The interesting point here is that there are a lot of aircraft in the sky at any time. With a small WiFi-like box in each one, you've got a dandy mesh network. It is independent of land lines and satellites, so it is a new kind of connectivity. Whether there's any application other than aviation support isn't clear to me. The bandwidth wouldn't give you much video for the passengers, etc.
This is all about setting reasonable default security options. If I set "Firewall Protection: Enable", the problem goes away -- whether or not I've set a good password. (This is not a WEP issue. WAN exposure to the world is a lot worse than wireless exposure to the neighbors, IMO.)
The author of this report is likely to be using an earlier firmware version that did not have a firewall setting.
I don't know if Firewall/enable is the factory default now, but it might be. Problem solved? Not exactly -- there are lots of older units out there, and very few users have the ability or knowledge to do a firmware update.
The High Performance Solutions Consortium, sponsored by Cornell University (Theory Center), has been going on for maybe 5 years now. This is a partnership with Microsoft and Dell, among others, to bring the wonderful world of Windows to your local supercomputer center.
Previously, Cornell had been mainly in the IBM camp, running an SP-2 under AIX, and before that, various Big Blue mainframes. So the move to Windows might have been seen as liberalizing!
Personally to me, coming from a university environment, this seemed to be Cornell whoring for corporate dollars as NSF support of supercomputing went into the tank. The technical case for open-source Unix-like software is hard to overcome, but the CEO/CFO mentality is easily swayed toward "supported" MS/proprietary solutions.
Financial applications were emphasized. My one contact with the group was a memorable meeting for the Wall St. crowd that Dell and Cornell put on at the Windows on the World restaurant (dripping irony) on top of the World Trade Center, less than a year before 9/11.
The other half of this project is eyeglasses that make eye contact with other people in the room. So we can go through life staring at the floor in social situations...
People talk about FNAL as a "nuclear" lab, as if they do bombs or have something to do with "national security." They are just a physics lab, one step above your typical university physics department. The main difference is that Uncle Sam runs it as a "national facility", and Unk is kind of twitchy just now.
Personally, I really like the "what me worry?" photo of our friendly hacker.
73 - Martin
It's not just the different OS. With Linux, everybody's kernel is compiled a little differently. At least the major distros are, and you do compile your own kernel, don't you?
This means all the memory maps are a little different, and your typical stack overflow hack needs to be tuned to each compiled kernel. Ergo, Linux is good.
Why couldn't MS do the same for Windows? Distribute randomized kernels & libraries to foil the hacks.
S'pose it makes it harder to interpret all those blue screen dumps...
He took the binary code and inferred a C language program that would produce the same code. Very clever, but I thought reverse engineering worked on a functional level.
IANAL, but I don't think the source code is legally safe if VIA wants to go after it.
Too late for UW, but you want to make your NTP or other well-known services a moving target, not available at a fixed IP. Rotate the service among many IPs and synchronize your dynamic DNS. This could be done in a single machine, I suppose. A nice weekend project.
Tommy Gold should know better, and perhaps he does. (Maybe this article was supposed to come out on April 1?)
Carnot's principle and thermodynamics in general only applies where you are very close to thermodynamic equilibrium. Even the concept of temperature does not apply unless there is equilibrium.
To me, the obvious come-back to Gold is an example of a laser that emits photons of a single energy. Shoot the photons at a target, mirror or otherwise, and momentum is transferred to the target. Presto, a laser sail. The sun is not a laser, but it emits photons which are one-by-one indistinguishable.
The solar system is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. All these photons are basically shooting from the sun outward. Look at the Sun, you see 5000 K. Look outward, you see 3 K cosmic background. Don't you feel the push?
Exactly. The purpose of copyright (and presumably other IP laws) from the government's (people's) view is to stimulate the creative arts, not to maximize profits for anybody. At least, that's how it was explained to me.
Stimulating the arts requires reasonable incentives and protections for authors - but not necessarily to become gazillionaires or to have perpetual or to have exclusive ownership of everything remotely similar to a given work.
The arts are (arguably) best stimulated when other artists have a chance to adapt, quote, and parody pretty soon after publication.
As with music, most writers labor in obscurity and would be pleased to have themselves quoted or parodied! Why do we worry so much about the superstars. Maybe money talks?
This is not much of a comparison. Spectrum analysis is not enough to tell you what a musical track sounds like. Kinds of distortion that sp. analysis may not pick up: harmonic (e.g., from clipping of high levels or quantization of low levels), transient (percussion, attack), intermodulation (tones "beating" against each other), dynamic range (noise at low levels vs maximum loudness), phase (relationship of pure signals at different frequencies), and on and on.
So it's interesting to compare the Apple codec with all the others, but this review doesn't do it.
According to Intel, the 3 GHz P4 dissipates 81.8 watts. While that keeps you warm over a long winter night, it's a lot of power to run all the time. I guess it's about $72 a year for energy. You have to put up with noisy fans, dust bunnies in your box, and all that.
I'd like to see speed/power specs advertised, and not just for laptops.
...to get people's attention, which is half the battle. But anyone who has taken high school physics knows about the "color" spectrum and the "infinite" range of frequencies/wavelengths available.
Too bad, but the physics of radio propagation does put a limit on the range of useful frequencies. If you want to do international broadcasting, you are pretty well limited to 3 - 30 MHz. If you want to do TV broadcasting with a single transmitter over a range of 100 miles, you are probably limited to 50 - 1000 MHz, and so on.
The problem is that governments, not knowing anything better to do, have carved up the spectrum into fixed allocations to various "services" - broadcasting, police & fire, military, amateur, etc. But if you listen with a wide coverage receiver, you will find most of the frequencies are empty most of the time. That is a real waste.
Theoretically, "software defined radio" lets you divide up frequency and time and modulation type in arbitrary dynamically programmable ways. The problem with that is that both ends have to agree on the algorithm and everybody has to agree to use the minimum power necessary. (Because there IS interference if you use too much power.) The price of flexibility is a huge burden of coordination. Of course, this is great for covert communications.
To paraphrase one of my profs, if you pave all of Delaware County, you don't need stop lights anymore.
-Martin
Sig of the day: What became of humble foreign policy?
The technical solution is not to charge for sending email, but to make the protocol robust. SMTP is laughably insecure. A More Secure SMTP might let the email receiver get a known ISP to vouch for the email sender before accepting a message, for example.
I should be able to ask Hotmail (or whoever) "I have message #xyz from your domain. Does it originate from a user in good standing?" If the ISP gets too many queries for an individual account, it will stop vouching for it.
Likewise, you need a database of "ISP's in good standing". I.e., who is known to play by the rules with MSSMTP?
Verification would serious server resources, but better that than spam.
I peer with another system at another institution using rsync. They rsync their files to a folder on my disk, and I rsync to a folder on theirs. No encryption, but very good performance - 128 kbs DSL upload is fine, running overnight.
This requires a lot of trust, which is OK because I'm the sysadmin at both places.
Without trust, you need DIBS-like encryption, which (probably) means no rsync-like differential backups, and you need a "safe" way to find partners.
How about "DIBS-raid" where your data is spread over many peers? If a peer blows up, you can still recover, and no one peer should have a recognizable piece of your data.
Don't confuse your one-off projects with the real world market. At $40 (or maybe $20 in volume) this chip is pretty expensive for some of the applications I'd like to see:
Put a web/cgi server in your VCR/DVD/Tivo. Maybe real people can finally program these things!
Instrument other consumer systems (plumbing, hvac, weather, kitchen, etc.) with LAN-connected controllers. httpd when a human wants to interact directly. X10 on steroids.
This chip shows where the embedded market is heading. Very low chip cost, standards based IO and OS will get us lots of interesting options.
Until recently, I was responsible for software licensing for a number of university departments. The facts of life:
Nobody is in full compliance without an institutional license (like these) and probably nobody is in compliance even with such a license program.
The cost of full (a la carte) compliance would be enormous. How do you track 20,000 licenses among many departments, research groups, students, etc.?
Anyone who thinks about legal exposure is running scared.
License administration is exceedingly unproductive work that everyone hates. So we had a pretty strong reason to pay MS's "protection money" and sign up for the blanket license. Even under the program, there are a lot of onerous provisions, as the FAQs cited at Ohio & Michigan show.
A courageous administrator (more courageous than I) would add up all the costs and risks and conclude that the rational thing is to go Open Source. Microsoft's strategy seems to be to extract all the cash from universities that the market will bear, without starting a rebellion.
All this has nothing to do with FOIA and everything to do with monopolists, institutional inertia and risk avoidance.
SBC/SNET says (in so many words) that home networks (NATted) are OK, as long as only one computer is used at a time. I think this means only one packet at a time, and I can live with this.:-)
More likely they will not appreciate if I suck up potential paying customers behind my NAT box. So I expect they'll eventually say something about service to one household.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd, I seem to see the same guy's face popping up in 600 places.
-mse
Earth's magnetic field may be about to "flip". (Physicists would use this word.) But it's not going to "flip flop".
Yours for semantic purity.
People are actually pretty good heat sinks. They are liquid cooled and have a large surface area.
The author of this report is likely to be using an earlier firmware version that did not have a firewall setting.
I don't know if Firewall/enable is the factory default now, but it might be. Problem solved? Not exactly -- there are lots of older units out there, and very few users have the ability or knowledge to do a firmware update.
-mse
Previously, Cornell had been mainly in the IBM camp, running an SP-2 under AIX, and before that, various Big Blue mainframes. So the move to Windows might have been seen as liberalizing!
Personally to me, coming from a university environment, this seemed to be Cornell whoring for corporate dollars as NSF support of supercomputing went into the tank. The technical case for open-source Unix-like software is hard to overcome, but the CEO/CFO mentality is easily swayed toward "supported" MS/proprietary solutions.
Financial applications were emphasized. My one contact with the group was a memorable meeting for the Wall St. crowd that Dell and Cornell put on at the Windows on the World restaurant (dripping irony) on top of the World Trade Center, less than a year before 9/11.
-Bromo
The other half of this project is eyeglasses that make eye contact with other people in the room. So we can go through life staring at the floor in social situations...
Write clearly, and put your name at the top right corner.
Personally, I really like the "what me worry?" photo of our friendly hacker. 73 - Martin
This means all the memory maps are a little different, and your typical stack overflow hack needs to be tuned to each compiled kernel. Ergo, Linux is good.
Why couldn't MS do the same for Windows? Distribute randomized kernels & libraries to foil the hacks.
S'pose it makes it harder to interpret all those blue screen dumps...
-mse
IANAL, but I don't think the source code is legally safe if VIA wants to go after it.
-mse
-mse
Carnot's principle and thermodynamics in general only applies where you are very close to thermodynamic equilibrium. Even the concept of temperature does not apply unless there is equilibrium.
To me, the obvious come-back to Gold is an example of a laser that emits photons of a single energy. Shoot the photons at a target, mirror or otherwise, and momentum is transferred to the target. Presto, a laser sail. The sun is not a laser, but it emits photons which are one-by-one indistinguishable.
The solar system is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. All these photons are basically shooting from the sun outward. Look at the Sun, you see 5000 K. Look outward, you see 3 K cosmic background. Don't you feel the push?
Physics is wonderful!
Stimulating the arts requires reasonable incentives and protections for authors - but not necessarily to become gazillionaires or to have perpetual or to have exclusive ownership of everything remotely similar to a given work.
The arts are (arguably) best stimulated when other artists have a chance to adapt, quote, and parody pretty soon after publication.
As with music, most writers labor in obscurity and would be pleased to have themselves quoted or parodied! Why do we worry so much about the superstars. Maybe money talks?
-mse
So it's interesting to compare the Apple codec with all the others, but this review doesn't do it.
-mse
I'd like to see speed/power specs advertised, and not just for laptops.
-mse
Too bad, but the physics of radio propagation does put a limit on the range of useful frequencies. If you want to do international broadcasting, you are pretty well limited to 3 - 30 MHz. If you want to do TV broadcasting with a single transmitter over a range of 100 miles, you are probably limited to 50 - 1000 MHz, and so on.
The problem is that governments, not knowing anything better to do, have carved up the spectrum into fixed allocations to various "services" - broadcasting, police & fire, military, amateur, etc. But if you listen with a wide coverage receiver, you will find most of the frequencies are empty most of the time. That is a real waste.
Theoretically, "software defined radio" lets you divide up frequency and time and modulation type in arbitrary dynamically programmable ways. The problem with that is that both ends have to agree on the algorithm and everybody has to agree to use the minimum power necessary. (Because there IS interference if you use too much power.) The price of flexibility is a huge burden of coordination. Of course, this is great for covert communications.
To paraphrase one of my profs, if you pave all of Delaware County, you don't need stop lights anymore.
-Martin
Sig of the day: What became of humble foreign policy?
What kind of a Mac can you get for $200?
-MSE
"Beware of foreign entanglements." - G Washington (or equiv)
I should be able to ask Hotmail (or whoever) "I have message #xyz from your domain. Does it originate from a user in good standing?" If the ISP gets too many queries for an individual account, it will stop vouching for it.
Likewise, you need a database of "ISP's in good standing". I.e., who is known to play by the rules with MSSMTP?
Verification would serious server resources, but better that than spam.
-mse
Who steals my .sig, steals trash.
This requires a lot of trust, which is OK because I'm the sysadmin at both places.
Without trust, you need DIBS-like encryption, which (probably) means no rsync-like differential backups, and you need a "safe" way to find partners.
How about "DIBS-raid" where your data is spread over many peers? If a peer blows up, you can still recover, and no one peer should have a recognizable piece of your data.
-Martin
This .sig donated to Poets Against the War.
Happy New Year - mse
- Put a web/cgi server in your VCR/DVD/Tivo. Maybe real people can finally program these things!
- Instrument other consumer systems (plumbing, hvac, weather, kitchen, etc.) with LAN-connected controllers. httpd when a human wants to interact directly. X10 on steroids.
This chip shows where the embedded market is heading. Very low chip cost, standards based IO and OS will get us lots of interesting options.- Nobody is in full compliance without an institutional license (like these) and probably nobody is in compliance even with such a license program.
- The cost of full (a la carte) compliance would be enormous. How do you track 20,000 licenses among many departments, research groups, students, etc.?
- Anyone who thinks about legal exposure is running scared.
License administration is exceedingly unproductive work that everyone hates. So we had a pretty strong reason to pay MS's "protection money" and sign up for the blanket license. Even under the program, there are a lot of onerous provisions, as the FAQs cited at Ohio & Michigan show.A courageous administrator (more courageous than I) would add up all the costs and risks and conclude that the rational thing is to go Open Source. Microsoft's strategy seems to be to extract all the cash from universities that the market will bear, without starting a rebellion.
All this has nothing to do with FOIA and everything to do with monopolists, institutional inertia and risk avoidance.
More likely they will not appreciate if I suck up potential paying customers behind my NAT box. So I expect they'll eventually say something about service to one household.
Merry Holidays!
The daisy wheel was the best thing, and if you really knew your stuff, it could do proportional fonts.
To someone brought up on ASR-33/35 teletypes, the daisy wheel or IBM golfball printers were super!
WordStar's UI was pretty good as I recall, sort of emacs-lite.