[[@fitiri.com
Domain Name: PALLADIUMSUCKS.COM
Administrative Contact:
Brady Moritz brady]]@fitiri.com
4040 San Felipe Suite 224
Houston, TX 77027
United States
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Colin Moritz colin[[@viptx.net
4040 San Felipe Suite 224
Houston, Texas 77027
United States
713 871 8668
Record last updated on 26-Jun-2002.
Record expires on 26-Jun-2003.
Record created on 26-Jun-2002.
Domain servers in listed order:
dns.fitiri.com 216.136.86.132
ns1.granitecanyon.com 205.166.226.38
ns2.granitecanyon.com 64.63.77.89
(interestingly, palladium.com is not a MSFT owned domain)
I agree. There is a similar lack of security on ResNets by clueless students. Basically at the start of each semester, some of by buddies scan the resnets for insecure machines and print out some security documentation on the printer of the insecure person or deposit a helpful security document on the person's Windows desktop. (I don't actually do this because I don't live in university residence.)
If people did that on wardrives, you might call it 'drive-by security consulting' .
You don't need a map. If you're in the core, all you have to do is turn yourself around 360 degrees and you will most likely see a coffe shop, probably a Starbucks or Timothy's (not to be confused with Tim Horton's.)
Damn, stop giving them ideas!
"Mac 4%
Linux 1%
Other 4%
the rest being windows."
Yeah but how many of those 'other windows machines' are actually linux users using opera faking itself as MSIE or, perhaps some other user agent morphing tool?
Why, just recently, according to my useragent, I was using the miniature-giant-spacehamster-browser-v0.26 on on WheatonixOS.
also: paypalwarning.com.
I challenge you to write an explanation for how to do this that my mother could follow. Or maybe my boss. Installing a plugin is still a convoluted 37 step process to those people where they need to take 3 pages of notes to learn how to do it themselves.
How old are your monitors? My Sony G400 is a TCO99 compliant monitor and it (according to the manual) takes a maximum of 1.5W when powered down.
"Computer hardware. The power strip supporting my 1.6Ghz Athlon and 1Ghz Duron draws a whopping 4.4 Amps, or 500 watts, while both systems sit at zero load! Apparently, AMD expended significantly more effort making sure their processors were well-equipped to start house fires when the heatsink falls off, rather than making those Linux kernel "CPU idle" calls actually do anything."
The Athlon is simply more power-hungry than the P4. Of course you get more bang-per cycle. Perhaps in the winter (assuming winter exists where you are) this could be used in place of a furnace for some of the time. I know that many a dorm-dweller here in Canada gets all the heating they need from their trusty 19" monitor.
And back in the day, my dad heated his lunch at work on his computer case which had a defective power supply that generated exess heat. Alas, there was a power outage and the PSU died. No more warm lunch for him. (This was back in the days before microwaves were commonplace.)
Damn I'm tired ... some of the text on the screen looks like it's blinking red but it's not...
Might I suggest using FPGAs to emulate the hardware old system so the software doesn't have to be thrown out?
Assuming that circuit layouts are available for these old chips, it would be a piece of cake to emulate them in VHDL (a hardware description language) because they are comparatively simple to today's integrated circuits. Once the chip descriptions are written in VHDL, it would be relatively easy to 'port' the hardware over to a new FPGA if the old one dies or whatever. Then it would not be necessary to truly port or re-code any of the currently working code, and it would be much easier to fix bugs and extend it because you don't have the memory and speed limitations of the old system.
A lot of people use myname.NOSPAM@isp.com to avoid spam. I often use myname.anti-spam@mydomain.biz to avoid spam myself. But it might be interesteing to actually set up an e-mail alias for myname.anti-spam@mydomain.biz and have everything sent to it automatically bounced to uce@ftc.gov and to myself to see if it's working. It might be an interesting experiment.
Didn't IBM sell 80% of its hard drive division to Hitachi? Hitachi's still gotta be in the game.
Didn't IBM subsequently announce new breakthroughs in storage technology? They are not exactly rolling over and dying.
Isn't Fujitsu, the biggest computer company in Japan still in the game, especially in the area of notebook computer hard drives?
I expect that Seagate, a giant in the SCSI drive business and current maker of the quietest IDE drive on the market, the Barracuda IV series would have something to say about this. They recently reported significant progeress in overcoming the superparamagnetic limit.
As you can see, there are more than two players in the hard drive market, although Maxtor and WD are clearly the most visible on the consumer product front. But if one of them dies, there will be by no means a monopoly. Frankly, I am willing to pay for a more expensive drive from Seagate or Fujitsu to get a longer warranty. Although I expect the masses will always go for the product with the largest size for least dollars, there will always be a high end market for businesses, professionals, servers, etc where reliability and support are truly part of the equation. This is where those who are ready to put their money where their mouth is and put quality over quantity will buy their HDDs.
I agree with you ... impatience both on the part of the backer-outers and the people driving around looking for spots are big factors in parking lot fender-benders. As to getting your car dinged ... there are too many fools who don't understand what it is to take care of a car, or don't care because their car is pretty crappy already so they just fling their doors open.
My reasoning is that if someone has a well-maintained, shiny car then they know what it is to take care of a car so they will be careful not to ding you. This is a problem at my university because students in general have such stretched finances (thank goodness for scholarships) that most of us who need to drive for our jobs or whatever can only afford POS cars.
This is why I try to find those shiny, well-cared-for cars and park between/beside them.
Your analogy is flawed because being smashed is fundamentally different than mobile phone useage. Having some beer/wine/etc before you drive provides a chemically induced impairement in your brain. Things just aren't hooked up right when you're drunk, and no matter how you try to be careful, you can't because your perceptions and the way your head processes data are fundamentally flawed to begin with (until you sober up.) This obviously is why I don't drink and drive ...
"Now, don't you think EVERY SINGLE drunk guy who gets into an accident thinks he is capable of driving home if he's just extra careful? I don't think the extra confidence here is healthy. Besides, should't you be paying full attention to the road to begin with?"
They thought that they would be extra careful at the same time they were drunk. That is a bad argument on their part because they used impaired reasoning to deduce that they have no problem driving.
I decide to be smart and keep the dang phone out of use as much as possible when driving and then only use it with the headset on straight, sparsely driven road or stoplights or just plain pull over if it's busy and I'm not in a rush.
Clearly, driving and talking on the phone is less safe (for everyone, including the cyclist who bikes up the same road I drive) than driving with an earpiece in your ear doing nothing. But I do believe that mobile phones can be used safely in cars when used with a headset, when you know the risks and therefore try to be more alert, and minimise the useage to the conditions I mentioned above.
Drinking after having a bunch of beer ... well that's just plain stupid.
Yes, this is important. Fortunately for me, most of my in-car calls go like this: "Hi, the train was slow today. I'll be home in 20 minutes. Bye."
(Well ...) When it comes to pot, I've never smoked but I have inhaled (*) ... at rasta beaches in the carribean. :-)
(*) Raise your hand if you caught the 'hidden joke' there ;-)
Sorry ... I can't help it ... I was brought up by a multilingual language teacher and an oldschool unix admin. Thus I both read slashdot and have a greater knowledge of grammar and spelling rules than CmdrTaco :-)
Parking lots are not government regulated roads and insurance doesn't cover it if your car gets creamed in one of them. (IANAL) If she said you were speeding in a parking lot, you might have wanted to ask her what the speed limit was. As far as I know, only governments can set legally enforcable speed limits on their roads.
I know this one girl who has had 3 accidents and they were all in parking lots and insurance did not cover any of it.
As to backing out, I think that there ARE too many fools who look around BEFORE they get into the car, and then back out assuming that the place is still clear. Your only defence in a parking lot is to be alert and keep your horn-hand at the ready. (does that sound dirty?)
Lucky for you, you learned this lesson the 'safe' way. Now that you know what can happen, you will be more careful.
People who do know that cell phones steal your attention will pay MORE attention while driving. If, on the rare occasions that I am driving and taking a call (with my hands free set of course) I deliberately become more alert, checking mirrors, speed limits, blindspots, indicators, lights, road signs, etc very carefully. There's only so much 'attention' to go around so when I'm on the phone, I temporarily heighten the 'pool of attention' that is available so I don't flatten some pedestrian by accident.
Those fools who use their phone and drive like mad people have never had a close call where they could have gotten injured, or gotten in trouble with the law because of a cellphone related driving offence and will keep driving badly until they realise firsthand that they drove over a pedestrian and their insurance bill doubled.
I am ambivalent on this one -- I can't decide whether you're slightly unskilled or just oblivious when it comes to English vocabulary...
:-P (no hard feelings)
Smart teacher. After that escapade, I suspect that the student *never* forgot to disable the ringer or completely turn off the phone for school again.
She knew it was her phone all along. She was hoping that if she ignored it, nobody would realise that it was hers and she would be spared the ridicule and embarassment of everyone knowing that her phone rang in the lecture. I suspect that this is the same problem in movie theaters when a phone rings. Not being identified/embarassed is more important that shutting the thing off.
If only it were true ... my phone actually has a small number of very annoying eccentricities, one of them being that the ring is either on super-loud or turned off. (You can change the volume setting, but it has no effect.) Still, I chose the phone because it is otherwise all-around excellent.
Plead? No, they just need a reason to prevent themselves from looking bad when they BUY the laws they want. That industry already owns enough congresspeople - they just don't want it to look obvious.
Depending on who you ask, the answer may just be yes.