The biggest problem with the Space Shuttle is that it is completely useless to launch anything into a geosynchrous orbit, unless said object had a boosting rocket of its own. For inexpensive artifical sattelites, this is not an option.
The Atlas-V is definitely a refinement of previous ELVs (the Saturn V is really only meant for really big payloads) and is a cheaper solution on the price per pound ratio.
If the only input from potential candidates to political office is a "mass e-mailed" request for votes, I'm sorry to say that only demonstrates how much effort said candidate will put in for the people the represent.
While their SPAM may cut their campaigning costs, a candidate who doesn't put enough effort into meeting their voters should never represent them.
I usually don't reply to myself, but here is some information confirming what I had stated.
The word Palladium comes from an ancient Greek legend of a statue that stood in the city of Troy holding a shield and a spear. It was believed to have been hurled from Olympus by the god Zeus at the founding of the city, and it was thought that this statue protected the city. In the tenth year of the Trojan War the Greek heroes Diomedes and Odysseus stole the Palladium, thus facilitating the fall of Troy.
Yep, the statue was stolen, ironically during the Trojan War.
Ooh, the irony. Too bad the Palladium was only made out of wood.:)
If I remember my greek mythology correctly, the Palladium was supposedly used to protect the city of Troy. As long as the statue was there, the city would be safe.
The Palladium was eventually stolen and afterwards the city of Troy fell.
I don't know about you, but isn't it ironic that Microsoft names their next security product in reference to this same Palladium?
First, to any sysadmin who has to deal with these problems, you have my sympathies. As a sysadmin myself and a former employee of a company that developped e-commerce software, e-commerce is a minefield in itself.
I personally don't see the sysadmin to be ethically obligated any more than if a similar theft occured at a brick and mortar establishment. For instance, would the security guard be ethically obligated to inform the store's customers that someone may have stolen credit card purchase slips stored in a safe?
And if we open the ethical debate, we cannot simply ignore the said consequences. What would the credit card holder do? Sue the sysadmin or the company? Become irate? Would he even thank the sysadmin that disclosed the information?
The truth is that in the brick and mortar world, you generally require at least a signature to charge a purchase on your card. When business involved to purchases over the phone or on the Internet, the credit card companies should have brought that philosophy with them.
What is sad is the fact that this does exist. It's called SET (Secure Electronic Transactions) which was being actively developed to handle electronic signatures for electronic credit card purchases.
The big question is why it isn't in place right now. The answer is quite simple. The credit card companies instantly realize that e-commerce transactions equals profit. Force SET down the throats of merchants and credit card holders would cost the credit card companies big.
So the system is insecure simply because the losses in the volume of transactions (which equals profit) would be more than the losses caused by credit card fraud. It is their definition of "risk management" that makes e-commerce transactions insecure.
So, if you as a credit card holder want to question the ethics of the sysadmin, remember these very key points:
The credit card company has put their seal of approval on the system used by the merchant.
The sysadmin is not the merchant; his/her company is.
Credit cards equals convenience for all parties involved. Convenience is inversely proportional to security.
Personally, I believe that ethical obligations are proportional to those benefit the most from the stated conditions. And trust me on this one; the sysadmin does not benefit at all from these conditions.
Well, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people already know this, but as far as the quality of patents go, they simply stink.
While I don't remember what date the special was aired (sometime in 2001), NBC (in the United States) aired a special on the USPTO and how patent examiners are given performance pay. The third paragraph in this article supports this fact. While the quality of a patent is not measurable, the quantity of patents approved by examiners is.
Since the USPTO does provide performance pay due to a lack of examiners, they have basically created their own problem. Since everything under the sun is patentable (including restaurants attached to hotels and bra size measurements), the examiners have basically build themselves a self-reinforcing problem that continually encourages them to rubberstamps patents, regardless of what the patent application is for.
I'm not at all surprised at what gets through the USPTO these days. Simply put, the excessive number of patents only serves the examiners and the legal system.
From the specifications, it is indeed a sulfur-based lamp. The major difference is that it uses RF energy, rather than an electrical charge to excite the sulfur atoms to produce light.
The big advantage is that by using RF energy, they are essentially boosting the efficiency of the bulb. For instance, incandescent bulbs are approximately 2-4% efficient, mercury and sulfur based fluorescent bulbs are about 25-35% efficient. With this new bulb, they are indicating about 70-80% efficiency. These bulbs should also last much longer, as the magnetron device (producing the RF energy) doesn't wear down like electrodes do.
While to ordinary Joe Consumer, this isn't that much of a big thing, imagine for instance the amount of electricity used by a large city just to keep the lamp posts lit. They would achieve the same amount of light on half the electricity bill.
Unfortunately, that would mean that every lamp post (so equipped) would become an instant RF source. It would certainly be far too minuscule to cook you, but definitely enough to cause some interference on wireless RF equipment in that spectrum.
If the past year's viruses were all hype, I have to wonder how serious a virus has to be before they actually claim them as dangerous.
Thanks to SirCam, I personally received two documents from Fortune 500 companies (which were infected) with draft proposals for new products and the markets they were targetted for. I get to know the plans of a big company even before their CEO does.
Thanks to CR/Nimda, I get to see at least 100 probes a day trying to get to my personal web server. On more active days, that number is more like 500. And this is now, over 8 months after the virus was at its peak.
I know of at least a few administrators (that work at various companies) that had to put in about a week to get the "I love you" virus under control. And that virus didn't even have a nasty payload.
Mind you, they could have been much worse. The simple fact is that most of these viruses were born from stupid bugs (which in most cases were simply overlooked) and hence were somewhat easier to fix.
Read between the lines and you'll see that it's nothing more than a cash grab based upon the circumstances surrounding the person's suicide.
It raises one interesting question. If the person in question was diagnosed as having severe psychological conditions, why wasn't his activity being monitored more carefully?
Hypothetically speaking, if a person loves to play with butter knives, should the manufacturer [of said knives] be sued because there was no warning label stating "Sharp object. May kill." on it?
While I can sympathize with the mother, I don't think that she has any just reason for pursuing this issue.
I'd buy the book, if it has a good set of guidelines on how to properly handle the dreaded BWI (Boss With Ideas). Does it have anything covering this issue?
Personally, I've always found it difficult when a boss (with a non-technical background) insists on using his idea even if it will cause the rest of the network, which you invested thousands of hours of your work, to disintegrate itself down to a ugly mess.
There is already a live action version, which you can buy here. I have seen it, and it is horrible.
How bad is it you ask? Just look for the infamous grenade; the one that blows up but keeps on bouncing off the ground after the special effects explosion went off.
ESR appears to be way over the edge on this one. First off he does not appear to know that OEMs already get Windows at deep discounts over the retail price. Microsoft does not have to provide packaging, retail discount, activation or first level support for those customers so the cost is probably more like $35 for XP Home.
Apperances can be deceiving. True, the Microsoft OS can be literally given away with a new PC, but that's because Microsoft makes up the difference easily with applications.
For instance, take Microsoft Office. Add SQL server. Add Exchange Server. These are all packages that you have to shell out big bucks for. Have I even begun to reach the equivalent functionality level of a Linux distro? The answer is no.
But, I know one thing. The pocket book will definitely be far emptier with the so called "Microsoft Tax" (all of the software listed above) compared to Linux.
Couple it with the fact that a lot of businesses go with a complete Microsoft end to end solution, your desktop cost becomes mostly software. Can you guess who the greatest beneficiary is?
It wasn't just the domain name. This company was also well known for its spend-thrift parties, social functions, etc. etc. If you didn't know any better, you would think that the company knocked off a bank or two every so often to finance these events.
The product (Netwinder) didn't kill them at all. It was the fact that they lavishly spend money all while believing they could never run out of cash. They also racked up millions in debt, so much so that they were being cutoff as a reseller for other equipment.
Hopefully, the new company won't follow the same path as Rebel.com, because they'll have a much greater chance at being successful.
The article goes to indicate that the golden HTTP protocol can't do everything, and as such, its days are numbered.
True, HTTP can't push a full gamut of services on the web. It wasn't designed to do that. That's is where the HT in HTTP becomes most significant (HyperText).
What is ultimately the problem is the push to get the browser to do everything, including handling your applications (think ASPs) and transactions (e-commerce in particular). This mentality of "the browser must be able to do everything" has become its own monster, relying on a protocol that was really designed to push little more than web pages.
There is very little that browsers can't do these days. However, you can bet that over 99% of all web browser activity uses HTTP (which isn't necessarily a suitable protocol to do everything)...
Now, there is plenty of room for other protocols to come in and enhance the web. However, HTTP still has a large role and shouldn't be called dead prematurely. However, if these new protocols were to remain proprietary, you can bet that they will never be as widely accepted as HTTP (which is not proprietary, btw).
I think that there are a lot people who don't like driving on congested roadways. Trying to marginalize them by hitting their pocketbook is by no means a real solution...
Rush hour is mainly caused by people commuting to work. On an average work day, I spend 30 minutes in my car to commute to work. Public transportation requires 3 hours of my time for the same commute. And I live in a city where we're supposed to have a great public transportation system.
How is this managed, you ask? I leave for work and head back home before the respective "rush hours" start (I work from 6am to 2pm).
While I requested this out of my own free will, I'm sure the government can give employers some incentives to help reduce rush hour congestion by avoiding the "everyone must be in at 9am" requirement.
What this document doesn't address is the severity of the vulnerability. If a vendor can get up to 30 days to find a fix for a problem regardless of how severe any potential exploits are, I certainly would not feel comfortable as a sysadmin or customer.
I have to admit. Considering the amount of SHOULD conditions in the document, it is nowhere even close to being a final document. Addressing the severity of the problem is a very important part of the equation. It simply cannot be ignored.
Wow, a whole two paragraphs and a score given with out a real breakdown of how it was determined. I don't know about you, but that lacks any real content to be called a review IMO.
Considering that most print magazines allocate at least a good half page to fully review a game, this is more of a "leaking out that it exists and trying to make it look like a review, but it isn't" snippet that would be put in the "What's New" section.
My guess is that it probably uses a series of mirrors to redirect the light to your eye. Add a couple of well placed lenses and your total focal length is 2 feet.
Therefore, display appears as if it is 2 feet away from you when it actually isn't.
I'm not so worried about the technical side of things, but more along the lines of intended use...
Could someone queue a job to crack a encrypted password file, or a document stolen from the government? I imagine that with 150 million computers using their spare cycles, this job could be done with relative ease. This is definitely an issue that the authors have failed to address in their proposal.
The legal rammifications alone makes this prohibitive. Is a person who's computer did 0.1% of an illegal activity just as liable as someone who did 10%, 25%, 50% or as liable as the person who submitted the job? Can you even fully control what kind of jobs your system is doing using this proposed infrastructure?
It may be a great idea for say X machines inside a large corporation, but there is already some alternatives to fill that need. I just don't see how they can work out the logistics of issues such as the one I present above, when they have to also worry about technical and financial issues that such a system would bring with it.
It was a really fun game and I still play it sometimes. Problem is that it is turn-based, so not all the actions take place simultaneously. It was a good primer for situational economics (supply and demand) under specific conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem with the Space Shuttle is that it is completely useless to launch anything into a geosynchrous orbit, unless said object had a boosting rocket of its own. For inexpensive artifical sattelites, this is not an option.
The Atlas-V is definitely a refinement of previous ELVs (the Saturn V is really only meant for really big payloads) and is a cheaper solution on the price per pound ratio.
If the only input from potential candidates to political office is a "mass e-mailed" request for votes, I'm sorry to say that only demonstrates how much effort said candidate will put in for the people the represent.
While their SPAM may cut their campaigning costs, a candidate who doesn't put enough effort into meeting their voters should never represent them.
I usually don't reply to myself, but here is some information confirming what I had stated.
The word Palladium comes from an ancient Greek legend of a statue that stood in the city of Troy holding a shield and a spear. It was believed to have been hurled from Olympus by the god Zeus at the founding of the city, and it was thought that this statue protected the city. In the tenth year of the Trojan War the Greek heroes Diomedes and Odysseus stole the Palladium, thus facilitating the fall of Troy.
Yep, the statue was stolen, ironically during the Trojan War.
Ooh, the irony. Too bad the Palladium was only made out of wood. :)
If I remember my greek mythology correctly, the Palladium was supposedly used to protect the city of Troy. As long as the statue was there, the city would be safe.
The Palladium was eventually stolen and afterwards the city of Troy fell.
I don't know about you, but isn't it ironic that Microsoft names their next security product in reference to this same Palladium?
Personally, I like this idea a lot better. Not that I like or dislike punk music, but it just seems so right.
First, to any sysadmin who has to deal with these problems, you have my sympathies. As a sysadmin myself and a former employee of a company that developped e-commerce software, e-commerce is a minefield in itself.
I personally don't see the sysadmin to be ethically obligated any more than if a similar theft occured at a brick and mortar establishment. For instance, would the security guard be ethically obligated to inform the store's customers that someone may have stolen credit card purchase slips stored in a safe?
And if we open the ethical debate, we cannot simply ignore the said consequences. What would the credit card holder do? Sue the sysadmin or the company? Become irate? Would he even thank the sysadmin that disclosed the information?
The truth is that in the brick and mortar world, you generally require at least a signature to charge a purchase on your card. When business involved to purchases over the phone or on the Internet, the credit card companies should have brought that philosophy with them.
What is sad is the fact that this does exist. It's called SET (Secure Electronic Transactions) which was being actively developed to handle electronic signatures for electronic credit card purchases.
The big question is why it isn't in place right now. The answer is quite simple. The credit card companies instantly realize that e-commerce transactions equals profit. Force SET down the throats of merchants and credit card holders would cost the credit card companies big.
So the system is insecure simply because the losses in the volume of transactions (which equals profit) would be more than the losses caused by credit card fraud. It is their definition of "risk management" that makes e-commerce transactions insecure.
So, if you as a credit card holder want to question the ethics of the sysadmin, remember these very key points:
Personally, I believe that ethical obligations are proportional to those benefit the most from the stated conditions. And trust me on this one; the sysadmin does not benefit at all from these conditions.
Well, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people already know this, but as far as the quality of patents go, they simply stink.
While I don't remember what date the special was aired (sometime in 2001), NBC (in the United States) aired a special on the USPTO and how patent examiners are given performance pay. The third paragraph in this article supports this fact. While the quality of a patent is not measurable, the quantity of patents approved by examiners is.
Since the USPTO does provide performance pay due to a lack of examiners, they have basically created their own problem. Since everything under the sun is patentable (including restaurants attached to hotels and bra size measurements), the examiners have basically build themselves a self-reinforcing problem that continually encourages them to rubberstamps patents, regardless of what the patent application is for.
I'm not at all surprised at what gets through the USPTO these days. Simply put, the excessive number of patents only serves the examiners and the legal system.
I suppose that will eliminate Kuwait from my travel guide. Who in their right mind wants to visit a country where pr0n is illegal?
"I'll predict a much greater level of Internet usage with these privacy policies in place," Boucher said.
Oh boy, I just can't wait to get a lot more spam messages for herbal Viagra in my mailbox.
And they thought that increased Internet usage would automatically be a good thing...
From the specifications, it is indeed a sulfur-based lamp. The major difference is that it uses RF energy, rather than an electrical charge to excite the sulfur atoms to produce light.
The big advantage is that by using RF energy, they are essentially boosting the efficiency of the bulb. For instance, incandescent bulbs are approximately 2-4% efficient, mercury and sulfur based fluorescent bulbs are about 25-35% efficient. With this new bulb, they are indicating about 70-80% efficiency. These bulbs should also last much longer, as the magnetron device (producing the RF energy) doesn't wear down like electrodes do.
While to ordinary Joe Consumer, this isn't that much of a big thing, imagine for instance the amount of electricity used by a large city just to keep the lamp posts lit. They would achieve the same amount of light on half the electricity bill.
Unfortunately, that would mean that every lamp post (so equipped) would become an instant RF source. It would certainly be far too minuscule to cook you, but definitely enough to cause some interference on wireless RF equipment in that spectrum.
If the past year's viruses were all hype, I have to wonder how serious a virus has to be before they actually claim them as dangerous.
Thanks to SirCam, I personally received two documents from Fortune 500 companies (which were infected) with draft proposals for new products and the markets they were targetted for. I get to know the plans of a big company even before their CEO does.
Thanks to CR/Nimda, I get to see at least 100 probes a day trying to get to my personal web server. On more active days, that number is more like 500. And this is now, over 8 months after the virus was at its peak.
I know of at least a few administrators (that work at various companies) that had to put in about a week to get the "I love you" virus under control. And that virus didn't even have a nasty payload.
Mind you, they could have been much worse. The simple fact is that most of these viruses were born from stupid bugs (which in most cases were simply overlooked) and hence were somewhat easier to fix.
Read between the lines and you'll see that it's nothing more than a cash grab based upon the circumstances surrounding the person's suicide.
It raises one interesting question. If the person in question was diagnosed as having severe psychological conditions, why wasn't his activity being monitored more carefully?
Hypothetically speaking, if a person loves to play with butter knives, should the manufacturer [of said knives] be sued because there was no warning label stating "Sharp object. May kill." on it?
While I can sympathize with the mother, I don't think that she has any just reason for pursuing this issue.
I'd buy the book, if it has a good set of guidelines on how to properly handle the dreaded BWI (Boss With Ideas). Does it have anything covering this issue?
Personally, I've always found it difficult when a boss (with a non-technical background) insists on using his idea even if it will cause the rest of the network, which you invested thousands of hours of your work, to disintegrate itself down to a ugly mess.
There is already a live action version, which you can buy here. I have seen it, and it is horrible.
How bad is it you ask? Just look for the infamous grenade; the one that blows up but keeps on bouncing off the ground after the special effects explosion went off.
ESR appears to be way over the edge on this one. First off he does not appear to know that OEMs already get Windows at deep discounts over the retail price. Microsoft does not have to provide packaging, retail discount, activation or first level support for those customers so the cost is probably more like $35 for XP Home.
Apperances can be deceiving. True, the Microsoft OS can be literally given away with a new PC, but that's because Microsoft makes up the difference easily with applications.
For instance, take Microsoft Office. Add SQL server. Add Exchange Server. These are all packages that you have to shell out big bucks for. Have I even begun to reach the equivalent functionality level of a Linux distro? The answer is no.
But, I know one thing. The pocket book will definitely be far emptier with the so called "Microsoft Tax" (all of the software listed above) compared to Linux.
Couple it with the fact that a lot of businesses go with a complete Microsoft end to end solution, your desktop cost becomes mostly software. Can you guess who the greatest beneficiary is?
It seems that the Microsoft lawyers have learned some lessons from the Microsoft support team...
The more you want a proper solution from Microsoft support, the more time and money you've got to waste...
Before we go to court, can you please give us your credit card number and expiry date?
It wasn't just the domain name. This company was also well known for its spend-thrift parties, social functions, etc. etc. If you didn't know any better, you would think that the company knocked off a bank or two every so often to finance these events.
The product (Netwinder) didn't kill them at all. It was the fact that they lavishly spend money all while believing they could never run out of cash. They also racked up millions in debt, so much so that they were being cutoff as a reseller for other equipment.
Hopefully, the new company won't follow the same path as Rebel.com, because they'll have a much greater chance at being successful.
The article goes to indicate that the golden HTTP protocol can't do everything, and as such, its days are numbered.
True, HTTP can't push a full gamut of services on the web. It wasn't designed to do that. That's is where the HT in HTTP becomes most significant (HyperText).
What is ultimately the problem is the push to get the browser to do everything, including handling your applications (think ASPs) and transactions (e-commerce in particular). This mentality of "the browser must be able to do everything" has become its own monster, relying on a protocol that was really designed to push little more than web pages.
There is very little that browsers can't do these days. However, you can bet that over 99% of all web browser activity uses HTTP (which isn't necessarily a suitable protocol to do everything)...
Now, there is plenty of room for other protocols to come in and enhance the web. However, HTTP still has a large role and shouldn't be called dead prematurely. However, if these new protocols were to remain proprietary, you can bet that they will never be as widely accepted as HTTP (which is not proprietary, btw).
I think that there are a lot people who don't like driving on congested roadways. Trying to marginalize them by hitting their pocketbook is by no means a real solution...
Rush hour is mainly caused by people commuting to work. On an average work day, I spend 30 minutes in my car to commute to work. Public transportation requires 3 hours of my time for the same commute. And I live in a city where we're supposed to have a great public transportation system.
How is this managed, you ask? I leave for work and head back home before the respective "rush hours" start (I work from 6am to 2pm).
While I requested this out of my own free will, I'm sure the government can give employers some incentives to help reduce rush hour congestion by avoiding the "everyone must be in at 9am" requirement.
What this document doesn't address is the severity of the vulnerability. If a vendor can get up to 30 days to find a fix for a problem regardless of how severe any potential exploits are, I certainly would not feel comfortable as a sysadmin or customer.
I have to admit. Considering the amount of SHOULD conditions in the document, it is nowhere even close to being a final document. Addressing the severity of the problem is a very important part of the equation. It simply cannot be ignored.
Wow, a whole two paragraphs and a score given with out a real breakdown of how it was determined. I don't know about you, but that lacks any real content to be called a review IMO.
Considering that most print magazines allocate at least a good half page to fully review a game, this is more of a "leaking out that it exists and trying to make it look like a review, but it isn't" snippet that would be put in the "What's New" section.
My guess is that it probably uses a series of mirrors to redirect the light to your eye. Add a couple of well placed lenses and your total focal length is 2 feet.
Therefore, display appears as if it is 2 feet away from you when it actually isn't.
I'm not so worried about the technical side of things, but more along the lines of intended use...
Could someone queue a job to crack a encrypted password file, or a document stolen from the government? I imagine that with 150 million computers using their spare cycles, this job could be done with relative ease. This is definitely an issue that the authors have failed to address in their proposal.
The legal rammifications alone makes this prohibitive. Is a person who's computer did 0.1% of an illegal activity just as liable as someone who did 10%, 25%, 50% or as liable as the person who submitted the job? Can you even fully control what kind of jobs your system is doing using this proposed infrastructure?
It may be a great idea for say X machines inside a large corporation, but there is already some alternatives to fill that need. I just don't see how they can work out the logistics of issues such as the one I present above, when they have to also worry about technical and financial issues that such a system would bring with it.
It was a really fun game and I still play it sometimes. Problem is that it is turn-based, so not all the actions take place simultaneously. It was a good primer for situational economics (supply and demand) under specific conditions.
IMO, the book I'm hoping to see published would be "Management for Dummies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Managers".
I have heard many horror stories of BWIs (Bosses With Ideas) that couldn't buy a clue. Maybe they'll be able to if the book were released.