"Clarke said the hackers should be responsible about reporting the programming mistakes. A hacker should contact the software maker first, he said, then go to the government if the software maker doesn't respond soon."
I suggest that a US citizen send them a fax or two about Hewlett Packard.
"you are still alowed to do that, There is no connection between IMEI and your phone number.
IMEI is more like a MAC adress your phone number is pure software,(actualy bound to the sim#)
So bad example."
Yeah but at the level of the cell phone network hardware, the IMEI number (or in my case the ESN number) is what identifies the phone to the network.
If your phone is stolen and you tell the mobile service provider, they tell the network to disable access to the phone with the ESN# (or IMEI#) shown on your account information. If you change this ESN/IMEI number, you can register this phone again with a new service provider on a new account and the network won't know the difference and won't be able to disable the phone's access.
This is why changing the IMEI number is valuable to phone crooks.
"Not only are Intel already at.13 micron, but they are also at 300mm. They already have a.1 micron facility in progress, so IBM will be playing catch-up. Luckily for IBM, Intel facility seems delayed."
Just to clarify, that's a 300 mm wafer using an 0.1 micron process.
"Weren't we supposed to hit some sort of quantum limit before.1 Micron? What are the current guesses on how much smaller we can get?"
'They' always come up with some reason as to why a certain limit will be reached. Hard drives were never supposed to reach over 120 GB but there are new methods researched to bend the Laws of Physics. With this 0.1 micron process, I am no semiconductor expert but I suspect they have come up with some new way of doping the silicon to make more 'pure' boundaries between N and P areas or something else at least as tricky.
"I was figuring it might make more sense to buy a bunch of plaster, silicone patching material, and caulk. Of course not everyone has a shop-vac. The good ones aren't cheap. Pity the person who can afford a computer but not $50 worth of patching supplies to keep the bugs out in the first place."
The trouble is not buying the supplies, it's finding out where they get in. This is not easy. From the accounts I have read, very very few people have been able to find out exactly how the ladybeetles get into their home. And by the time you do find the place they enter, your home is already invaded, meaning you need a vaccum anyway. Since shop vacs can be rented from many industrial supply companies, the expense is not too great.
"If you are in a developed country, and you are constantly having problems with mosquitos, cockroaches, and rats around your workspace, simply MOVE YOUR FUCKING COMPUTER INDOORS!"
Perhaps people in developed countries would like this if they compute outside via WiFi or (like me) have their box in the cool basement where it is more common to see insects.
In the area of Canada where I live, it's not too uncommon just before the winter for ladybugs (ok ladyBEETLES) to swarm in homes. This means that TENS OF MILLIONS get into your place via tiny cracks in bricks and window spaces live in your house for some time when it's about to get cold. This means that there are so many, you can't see your walls anymore. Maybe this software would work on them. (Fortunately this has never happenned at my place. We replaced all the rickety old windows with new ones.)
The traditional method of removal is to get a big ol' shop-vac and vaccum them up and then turn the vac on reverse and shoot them outside. This is becoming more and more of a problem because of the massive reproduction of asian ladybeetles imported to combat aphids in farmers' fields.
"The electronic mosquito repellents use ultrasonic sound, i.e. sound that is so high that it can't be heard by humans. Basically, they emit similar sounds as the natural enemies of mosquitos. I really wonder how well such sounds can be reproduced using regular computer speakers that can barely reproduce the frequencies we hear."
I've read Consumer Reports Magazine articles about these things. Supposedly they emit the sound of a dragonfly which is the mosquito's natural enemy. According to the TV ads, the devices are "Tested by the US Army" but not endorsed. According to the Consumer Reports article, the things don't work worth sh~t and you're better off using regular citronella(sp?) based insect repellents.
Maybe this thai software has something the commerical devices don't?
OK I did not look very extensively at the games, mainly because I work/commute long hours and have little time, but the footage I saw of the main on-foot marathon was very poor quality. As to the vélodrome, I don't know about the picture quality because I didn't see it.
"My main quibbles, however, are with the artefacts, especially in live TV coverage (eg with the current Commonwealth games coverage on the BBC). For example, competitors are often haloed by DCT blocks (i.e. high frequency areas) or while low frequency data (i.e. subtle blended colours like walls or the sky) are often quite banded.
Of course, this could be that the realtime compression hardware simply doesn't have the grunt to cope with the image data that's being thrown at it, but I'm also wondering if the signals are deliberately over bandwidth-limited. I believe that the latter has been the case with some digital radio broadcasts."
Actually I was seeing a very low quality picture here in Canada on the 18" satellite dish watching footage from the Commonwealth games. It was very blurry and grainy. Everything was hard to make out. Since the digital TV vs. Satellite are totally different broadcast methods, perhaps the problem is, as you said, with the recording equipment and not the broadcast system.
"Every now and then Best Buy (at least in my area - Raleigh Durham, NC) offers deals for 50 or 100 packs with a rebate for the full price. I haven't "bought" a CD-R in over a year and a half now. I think it had something to do with an oversupply in the industry (couldn't find the old slashdot stories on it) Plus they probably rely on people like my girlfriend who will either A) Lose the reciept, or B) Just forget to send the rebate in before the one month deadline."
Ah I see... your comments about them relying on people losing the receipt or forgetting about the rebate make sense. Sending snail mail these days low on my list of priorities. The last time I did it was 7 months ago for the rebate on my plextor CD-Rw. Before that, the last time was... sending in university application correspondence.
Here in Canada, the last time we got CD-R discs the price was CDN$30 for a 50disc Fujifilm spindle. But I have never seen a rebate equal to the price of the discs.
"I still keep a 5.25" around. I've used it a few times. Once I had to bring it in to work in order to upgrade from an ancient version of some accounting package (the accountants were scared of upgrading)."
Exactly... not long ago a guy at work had some important records on a 5.25" but there was not a (known) 5.25" drive on the floor or anywhere in the building for that matter. So I took the disk home, copied the files using the 5.25" that I had kept in the network server for such a purporse and e-mailed the stuff to him. It's important to keep the ability to read legacy formats if there's a chance they'll be needed. You just don't need the drives in every machine.
" And despite the fact that floppies are almost impossible to buy now..."
What!? I was costco a couple of weeks ago and an enormous stock of boxed floppies (100 per box) next to the CD-R/Rws. There's must've been at least 1000 boxes total.
"And am I the only one with about 120 floppies sitting in my computer room in boxes? Including the boot disks for Windows versions 95 - XP?"
No you are not the only one. I have 200+ floppies with backups of old games, applications, bootdisks, and such. They are still quite useful when I need to install network card drivers on another machine in the house (and naturally I can't copy them over the network.)
NICE! Since CF cards are so small, it might be interesting to see some sort of adapter like those VHS 'tapes' that you can insert a Video8 tape into. In this case, it would be a '3.5" floppy' where you could insert a CF or Smartmedia disk into for legacy support on machines that have no CF/SM drive.
I filled out the form in the back of the Windows 98 booklet and sent it in to Microsoft so that they sent me the 3-1/2" floppy version of Windows 98. It cost about $10 to do so, and they screwed up at their end and sent two copies by mistake.
Heh, that happened at the company I worked for with modems one. We sent in 1 for RMA and got 2 back.
"Yeah, I've got four or five burners but I'm sure everybody has got that one Aunt who doesn't. When CD Burners are $2 on pricewatch and you can ALWAYS find quality CDr's for free we should get rid of the floppy in NEW systems."
Where do you get quality CD-Rs for free? I have never seen such a thing anywhere... (I am not in the USA though.)
"Picture: 10 years from now, some company sells one of these things, and it takes off. Then somebody finds a nasty security hole that fscks the toaster up. Would you like it if suddenly you find your house burnt down by some script kiddie doing a port scan?"
That's why you get it to all run wirelessly on bluetooth so you have to be within the 20 ft limit (or whatever small number it is) so that fsckage is limited and no script kiddie can hit everything at once.
"Now all i need is VNC for my microwave and oven, and i can control my whole kitchen from my computer."
That's still not good enough. Get it all running on bluetooth, get an Ericsson T68i phone (coming soon to the USA) and control it all wirelessly. No laptop needed!
"At those bitrates you'd need a golden ear to tell the difference."
I'd be surprised if most people in the ~20-30 year age range, and especially females would not be able to tell the difference between Jesse Cook - Fall At Your Feet between 256kbit and 340kbit using oggvorbis1.0. The difference is amazing.
Age matters because as you get older, your ability to hear up to 20 khz becomes more and more impaired. Furthermore, the effect is much more rapid and the threshold decreases much more quickly in males than in females. A 60 year old male might only hear up to 14 khz, while being in the aforementioned group myself, I have been tested and can hear 18-19 khz.
"That is because you have crap hearing. Get a very cleanly (over) produced song - I recommend TLC - Unpretty (no, you don't have to like it. [...] If you can't hear this difference having done exactly what I've said then I suggest you are not qualified to ever post a comment to a thread discussing audio quality again."
And if you log onto kazaa and download the mp3 to and then attempt to do this quality comaprison, you are not qualified to ever post on slashdot again.:P
If anything good comes of this, it will be the publicity. Let's hope an intelligent columnist clues into what's really going on and lets the general public know about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest that a US citizen send them a fax or two about Hewlett Packard.
Now I hope that a USA Citizen tells them that they are encouraging something that is outlawed by the DMCA.
Yeah but at the level of the cell phone network hardware, the IMEI number (or in my case the ESN number) is what identifies the phone to the network.
If your phone is stolen and you tell the mobile service provider, they tell the network to disable access to the phone with the ESN# (or IMEI#) shown on your account information. If you change this ESN/IMEI number, you can register this phone again with a new service provider on a new account and the network won't know the difference and won't be able to disable the phone's access.
This is why changing the IMEI number is valuable to phone crooks.
Then maybe they should just make it illegal to modify the IMEI except in the case where you prove you bought the phone legitimately.
Btw, how was your phone stolen? Did someone just grab it from you on the street or what?
Just to clarify, that's a 300 mm wafer using an 0.1 micron process.
'They' always come up with some reason as to why a certain limit will be reached. Hard drives were never supposed to reach over 120 GB but there are new methods researched to bend the Laws of Physics. With this 0.1 micron process, I am no semiconductor expert but I suspect they have come up with some new way of doping the silicon to make more 'pure' boundaries between N and P areas or something else at least as tricky.
The trouble is not buying the supplies, it's finding out where they get in. This is not easy. From the accounts I have read, very very few people have been able to find out exactly how the ladybeetles get into their home. And by the time you do find the place they enter, your home is already invaded, meaning you need a vaccum anyway. Since shop vacs can be rented from many industrial supply companies, the expense is not too great.
Why in the world was this posted under 'science' ? I see nothing related to research, scientific advancement or academia in this story.
Perhaps people in developed countries would like this if they compute outside via WiFi or (like me) have their box in the cool basement where it is more common to see insects.
In the area of Canada where I live, it's not too uncommon just before the winter for ladybugs (ok ladyBEETLES) to swarm in homes. This means that TENS OF MILLIONS get into your place via tiny cracks in bricks and window spaces live in your house for some time when it's about to get cold. This means that there are so many, you can't see your walls anymore. Maybe this software would work on them. (Fortunately this has never happenned at my place. We replaced all the rickety old windows with new ones.)
The traditional method of removal is to get a big ol' shop-vac and vaccum them up and then turn the vac on reverse and shoot them outside. This is becoming more and more of a problem because of the massive reproduction of asian ladybeetles imported to combat aphids in farmers' fields.
I've read Consumer Reports Magazine articles about these things. Supposedly they emit the sound of a dragonfly which is the mosquito's natural enemy. According to the TV ads, the devices are "Tested by the US Army" but not endorsed. According to the Consumer Reports article, the things don't work worth sh~t and you're better off using regular citronella(sp?) based insect repellents.
Maybe this thai software has something the commerical devices don't?
OK I did not look very extensively at the games, mainly because I work/commute long hours and have little time, but the footage I saw of the main on-foot marathon was very poor quality. As to the vélodrome, I don't know about the picture quality because I didn't see it.
Of course, this could be that the realtime compression hardware simply doesn't have the grunt to cope with the image data that's being thrown at it, but I'm also wondering if the signals are deliberately over bandwidth-limited. I believe that the latter has been the case with some digital radio broadcasts."
Actually I was seeing a very low quality picture here in Canada on the 18" satellite dish watching footage from the Commonwealth games. It was very blurry and grainy. Everything was hard to make out. Since the digital TV vs. Satellite are totally different broadcast methods, perhaps the problem is, as you said, with the recording equipment and not the broadcast system.
Ah I see ... your comments about them relying on people losing the receipt or forgetting about the rebate make sense. Sending snail mail these days low on my list of priorities. The last time I did it was 7 months ago for the rebate on my plextor CD-Rw. Before that, the last time was ... sending in university application correspondence.
Here in Canada, the last time we got CD-R discs the price was CDN$30 for a 50disc Fujifilm spindle. But I have never seen a rebate equal to the price of the discs.
Exactly ... not long ago a guy at work had some important records on a 5.25" but there was not a (known) 5.25" drive on the floor or anywhere in the building for that matter. So I took the disk home, copied the files using the 5.25" that I had kept in the network server for such a purporse and e-mailed the stuff to him. It's important to keep the ability to read legacy formats if there's a chance they'll be needed. You just don't need the drives in every machine.
What!? I was costco a couple of weeks ago and an enormous stock of boxed floppies (100 per box) next to the CD-R/Rws. There's must've been at least 1000 boxes total.
No you are not the only one. I have 200+ floppies with backups of old games, applications, bootdisks, and such. They are still quite useful when I need to install network card drivers on another machine in the house (and naturally I can't copy them over the network.)
NICE! Since CF cards are so small, it might be interesting to see some sort of adapter like those VHS 'tapes' that you can insert a Video8 tape into. In this case, it would be a '3.5" floppy' where you could insert a CF or Smartmedia disk into for legacy support on machines that have no CF/SM drive.
Heh, that happened at the company I worked for with modems one. We sent in 1 for RMA and got 2 back.
Where do you get quality CD-Rs for free? I have never seen such a thing anywhere ... (I am not in the USA though.)
That's why you get it to all run wirelessly on bluetooth so you have to be within the 20 ft limit (or whatever small number it is) so that fsckage is limited and no script kiddie can hit everything at once.
That's still not good enough. Get it all running on bluetooth, get an Ericsson T68i phone (coming soon to the USA) and control it all wirelessly. No laptop needed!
I have had problems with that program that went away when I closed xmms.
I'd be surprised if most people in the ~20-30 year age range, and especially females would not be able to tell the difference between Jesse Cook - Fall At Your Feet between 256kbit and 340kbit using oggvorbis1.0. The difference is amazing.
Age matters because as you get older, your ability to hear up to 20 khz becomes more and more impaired. Furthermore, the effect is much more rapid and the threshold decreases much more quickly in males than in females. A 60 year old male might only hear up to 14 khz, while being in the aforementioned group myself, I have been tested and can hear 18-19 khz.
And if you log onto kazaa and download the mp3 to and then attempt to do this quality comaprison, you are not qualified to ever post on slashdot again. :P
If anything good comes of this, it will be the publicity. Let's hope an intelligent columnist clues into what's really going on and lets the general public know about it.