There is a special club amongst people working at the South Pole. When conditions are good, they heat up a sauna and then run naked from the sauna (except for footware) run once around the pole and back again. I believe the club is called something like the two-hundred below club, the two hundred referring to the temperature difference between the Sauna and outside in Farenheit.
Hey you should take a visit over to this side an interactive story version of Episode 3.
In one hilarious finale, Anakin dies, Jar Jar Binks becomes a new Sith apprentice as "Darth Jar Jar". Jar-Jar having something to do with the dark-side would explain a lot!!!!
Been done - years ago...
on
A Real Tabletop PC
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Back when I first started learning computing we had access to an IBM 1130 at a local college. The main unit consisted of a selectric typrewriter built into a desk containing instead of a drawer unit a removable hard-disk and the processor/memory (a princely 16KB of memory.
Of course, it didn't have the natty glass cover and its processing power was somewhat small compared to the average pocket calculator, but it was a desk. It was also IBM's first real foray into the world of the minicomputer where they were looking for a form that could even go into an office (with a/c of course). Of course, when you added a line printer and a card-reader, this rather defeated the object as they were each larger than the desk.
I'm fairly certain that Digital also had some early systems in the desk type format.
First, the company is called Microsoft Inc. MSFT is the short form for the securities issed by Microsoft. You aren't perchance a shareholder, are you?
If you go back to that article, you see that the person concerned has no current access to source code, however they admit that the early code was BSD related. Many of the utilities still have BSD copyright strings in them.
As for the benefits, this is debatable as the editors here would agree (whenever they get DOSed from a Windows box where the owner isn't even aware that their system has been broken in to. By the release of insecure code that can not easily be fixed. By distributing such code, they have done the world a disservice.
What concerns me though, is the embrace/extend policy. For example, look at what happened to Kerberos. Their security extensions are sufficiently outside public domain as to hinder interoperability.
Actually, I note that Ximian is careful about its relations with Microsoft and is careful about how they license their code. I support what they have done with the classes, but hope that the rest of the code that is currently GPL'ed remains so.
NASA put out that they died from asphyxiation caused by inhaling combustion products. The astronauts' bodies had sustained thermal burns and it was not possible to say weather those burns happened before or after death.
I trained as a SCUBA diver - PADI advanced only but it means I had to learn something about breathing. You definitely use more air when making an effort than at rest. However, loss of air does not mean loss of consciousness even when you are swimming (been there, done that).
I don't know the plastics involved, but unless something was extremely toxic (i.e. giving off cyanide products) when burnt, at least two of the astronauts (judging from suit damage reports) probably received significant burns before they died.
You are partly right though in that if the oxygen level falls below a certain level, the partial pressure of the O2 in the haemoglobin is greater than that in the lungs and O2 is removed from the body. CO also preferentially binds to the haemoglobin in the presence of O2 thus reducing efficiency. However deaths from CO poisoning take over a minute.
I fail to see a single incidence the BSD code modified and closed the has hurt the BSD community.
Well if we talk about software being taken from BSD, used, and the source dissappears for ever, there is probably no better example than Microsoft. Their network stack owes a lot to BSD, but has any of it been passed back? No.
Duh, Mono is not competinting with.NET. It is an Open Source alternative which allows access from more platforms.
It has been stated before that Mono does appear on the MSFT radar, but at the moment, it is seen as benign. Maybe this will change, but so what for the moment.
A BSD or MIT license is appropriate to encourage adoption. Yes, I'm certain if MSFT see good ideas then they will steal them, but please remember that they have already implemented all of their classes and they are extremely proprietary. However, what everyone is interested in is Mono being adopted on Unix platforms. Once it has been adopted, then it woud be possible to improve it using GPL'ed software.
According to the description of one attack, the bots got their orders via IRC. This means there is no direct link between the person giving orders and the bots. This is kind of hard to follow up.
Would this be adequate for a distributed denial of service attack?
There may be hundreds of attack 'bots involved. Each one is run by a user who has no knowledge of the attack and probably very little technical knowledge. To mask all of these and hunt them down would be non-trivial (even if you just pass the info to their ISP).
As far as I can see, the script k1dd13z, are intentionally interfering with a business. Treat it as any other kind of commercial blockade and if they persist, let them be sued.
In the UK, the Computer Misuse act is such a catchall, it would be easy to claim damages (less easy to collect though).
Slashdot is known for having a DOS effect, but at least it is people attempting to view a site for its content. Its tough if you pay your hosting company for bandwidth but, at least it's legitimate and its is coming from a lot of users.
The trouble is, so does a distributed DOS. This has a lot of unwitting users too. It is extremely difficult to trace who is giving the orders and the actual attack 'bots run on any suitably unprotected system that happens to have conveniant broadband access to the web. Even the Whitehouse was hit, liuckily the attack 'bot was dumb and a quick switch to a backup IP address solved the problem.
The only solution that I know is to use a private network (as done by several securities exchanges). You can block out all of an exchange's internet access, but you will not hit the private network. Users without a private network connection can fall back to switched circuit connections (i.e., ISDN) when the Internet is down.
I once had to buy MS Office that way because of some problems with my notebook whilst travelling in Central Asia. I needed to reinstall but the real licensed s/w CDs were in Germany. So I bought a local copy and it was fine. I kept my keyt rather than using the one enclosed, so I guess it was ok.
Only one difference, the pirates actually include the service packs on the distribution CD to make it easier to bring stuff up to date.
Melbourne sounds a lovely city to me but other people have also commented about its lack of a centre. Perhaps this personal tram system could be useful there.
For us, the Rhein-Main area is multi-centre with a number of cities and towns with smaller dormitory towns and villages. There are quite a few people in the area and Frankfurt has a high trip density but it is by no means the centre of the network.
The suburban rail service or S-Bahn provides inter-district travel. Lower frequency but it takes you much further. There is also a real regional train system which tends to be sort-of linked to the S-bahn. Certainly the technology is compatible.
The highest density people movers are probably the U-Bahn, a light railway service that is very frequent and spends much of its time underground in cities. At no time does it share roads like a tram does but sometimes there may be uncontrolled crossing points in the centre of the road. Signalling on these is all electronic and there can be frequencies of every few minutes.
Busses and trams are like you say, subject to road delays. In some places, the trams have dedicated tracks which reduces delay. Note that in Germany, a car *must* give way for a bus or tram.
Everything except the real railway service (Bahn) uses one person only to drive the things. For fares, there are a lot of ticket machines and a team of plain clothes inspectors. The price for a single journey is set to encourage season ticket holders.
Don't worry. This will be from the same guys that brought you the Content Scrambling System (CSS) for DVDs and we know how serious that was.
Still that was serious enough for the developer to be persued through his home country's courts.
Timeshifting is now a part of everyday life. Slowly, it is no longer an elite group that can set the timer on a vcr (devices like TiVo, help a lot) and a lot of people time-shift.
It doesn't matter wherether it is a broadcast premiere of a movie or a sports event, both may be time-shifted, and quite legally too! This is going to upset a lot more people than the CSS business and will not do anything for industry credibility or compliance.
As noted wlsewhere, both KaZaa and Morpheus share the FastTrack network. They are P2P clients but have the disadvantage that they are centrally authenticated (to force the advertising down the punters' throats).
KaZaa users are still connecting as of 06:00 GMT today. The main problem is if the courts go after the authentication servers. This isn't happening yet.
As a brit marooned out in continental Europe, I have discovered the plethora of local transport systems, buses, trams, light railway services and suburban train services.
All of these have a disadvantage, but it is a system that exists now in most European cities. Even some UK cities are reintroducing the tram now.
However what really makes it work in Europe is the integrated transport policy which links the different types of public transport together.
What is discussed here is a blue sky project for te distant future. It may be created in some new purpose-built 'city' like Milton Keynes, but otherwise creating that network of lines would be a nightmare.
Just using a mixture of conventional public transport technologies can reduce road loading by an incredible degree. Having a policy of integration means that I can use different types as a simple way of getting from A to B.
Here in Germany, I can hit the web site of the transport system (it is also in English so have a look) and it can give me the right mixture of trains/trams/metro/buses to get between A and B throughout the region.
This isn't rocket science, but perhaps if we could drag the UK's tansport system to the level of other major European countries, then we can start to look at more radical technologies.
I would just like to comment upon the survey aspects. Cut and fill levelling with computer optimisation has been done for a very long time now, you always want to minimise the material brought into or removed from a site because it is expensive.
My father was doing this kind of stuff in the seventies. He used a program on an IBM 370.
The use of GPS is no great shakes either. It is arguable whether it is even that helpful because GPS 3D isn't wonderfully accurate unless you are prepared to wait. You start with one fixed point where you use GPS (and wait for the errors to average out) or use a benchmark or even a trig point (there are lots of these surveyed 'fixed points' in the UK) and do everything else with a conventional optical instrument with laser tangefinding (geodimeter), aagin something that hasd been possible for a very long time.
The main benefit of newer technology is that the instrument contains a datalogger so the information can be fed directly into the digital ground model. Total stations, as they are called have been around since the early eighties.
The construction used isn't that new either, see any number of radomes such as the old Fylingsdale ones.
The materials were new and the application, well, it sure beats the Kew Gardens conservatories for size! That is where the innovation is.
In a mountain village, somewhere in Central Asia..
on
The End of The X-Files
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· Score: 5, Interesting
In Uzbekistan a former Soviet Republic, the Government still believe in firm control (democracy is good, but the people aren't ready for it), they really are responsible for everything - probably even Little Green Men. The security police, the SNB, formerly the KGB, are their Men In Black who quietly conspire leaving the people ignorant.
In a hotel in a small mountain village, Chimgan, on the edge of the Altai mountains there is a hotel. At 2$/night, you may guess that this isn't the Hilton.
On entering the hotel, I sneaked passed the reception (I was registered as a local there)and we passed a television room where about 30-40 people were watching TV with rapt attention,
It was the X-files, of course (earlier episode with Mulder as well as Sculley). In a country where the government really does have control, it was hot stuff, even when badly dubbed into Russian.
I used to work a lot with Digital's offerrings. They have had the name DECwindows for their implementation of X since the eighties. It is even a registered trademark!!!
You can not selectively enforce a trademark. Either you enforce it or you don't, so X Windows being around for so long as a name for a GUI is extremely relevant.
OTOH, X is technically a GUI communications protocol, it most definitely isn't an OS. However, most people regard X as being a combination of the librry and the protocol. MS Windows was orinally a GUI and a task switcher. It didn't have any pretensions to being an OS until Win 95.
I started working at the Computer Aided Design Centre in Cambridge with of the old Atlas Computer. You can find another article about the beast here with some pictures. This was quite old even in 1976 when I started but it had lovely panel of those blinkin lights. The machine pioneered RISC, asynch clocks and virtual memory (Under the TITAN OS). It looked much more impressive than an IBM 360 console. The tape drives, being big 1" things were kind of nice too, and the strain reliefs were straight out of an early SF movie.
SInce then after passing through PDP 11s (some of these had some lovely 'paddle' switches to toggle stuff in) to VAXes I became more and more deprived of this original stimulus to enjoy computing, heck, even the LAN switches are losing their lights now!!!!!
Ok, on my high end servers I can enter console routines and fiddle with the CPU examing and depositing to registers and memory (even dissassembling code), but that isn't so much fun.
Back on topic, yes, there is a place for a low profuleand quiet box in my living room, but I don't like dead server rooms. If I have a room of computers doing things, I too like to have a feel of what they are doing.
Re:what about B5, Buffy, Simpsons
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Yeah and someone will rip them and put them up on a file share service.
I Have seen an ep of Enterprise in YUV2 MP43 format and it squishes down to about 128MB per episode and doesn't look too bad (even against one recorded with another standard at 450MB). However this is compression from TV. B5 was recorded in widescreen and could take more but that makes it frighteningly easy to distribute bootleg copies given an HQ source.
I would guess that Warner Bros realises this and is beiung careful. This is a shame because B5 was good enough that I already own a bundle of eps in VHS format.
Re:News for nerds? Can a STORY be modded Offtopic?
on
Review: Orange County
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
True - I can see a place here for reviews of LOTR, certainly A Beautiful Mind and maybe even Harry Potter.
Where next though? Has "Ocean's 11" any relevance to Slashdotters? SFX and CGI are interesting as well as techie topics, but there are other places to go to talk about movies just for their own sake.
Kuro5hin has a voting system open to all registered users for the front page. Maybe this is needed here on Slashdot.
I think you are a little unfair there about Linux being a DIY system. Support can be, and that is where the cost saving is. Support for closed sourced software is very expensive and you have no alternative.
This is why I recommend Linux where appropriate for developing countries who might be able to get a licence for, say, Microsoft Back Office on the back of a World Bank loan, but who can not then afford to keep it up to date.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a wearable computer in sight!!!!!!
In one hilarious finale, Anakin dies, Jar Jar Binks becomes a new Sith apprentice as "Darth Jar Jar". Jar-Jar having something to do with the dark-side would explain a lot!!!!
Of course, it didn't have the natty glass cover and its processing power was somewhat small compared to the average pocket calculator, but it was a desk. It was also IBM's first real foray into the world of the minicomputer where they were looking for a form that could even go into an office (with a/c of course). Of course, when you added a line printer and a card-reader, this rather defeated the object as they were each larger than the desk.
I'm fairly certain that Digital also had some early systems in the desk type format.
If you go back to that article, you see that the person concerned has no current access to source code, however they admit that the early code was BSD related. Many of the utilities still have BSD copyright strings in them.
As for the benefits, this is debatable as the editors here would agree (whenever they get DOSed from a Windows box where the owner isn't even aware that their system has been broken in to. By the release of insecure code that can not easily be fixed. By distributing such code, they have done the world a disservice.
What concerns me though, is the embrace/extend policy. For example, look at what happened to Kerberos. Their security extensions are sufficiently outside public domain as to hinder interoperability.
Actually, I note that Ximian is careful about its relations with Microsoft and is careful about how they license their code. I support what they have done with the classes, but hope that the rest of the code that is currently GPL'ed remains so.
I trained as a SCUBA diver - PADI advanced only but it means I had to learn something about breathing. You definitely use more air when making an effort than at rest. However, loss of air does not mean loss of consciousness even when you are swimming (been there, done that).
I don't know the plastics involved, but unless something was extremely toxic (i.e. giving off cyanide products) when burnt, at least two of the astronauts (judging from suit damage reports) probably received significant burns before they died.
You are partly right though in that if the oxygen level falls below a certain level, the partial pressure of the O2 in the haemoglobin is greater than that in the lungs and O2 is removed from the body. CO also preferentially binds to the haemoglobin in the presence of O2 thus reducing efficiency. However deaths from CO poisoning take over a minute.
Well if we talk about software being taken from BSD, used, and the source dissappears for ever, there is probably no better example than Microsoft. Their network stack owes a lot to BSD, but has any of it been passed back? No.
It has been stated before that Mono does appear on the MSFT radar, but at the moment, it is seen as benign. Maybe this will change, but so what for the moment.
A BSD or MIT license is appropriate to encourage adoption. Yes, I'm certain if MSFT see good ideas then they will steal them, but please remember that they have already implemented all of their classes and they are extremely proprietary. However, what everyone is interested in is Mono being adopted on Unix platforms. Once it has been adopted, then it woud be possible to improve it using GPL'ed software.
According to the description of one attack, the bots got their orders via IRC. This means there is no direct link between the person giving orders and the bots. This is kind of hard to follow up.
I don't know who did their contracts, but if there was misrepresentation about the use of the money, this should be recoverable.
If the kid isn't so important (think who Daddy is), think about $1K or less in Russia!!!!
There may be hundreds of attack 'bots involved. Each one is run by a user who has no knowledge of the attack and probably very little technical knowledge. To mask all of these and hunt them down would be non-trivial (even if you just pass the info to their ISP).
In the UK, the Computer Misuse act is such a catchall, it would be easy to claim damages (less easy to collect though).
Slashdot is known for having a DOS effect, but at least it is people attempting to view a site for its content. Its tough if you pay your hosting company for bandwidth but, at least it's legitimate and its is coming from a lot of users.
The trouble is, so does a distributed DOS. This has a lot of unwitting users too. It is extremely difficult to trace who is giving the orders and the actual attack 'bots run on any suitably unprotected system that happens to have conveniant broadband access to the web. Even the Whitehouse was hit, liuckily the attack 'bot was dumb and a quick switch to a backup IP address solved the problem.
The only solution that I know is to use a private network (as done by several securities exchanges). You can block out all of an exchange's internet access, but you will not hit the private network. Users without a private network connection can fall back to switched circuit connections (i.e., ISDN) when the Internet is down.
I once had to buy MS Office that way because of some problems with my notebook whilst travelling in Central Asia. I needed to reinstall but the real licensed s/w CDs were in Germany. So I bought a local copy and it was fine. I kept my keyt rather than using the one enclosed, so I guess it was ok.
Only one difference, the pirates actually include the service packs on the distribution CD to make it easier to bring stuff up to date.
For us, the Rhein-Main area is multi-centre with a number of cities and towns with smaller dormitory towns and villages. There are quite a few people in the area and Frankfurt has a high trip density but it is by no means the centre of the network.
The suburban rail service or S-Bahn provides inter-district travel. Lower frequency but it takes you much further. There is also a real regional train system which tends to be sort-of linked to the S-bahn. Certainly the technology is compatible.
The highest density people movers are probably the U-Bahn, a light railway service that is very frequent and spends much of its time underground in cities. At no time does it share roads like a tram does but sometimes there may be uncontrolled crossing points in the centre of the road. Signalling on these is all electronic and there can be frequencies of every few minutes.
Busses and trams are like you say, subject to road delays. In some places, the trams have dedicated tracks which reduces delay. Note that in Germany, a car *must* give way for a bus or tram.
Everything except the real railway service (Bahn) uses one person only to drive the things. For fares, there are a lot of ticket machines and a team of plain clothes inspectors. The price for a single journey is set to encourage season ticket holders.
Still that was serious enough for the developer to be persued through his home country's courts.
Timeshifting is now a part of everyday life. Slowly, it is no longer an elite group that can set the timer on a vcr (devices like TiVo, help a lot) and a lot of people time-shift.
It doesn't matter wherether it is a broadcast premiere of a movie or a sports event, both may be time-shifted, and quite legally too! This is going to upset a lot more people than the CSS business and will not do anything for industry credibility or compliance.
KaZaa users are still connecting as of 06:00 GMT today. The main problem is if the courts go after the authentication servers. This isn't happening yet.
All of these have a disadvantage, but it is a system that exists now in most European cities. Even some UK cities are reintroducing the tram now.
However what really makes it work in Europe is the integrated transport policy which links the different types of public transport together.
What is discussed here is a blue sky project for te distant future. It may be created in some new purpose-built 'city' like Milton Keynes, but otherwise creating that network of lines would be a nightmare.
Just using a mixture of conventional public transport technologies can reduce road loading by an incredible degree. Having a policy of integration means that I can use different types as a simple way of getting from A to B.
Here in Germany, I can hit the web site of the transport system (it is also in English so have a look) and it can give me the right mixture of trains/trams/metro/buses to get between A and B throughout the region.
This isn't rocket science, but perhaps if we could drag the UK's tansport system to the level of other major European countries, then we can start to look at more radical technologies.
My father was doing this kind of stuff in the seventies. He used a program on an IBM 370.
The use of GPS is no great shakes either. It is arguable whether it is even that helpful because GPS 3D isn't wonderfully accurate unless you are prepared to wait. You start with one fixed point where you use GPS (and wait for the errors to average out) or use a benchmark or even a trig point (there are lots of these surveyed 'fixed points' in the UK) and do everything else with a conventional optical instrument with laser tangefinding (geodimeter), aagin something that hasd been possible for a very long time.
The main benefit of newer technology is that the instrument contains a datalogger so the information can be fed directly into the digital ground model. Total stations, as they are called have been around since the early eighties.
The construction used isn't that new either, see any number of radomes such as the old Fylingsdale ones.
The materials were new and the application, well, it sure beats the Kew Gardens conservatories for size! That is where the innovation is.
In a hotel in a small mountain village, Chimgan, on the edge of the Altai mountains there is a hotel. At 2$/night, you may guess that this isn't the Hilton.
On entering the hotel, I sneaked passed the reception (I was registered as a local there)and we passed a television room where about 30-40 people were watching TV with rapt attention,
It was the X-files, of course (earlier episode with Mulder as well as Sculley). In a country where the government really does have control, it was hot stuff, even when badly dubbed into Russian.
I used to work a lot with Digital's offerrings. They have had the name DECwindows for their implementation of X since the eighties. It is even a registered trademark!!!
OTOH, X is technically a GUI communications protocol, it most definitely isn't an OS. However, most people regard X as being a combination of the librry and the protocol. MS Windows was orinally a GUI and a task switcher. It didn't have any pretensions to being an OS until Win 95.
SInce then after passing through PDP 11s (some of these had some lovely 'paddle' switches to toggle stuff in) to VAXes I became more and more deprived of this original stimulus to enjoy computing, heck, even the LAN switches are losing their lights now!!!!!
Ok, on my high end servers I can enter console routines and fiddle with the CPU examing and depositing to registers and memory (even dissassembling code), but that isn't so much fun.
Back on topic, yes, there is a place for a low profuleand quiet box in my living room, but I don't like dead server rooms. If I have a room of computers doing things, I too like to have a feel of what they are doing.
I Have seen an ep of Enterprise in YUV2 MP43 format and it squishes down to about 128MB per episode and doesn't look too bad (even against one recorded with another standard at 450MB). However this is compression from TV. B5 was recorded in widescreen and could take more but that makes it frighteningly easy to distribute bootleg copies given an HQ source.
I would guess that Warner Bros realises this and is beiung careful. This is a shame because B5 was good enough that I already own a bundle of eps in VHS format.
Where next though? Has "Ocean's 11" any relevance to Slashdotters? SFX and CGI are interesting as well as techie topics, but there are other places to go to talk about movies just for their own sake.
Kuro5hin has a voting system open to all registered users for the front page. Maybe this is needed here on Slashdot.
This is why I recommend Linux where appropriate for developing countries who might be able to get a licence for, say, Microsoft Back Office on the back of a World Bank loan, but who can not then afford to keep it up to date.