A dozen times a day I'm reminded that there's no 64-bit Flash plug-in for Firefox -- two years after the last 32-bits-only processor was sold. That's at least as aggravating as an IE-only web site.
In 1969 I went to work for Boeing at their 747 plant in Everett. A monumentally huge plant, each of its two assembly lines could roll out a 747 every 7 days. All wings were fabricated on-site using the latest technologies: laser-aligned jigs and robotic rivet machines. They had such stiffness and strength that the wingtips in the static test facility could reportedly be pushed & pulled upwards by hydraulic rams & cables more than 30 feet above their nominal resting levels before the first components started to fail (spars deforming, rivets shearing,...). I don't know how many G's would be required to produce that much deflection, but I'm sure the number would be more common to modern fighter aircraft than airliners. I've never felt safer than when flying in a 747. If the 787 carbon fiber wing really outperforms a 747's aluminum "slab", I'm going to enjoy flying on the new bird.
My home and residential neighborhood were built in 1973. A state highway with the highest traffic flow in Illinois (Il-159) passes just 200 yards from my home. The Metro East area across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, MO has a population of well over 200,000 yet since 1992 I've been unable to order anything but POTS from Illinois Bell, Ameritech, SBC, and now AT&T. "Not currently available" is the perennial status. The cold hard truth is that AT&T refuses to upgrade its physical plant from the classic copper-based exchange-centric service model. Oh, for years they've made widely-publicized promises of universal broadband service to the Illinois legislature, then refused to install the fiber-connected satellite equipment needed to expand DSL coverage beyond the 16,000-odd cable feet radius limits around their existing dial central offices (exchanges). A pin map shows that AT&T offers DSL service ONLY within those areas served by their existing copper cable plants, and they don't give a damn about investing in the infrastructure needed for universal service. They just keep milking that ol' copper cable plant for all it's worth.
I keep my whole beans in the freezer. About once a week I refill the ~2 cup hopper in my burr grinder. I grind the beans very fine just before use and put the fresh grounds in one of those gold plated filter baskets. I use a 20-year-old 10/12-cup Mr. Coffee. I use distilled water (I also have a 1 gallon distiller) so there's no lime or other dissolved minerals to clog the innards of the Mr. Coffee or to taint the flavor of the brewed coffee. In 15 minutes I have a pot of rich, full-flavored coffee ready for my thermos. Cleanup is a snap because the used grounds are so fine they go right down the disposal.
My personal preference is Hawaiian Kona coffee. I'm afraid such coffee is sold under false pretenses though because it typically contains only 10% Kona beans. The other 90% could be sawdust for all I know.
If anyone knows how to contact Bill Maher or his producer(s) at HBO, they need to see this. It's depressing to see these semi-professional educational Nazis take a hard right at the First Amendment and drag some bright kid (with more brains than any SPEN) and his family through legal hell.
1. It talks about desktop security configurations. Alan Paller from SANS talked about desktop applications, but Clay Johnson's actual memo does not. 2. It says nothing about servers. 3. There's no mention of Solaris, AIX, OS/X, Linux, BSD, VMS, or any other non-Microsoft operating system in common use. While it's true the total number of Windows XP/Vista desktops will far outnumber all the server and non-Windows systems, by ignoring them this memo is no more of a security solution than "3 cups of flour" is a recipe for bread.
RoundUp is an herbicide, not a pesticide. As in flora, not fauna. It's easy to confuse things like this when you're like overwrought and really don't know what you're talking about.
...or build your own system using energy efficient components. A year ago I put together a forensics workstation with a dual-Opteron mobo, 4GB registered DDR, and ten SCSI drives (1.1TB array). I used ball bearing fans throughout and a high-efficiency PCP&C p/s. My only concession to gaming was a pair of 6600 cards -- the only significant heat sources in the enclosure. At power-on the hard drives do a staggered spin-up. My Kill-A-Watt meter peaks briefly at 450W, then settles back to 330W. Running three virtual machines plus the host, it's effortlessly fast, reading room quiet, and very power efficient.
Since when did some anonymous group of "Silicon Valley companies" become an accrediting body for engineering schools? Forgive me for being a bit old-fashioned (at age 58 I think I've earned the right), but as someone who worked his butt off to earn a genuine engineering degree (BSE/EE, Arizona State '74) I'm inclined to wave a BS (the other one) flag on this whole discussion. One may be a self-taught programmer/coder/hacker/bit-twiddler, but never a self-taught engineer of any flavor -- regardless of gender.
If memory serves me correctly, it used to be unlawful for anyone to call themselves an "Engineer" in Oregon unless they have earned at least a bachelor's degree in engineering from an accredited college or university. I remember they went after Novell under that law for conferring term Certified Novell Engineer on anybody who bought some books and took a test. In most states use of the term Professional Engineer is legally restricted to those who have passed the Engineer-In-Training exam (an all day bugger) and served what amounts to a four-year apprenticeship working as a true engineer. Only a PE can certify blueprints and other design documents, and one must be a PE to give expert testimony in court.
One may argue the technical merits of CAPP/EAL certifications, but serious competitors in the federal IT market simply can't afford not to make the large investments in time and money to get them. Anyone interested in the details can explore:
Does MF have any plans to produce a Custom Configuration Kit and Mission Control Desktop capability for Firefox, Thunderbird, and the other now independent parts of what was the Mozilla suite? These new components are being marketed toward end users with no apparent regard for the needs of universities, corporations, government agencies, or other large enterprises for CCK/MCD support.
I have not seen support for a Custom Configuration Kit or the Mission Control Desktop mentioned in the same sentence with Firefox. For that reason I must assume Firefox is targeted solely at individual users.
The Mozilla suite, on the other hand, contains at least vestigial code support for a CCK and MCD. These would be crucial tools for enterprise rollout and day-to-day active management of Mozilla suite components. Like its ancestor, Netscape Communicator, the Mozilla suite is clearly targeted at enterprise users. Its demise would be an unspeakable loss to all sizes of corporate and government enterprises.
Nothing new under the sun...
on
A .Net CPU
·
· Score: 1
Long ago Western Digital made a Microengine that executed UCSD Pascal P-code. And Intel's iAPX-32 was supposed to execute Ada directly.
As hardware implementations, neither could economically evolve and survive.
Actually using Mozilla (and probably Firefox) instead of IE can be a partial solution. After an AdAware SE session I wrote down all the sites that set tracking cookies and added them to Mozilla's list of sites not allowed to store cookies. Now more than a month later my AdAware scans still come up clean. Try doing that with IE.
They say there are two types of surgery that you don't care about the cost: your heart and your eyes. It's true.
(1) It's far better to be your doctor's 1000th surgery than his 50th. Experience is extremely important. (2) Even if you're not a geek, the model of laser machine your doctor uses is very important. Older ones don't have dynamic tracking to follow your eye movements during the dot vaporizing stage. No matter how hard you try to hold it perfectly still, your eye will move. This will substantially increase the chances of less than a perfect outcome. (3) You didn't mention your age. If you're over 50 and have borderline dry eyes to begin with (I had to take out my extended wear soft contacts every night), you're going to have real (but temporary) problems with dryness following your surgery. The mechanism is simple: The microtome will peel back a surface flap to expose the cornea below. Any nerve endings in that flap are severed in the process. They grow back in 4-6 months, but in the mean time the surface numness takes away the stimulus needed to produce normal tears. Don't be surprised if you have to use eye drops A LOT after your surgery. (4) The surgery blew away my up close near vision. This is a common trade-off that can't be helped. Some folks get one eye done for near vision and the other for far. That wouldn't be my choice. Reading glasses are inexpensive and very effective. (5) Before my surgery I was almost totally disabled without my glasses (-4 plus diopters, plus astigmatism). I'm about 20/40 now in one eye and 20/50 in the other, and have some minor double vision. Not a perfect result (I'm thinking about going back for a trim), but overall I consider the improvement nothing short of miraculous.
The reason the Direct Marketing Association sought this injunction was to prevent the FTC from offering its mandatory Do_Not_Call registry service for free. This would effectively halt DMA's alternative where they charge consumers $5 apiece to put telephone numbers on an "opt out" list which their member firms are under no legal obligation to consult.
God forbid that a cash cow like this should become an endangered species!
Historical Note: This "new" recording technique is the same one that failed to take hold in 2.88M EHD floppy disks about 15 years ago. Back then the new recording material was barium ferrite, whose magnetic domains arrange themselves vertically with respect to the substrate.
Compared to ordinary floppy disks with horizontal magnetic domains, this technology had the potential of increasing data densities by as much as 2-3 orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the new disks were expensive and not compatible with the huge installed base of 1.44M drives. EHD drives required BIOS changes that weren't possible in those non-FlashBIOS days. Even if those problems could have been solved, IOMEGA's Zip drives were offering far more bang for the buck.
Of course, none of this would matter for hard drives.
By defining supercomputing in terms of storage capacity rather than aggregate CPU power, Microsoft seems intent on diverting discussion away from clustering, which Windows does very poorly (if at all).
Actually all the flags needed to support precedence were defined in RFC 791 many years ago. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0791.txt "Type of Service" on page 12.
In theory, packets with non-zero precedence bits would jump to the head of transmission queues for each hop. As far as I know, TOS support has never been implemented in any network -- not even those belonging to the U.S. military.
I'm sure this is all very impressive looking to the digital masses, but the last time I looked John Gilligan doesn't have a $6B budget he can lord over Microsoft or Cisco. Nor does he have veto authority over any of the Air Force four-stars who do. As Tigger might say, this whole federal CIO thing is stuff and nonsense.
The first rule of government -- and any large organization -- is the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules.
Has it ever occured to anyone that it doesn't make much sense to have a CIO if you don't have a CEO, COO, CFO,... ?? The Air Force is not a corporation. Nor are the State Department or the Bureau of Land Management
I'm an engineer, not a lawyer. But if I read the Reverse Engineering section 1201(f) correctly, it allows anyone to reverse engineer CSS in order to play a lawfully obtained DVD on a Linux system when player sofware has "not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention" and that such playback does "not constitute infringement" (meaning personal use).
DMCA would seem to require any and all persons wishing to view legally acquired DVDs on a Linux box to reverse engineer CSS and write their own individual versions of DeCSS from scratch. To this layman that is an absurd requirement.
More reasonable would be the legal availability of a DeCSS module that can be incorporated into the DVD player software of the user's choice. But this depends on one or more reverse engineering users being allowed to distribute their implementations to the legions of Linux users who only want to watch their DVDs without first having to purchase and install Windows (for which free DVD player software binaries have long been available).
Thus a single common DeCSS is considered unlawful infringement, yet each of tens of thousands of individually reverse engineered versions would apparently be legal. What's wrong with this picture?
All Illinois is divided into two parts: Chicago and Not_Chicago.
The boundary is roughly a 25-mile radius around the Sears Tower. Those of us who dwell in the nether regions of Not_Chicago just east of St. Louis, MO can only look with longing at the urban abundance in the far north. We have abandoned all hope of ever enjoying any connectivity better than the proverbial waxed string and peach can.
Slashdot Mirror
A dozen times a day I'm reminded that there's no 64-bit Flash plug-in for Firefox -- two years after the last 32-bits-only processor was sold. That's at least as aggravating as an IE-only web site.
In 1969 I went to work for Boeing at their 747 plant in Everett. A monumentally huge plant, each of its two assembly lines could roll out a 747 every 7 days. All wings were fabricated on-site using the latest technologies: laser-aligned jigs and robotic rivet machines. They had such stiffness and strength that the wingtips in the static test facility could reportedly be pushed & pulled upwards by hydraulic rams & cables more than 30 feet above their nominal resting levels before the first components started to fail (spars deforming, rivets shearing, ...). I don't know how many G's would be required to produce that much deflection, but I'm sure the number would be more common to modern fighter aircraft than airliners. I've never felt safer than when flying in a 747. If the 787 carbon fiber wing really outperforms a 747's aluminum "slab", I'm going to enjoy flying on the new bird.
My home and residential neighborhood were built in 1973. A state highway with the highest traffic flow in Illinois (Il-159) passes just 200 yards from my home. The Metro East area across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, MO has a population of well over 200,000 yet since 1992 I've been unable to order anything but POTS from Illinois Bell, Ameritech, SBC, and now AT&T. "Not currently available" is the perennial status. The cold hard truth is that AT&T refuses to upgrade its physical plant from the classic copper-based exchange-centric service model. Oh, for years they've made widely-publicized promises of universal broadband service to the Illinois legislature, then refused to install the fiber-connected satellite equipment needed to expand DSL coverage beyond the 16,000-odd cable feet radius limits around their existing dial central offices (exchanges). A pin map shows that AT&T offers DSL service ONLY within those areas served by their existing copper cable plants, and they don't give a damn about investing in the infrastructure needed for universal service. They just keep milking that ol' copper cable plant for all it's worth.
I keep my whole beans in the freezer. About once a week I refill the ~2 cup hopper in my burr grinder. I grind the beans very fine just before use and put the fresh grounds in one of those gold plated filter baskets. I use a 20-year-old 10/12-cup Mr. Coffee. I use distilled water (I also have a 1 gallon distiller) so there's no lime or other dissolved minerals to clog the innards of the Mr. Coffee or to taint the flavor of the brewed coffee. In 15 minutes I have a pot of rich, full-flavored coffee ready for my thermos. Cleanup is a snap because the used grounds are so fine they go right down the disposal.
My personal preference is Hawaiian Kona coffee. I'm afraid such coffee is sold under false pretenses though because it typically contains only 10% Kona beans. The other 90% could be sawdust for all I know.
If anyone knows how to contact Bill Maher or his producer(s) at HBO, they need to see this. It's depressing to see these semi-professional educational Nazis take a hard right at the First Amendment and drag some bright kid (with more brains than any SPEN) and his family through legal hell.
1. It talks about desktop security configurations. Alan Paller from SANS talked about desktop applications, but Clay Johnson's actual memo does not.
2. It says nothing about servers.
3. There's no mention of Solaris, AIX, OS/X, Linux, BSD, VMS, or any other non-Microsoft operating system in common use.
While it's true the total number of Windows XP/Vista desktops will far outnumber all the server and non-Windows systems, by ignoring them this memo is no more of a security solution than "3 cups of flour" is a recipe for bread.
RoundUp is an herbicide, not a pesticide. As in flora, not fauna. It's easy to confuse things like this when you're like overwrought and really don't know what you're talking about.
...or build your own system using energy efficient components. A year ago I put together a forensics workstation with a dual-Opteron mobo, 4GB registered DDR, and ten SCSI drives (1.1TB array). I used ball bearing fans throughout and a high-efficiency PCP&C p/s. My only concession to gaming was a pair of 6600 cards -- the only significant heat sources in the enclosure. At power-on the hard drives do a staggered spin-up. My Kill-A-Watt meter peaks briefly at 450W, then settles back to 330W. Running three virtual machines plus the host, it's effortlessly fast, reading room quiet, and very power efficient.
Since when did some anonymous group of "Silicon Valley companies" become an accrediting body for engineering schools? Forgive me for being a bit old-fashioned (at age 58 I think I've earned the right), but as someone who worked his butt off to earn a genuine engineering degree (BSE/EE, Arizona State '74) I'm inclined to wave a BS (the other one) flag on this whole discussion. One may be a self-taught programmer/coder/hacker/bit-twiddler, but never a self-taught engineer of any flavor -- regardless of gender.
If memory serves me correctly, it used to be unlawful for anyone to call themselves an "Engineer" in Oregon unless they have earned at least a bachelor's degree in engineering from an accredited college or university. I remember they went after Novell under that law for conferring term Certified Novell Engineer on anybody who bought some books and took a test. In most states use of the term Professional Engineer is legally restricted to those who have passed the Engineer-In-Training exam (an all day bugger) and served what amounts to a four-year apprenticeship working as a true engineer. Only a PE can certify blueprints and other design documents, and one must be a PE to give expert testimony in court.
Just my $0.02.
This adds a whole new definition and context for the term "core dump".
One may argue the technical merits of CAPP/EAL certifications, but serious competitors in the federal IT market simply can't afford not to make the large investments in time and money to get them. Anyone interested in the details can explore:
http://niap.nist.gov/cc-scheme/in_evaluation.html
http://niap.nist.gov/cc-scheme/vpl/vpl_type.html
For years he's been under the obviously mistaken impression that XML was his invention. Ref http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/sun-info/standards/xml/ why/xmlapps.htm .
Does MF have any plans to produce a Custom Configuration Kit and Mission Control Desktop capability for Firefox, Thunderbird, and the other now independent parts of what was the Mozilla suite? These new components are being marketed toward end users with no apparent regard for the needs of universities, corporations, government agencies, or other large enterprises for CCK/MCD support.
I have not seen support for a Custom Configuration Kit or the Mission Control Desktop mentioned in the same sentence with Firefox. For that reason I must assume Firefox is targeted solely at individual users.
The Mozilla suite, on the other hand, contains at least vestigial code support for a CCK and MCD. These would be crucial tools for enterprise rollout and day-to-day active management of Mozilla suite components. Like its ancestor, Netscape Communicator, the Mozilla suite is clearly targeted at enterprise users. Its demise would be an unspeakable loss to all sizes of corporate and government enterprises.
Long ago Western Digital made a Microengine that executed UCSD Pascal P-code. And Intel's iAPX-32 was supposed to execute Ada directly.
As hardware implementations, neither could economically evolve and survive.
Actually using Mozilla (and probably Firefox) instead of IE can be a partial solution. After an AdAware SE session I wrote down all the sites that set tracking cookies and added them to Mozilla's list of sites not allowed to store cookies. Now more than a month later my AdAware scans still come up clean. Try doing that with IE.
They say there are two types of surgery that you don't care about the cost: your heart and your eyes. It's true.
(1) It's far better to be your doctor's 1000th surgery than his 50th. Experience is extremely important.
(2) Even if you're not a geek, the model of laser machine your doctor uses is very important. Older ones don't have dynamic tracking to follow your eye movements during the dot vaporizing stage. No matter how hard you try to hold it perfectly still, your eye will move. This will substantially increase the chances of less than a perfect outcome.
(3) You didn't mention your age. If you're over 50 and have borderline dry eyes to begin with (I had to take out my extended wear soft contacts every night), you're going to have real (but temporary) problems with dryness following your surgery. The mechanism is simple: The microtome will peel back a surface flap to expose the cornea below. Any nerve endings in that flap are severed in the process. They grow back in 4-6 months, but in the mean time the surface numness takes away the stimulus needed to produce normal tears. Don't be surprised if you have to use eye drops A LOT after your surgery.
(4) The surgery blew away my up close near vision. This is a common trade-off that can't be helped. Some folks get one eye done for near vision and the other for far. That wouldn't be my choice. Reading glasses are inexpensive and very effective.
(5) Before my surgery I was almost totally disabled without my glasses (-4 plus diopters, plus astigmatism). I'm about 20/40 now in one eye and 20/50 in the other, and have some minor double vision. Not a perfect result (I'm thinking about going back for a trim), but overall I consider the improvement nothing short of miraculous.
Bottom Line: RECOMMENDED
Anybody care to wager that the SETI first message we actually decode won't be an offer for cheap Viagra?
The reason the Direct Marketing Association sought this injunction was to prevent the FTC from offering its mandatory Do_Not_Call registry service for free. This would effectively halt DMA's alternative where they charge consumers $5 apiece to put telephone numbers on an "opt out" list which their member firms are under no legal obligation to consult.
God forbid that a cash cow like this should become an endangered species!
Historical Note: This "new" recording technique is the same one that failed to take hold in 2.88M EHD floppy disks about 15 years ago. Back then the new recording material was barium ferrite, whose magnetic domains arrange themselves vertically with respect to the substrate.
Compared to ordinary floppy disks with horizontal magnetic domains, this technology had the potential of increasing data densities by as much as 2-3 orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the new disks were expensive and not compatible with the huge installed base of 1.44M drives. EHD drives required BIOS changes that weren't possible in those non-FlashBIOS days. Even if those problems could have been solved, IOMEGA's Zip drives were offering far more bang for the buck.
Of course, none of this would matter for hard drives.
By defining supercomputing in terms of storage capacity rather than aggregate CPU power, Microsoft seems intent on diverting discussion away from clustering, which Windows does very poorly (if at all).
Actually all the flags needed to support precedence were defined in RFC 791 many years ago. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0791.txt "Type of Service" on page 12.
In theory, packets with non-zero precedence bits would jump to the head of transmission queues for each hop. As far as I know, TOS support has never been implemented in any network -- not even those belonging to the U.S. military.
I'm sure this is all very impressive looking to the digital masses, but the last time I looked John Gilligan doesn't have a $6B budget he can lord over Microsoft or Cisco. Nor does he have veto authority over any of the Air Force four-stars who do. As Tigger might say, this whole federal CIO thing is stuff and nonsense.
... ?? The Air Force is not a corporation. Nor are the State Department or the Bureau of Land Management
The first rule of government -- and any large organization -- is the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules.
Has it ever occured to anyone that it doesn't make much sense to have a CIO if you don't have a CEO, COO, CFO,
Stuff and nonsense.
I'm an engineer, not a lawyer. But if I read the Reverse Engineering section 1201(f) correctly, it allows anyone to reverse engineer CSS in order to play a lawfully obtained DVD on a Linux system when player sofware has "not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention" and that such playback does "not constitute infringement" (meaning personal use).
DMCA would seem to require any and all persons wishing to view legally acquired DVDs on a Linux box to reverse engineer CSS and write their own individual versions of DeCSS from scratch. To this layman that is an absurd requirement.
More reasonable would be the legal availability of a DeCSS module that can be incorporated into the DVD player software of the user's choice. But this depends on one or more reverse engineering users being allowed to distribute their implementations to the legions of Linux users who only want to watch their DVDs without first having to purchase and install Windows (for which free DVD player software binaries have long been available).
Thus a single common DeCSS is considered unlawful infringement, yet each of tens of thousands of individually reverse engineered versions would apparently be legal. What's wrong with this picture?
All Illinois is divided into two parts: Chicago and Not_Chicago.
The boundary is roughly a 25-mile radius around the Sears Tower. Those of us who dwell in the nether regions of Not_Chicago just east of St. Louis, MO can only look with longing at the urban abundance in the far north. We have abandoned all hope of ever enjoying any connectivity better than the proverbial waxed string and peach can.