From what I understand the mayor difference between Displayport and HDMI is money. If you build a HDMI port, then you must shell out some money for royalties, patents, etc. Displayport is a royalty-free solution. This allows its usage even in low-cost devices.
A second interesting feature is that it is designed to be used also for internal connections between the motherboard/graphics chip of a laptop and the LCD. The internal and external signals look the same. The external port will be identical to the internal port, but with a connector.
I'm amazed that the UK will extradite its citizens to other countries. Most countries will refuse to do this and require a criminal to be tried locally using local law even if the crime has been commited abroad.
There is just now a case tried with quite some publicity where the accused committed a murder with an accomplice in Germany. The German accomplice was already sentenced a couple of months ago and we'll see what the accused will get here compared to across the border.
I very much agree with this way of treating cross border criminals because it somewhat shields travellers from absurd sentences for 'crimes' abroad which are not punishable at home. Something like getting 10 jears of prison because you defend democracy in China.
The problem is that in the music business we have essentially a monopoly market. The contracts signed by artists essentially give all rights forever to one single big company. It is then free to squeeze as much money as possible out of the customers. Many of these contracts pay the artist a (large) fixed sum independent of the success of the products.
In a ideal world the price should be somehow proportional to the effort spent creating and delivering the goods. For physical goods this holds more or less true. For virtual goods this is not much the case.
I'm aware that it is impossible to go to the extreme here, other wise the only buyer of an obscure song would have to cough up the entire cost while the songs at the top of the charts would sell at fractions of cents.
This is just completely wrong and defies common market mechanism. A popular song should be cheaper and a niche song more expensive. That's what happens with all products in a market economy, there are economies of scale in production of goods. These economies of scale are even bigger in with virtual goods like music and software.
If popular songs are sold more expensive this is only to fill the pockets of very few (top stars and top label managers) at the expense of very many (normal artists and small labels).
Actually one of the projects running on the BlueGene at EPFL is to simulate plasma turbulences in magnetical fields. This is part if the international ITER project for the fusion reactor to be built in south France.
Yes the address space is large enough. This is one important point. It allows Walmart to track products individually instead of anonymously (In store 123 we have can 234, 543 and 567 of milk instead of in store 123 we have 3 cans of milk). If you have a product recall or a similar occurrence, this makes finding the items much easier and faster.
The second part is the wireless stuff. This makes scanning stuff easier and faster, you don't have to point a scanner at a barcode any longer. Just having a wireless reader in the vicinity is sufficient.
The main problem is that building a fault-tolerant server is an ardous task. It take a lot of engineering and testing. This slows you down and your product cycles get long. When you bring your new machine to the market it will look old and slow compared to 'standard' competitors. In addition your database will be a specialized, proprietary version which does not work with any tool and the admin staff needs special education to manage and operate it.
Clusters are different. Just take your latest and greatest server and middleware, package it with a version of your clustering glue and voila - instant high availability. All your tools and admin knowledge is applicable because it's built on the same stuff you know already.
In addition, the real test, a real emergency is unlikely to happen anyway. Even if it does happen and your cluster fails to provide the promised availability there is no real problem besides your 1000 users beeing without application for a day. You'll blame the problem on the vendor and your reputation is safe. This is why you bought the cluster in place of a single system anyway.
Microsoft is ripping us off constantly. If I buy Windows for $100 then I pay $20 for the product and $80 into Bills pocket. The profit margin (around 80%) is way too big. Windows is the only part of a PC which increased in price in the last decade.
Microsoft is using unethical bully tactics to get rid of competitiors (Windows 3.1: if DrDOS then crash with obscure error, Internet Explorer is an 'integral part' of the operating system, etc.).
There is map.search.ch with this feature since a long time. In addition map.search.ch feature satellite images of higher resolution, is very intuitive to use, and has many nifty features when hovering over displayed icons (schedules on bus-stops or train stations, temperature reading of public swimming-pools, amount of free lots on parkings).
The Linkify and 'Popup Window Fixer' functions are quite obvious and enough for an average user to see that 'it does something'. The iframe remover does some magic which will mostly break sites instead of adding a convenience.
I'll update my (ignored) bug to change the Iframe remover to default to off to prevent unintended obscure problems.
It looks like this was a partial example of the problem sitting between chair and screen.
The particlar site is using iframes and GreaseMonkey summarily hides those tags in its default configuration. Excluding the site manually brings it back to life.
However, this means GreaseMonkey becomes thus a Geek-only tool. I can not ask of my mother or wife to know about such problems and manually configure exceptions if things don't work.
While I like the features of Greasemonkey lot, I had to uninstall it because it is incompatible with some websites I use often. They jut plain don't work with Greasemonkey enabled.
I've submitted a bug about it, but my submission has been completely ignored (as mozdev.org is slashdotted right now I don't have the reference handy).
Until it's released it's vaporware. Vaporware is something announced, with no real stuff available. Open source Solaris fits this description nicely right now.
If it takes until July to get ready, what was the point announcing it so early ?
The banks *know* their customers are technically inept and *will* be working with infected PC's. By not *requiring* their customers to use a phishing-safe authentication mechanism i'd accuse them of aiding the criminals.
The solution is quite simple: Require more than a simple password.
Since remote access to bank accounts became possible, somewhere in the late eighties, every financial institution did use more than a password for authentification. Either a one time password pad or challenge/response procedure is used. This might have to do with Swiss paranoia, but I think it as an absolute necessity.
Why oh why do US banks think they can get away with a simple, cheap password ?
Blinking lights on bikes should be forbidden. The blinking of bike taillights is as annoying and distrubing as blinking ads on a web page. It disturbs the attention of all other users of the road and should not be permitted.
Imagine in 10 years all tail-lights of all other users of the road to blink to stay visible among the blinkers...
AIX, IBM's Unix, does the same thing with its filesystem. All files are memory mapped and I/O is done by paging in or out.
This is one of the reasons the AIX JFS filesystem was tied tightly to the Power MMU hardware. When AIX was ported to IA64 this required the adoption of the new JFS2 (OS/2 heritage) which is the preferred filesystem on AIX now. This OS/2 derived JFS is the one available in Linux.
Most Swiss cantonal (=state) authorities provide a tax application for free. Just download and fill in. The program is written in Java and works on most platforms, including Windows, Mac and Linux. Printing generates PDF files with a special barcode, the tax office scans that page and does not have to retype the data.
This is very true. For a long time our banks did claim that ATM cards and PIN numbers were absolutely safe and unhackable. This has changed now as criminals mounted very elaborate attacks with magstripe readers and hidden cameras to create duplicate cards with known PIN's.
For the time beeing I still prefer to have a tiny weeny little chance that the scheme is hacked and I'm a choosen victim having to fight my bank than to have a big risk of having my account 0wn3d and having to fight my bank anyway.
The PIN number is no Problem for the inventive criminal. We had ATM's modified with a thin card reader in front of the card slot and a hidden wireless camera over the keyboard. The customers didn't notice the (well done) modifications, plugged in their cards and typed the PIN.
After a couple of hours the equipment was collected and the criminals made fake cards with the same magnetic information. The card, together with the PIN, allows you to withdraw the daily maximum until the account owner notices, which can take weeks. How often do you check your account balance ?.
This is indeed a problem. But the problem is the same if you use strong authentication or not. If there is a sudden transfer of the account contents to a obscure foreign bank the problem, is obvious with or without strong authentication. In addition, if the scheme is cracked there will be plenty of different customers having the same problem when the crackers move to get at the cash.
And here we are just talking about Bank of America, even when using a simple authetication scheme, does not cover their customers when shit happens. Here we are discussing a cheated customer suing his bank because the bank does not want to take responsability for the $90k gone off to Latvia.
I prefer the better safety, even if it is limited, over the completely unsafe userid/password stuff. While I think I'm alert enough not to fall for a phishing attempt, I'm sure my mother and my wife are not.
The UBS calculator is a limitation, you need to have it with you. However, the one-time pads are just perfect, in my wallet I have them with me, even in you thai internet café.
There is a regulation that a banks has to protect its clients data. This beats the patriot act every day. I suppose even with a allegedly unregulated US bank I can not walk up to the counter and ask the teller to hand me your account contents over.
There is no regulation asking for strong authentication, but all of them adopted a scheme to make sure there is good security fro their customers. For the time beeing I've yet to come across a phishing attempt for one of them, it looks like this added security helps to prevent those annoyances too.
Over here in Switzerland all banks use a strong authentication scheme to make sure only the owner of an account can get in. My UBS account has a challenge/response system (needs a special calculator and account-specific chipcard). My two other banks use a one-time pad where the same code is only valid for a single login. When the old pad is almost finished they just send a new one.
Simple passwords are just not safe enough on the internet. Unfortunately in the real world the real joe user is just not able to make absolutely sure that no cheating is going on.
The banks should at least take a part of the blame if they are too lazy to implement something safe.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand the mayor difference between Displayport and HDMI is money. If you build a HDMI port, then you must shell out some money for royalties, patents, etc. Displayport is a royalty-free solution. This allows its usage even in low-cost devices.
A second interesting feature is that it is designed to be used also for internal connections between the motherboard/graphics chip of a laptop and the LCD. The internal and external signals look the same. The external port will be identical to the internal port, but with a connector.
Markus
I'm amazed that the UK will extradite its citizens to other countries. Most countries will refuse to do this and require a criminal to be tried locally using local law even if the crime has been commited abroad.
There is just now a case tried with quite some publicity where the accused committed a murder with an accomplice in Germany. The German accomplice was already sentenced a couple of months ago and we'll see what the accused will get here compared to across the border.
I very much agree with this way of treating cross border criminals because it somewhat shields travellers from absurd sentences for 'crimes' abroad which are not punishable at home. Something like getting 10 jears of prison because you defend democracy in China.
Markus
The problem is that in the music business we have essentially a monopoly market. The contracts signed by artists essentially give all rights forever to one single big company. It is then free to squeeze as much money as possible out of the customers. Many of these contracts pay the artist a (large) fixed sum independent of the success of the products.
In a ideal world the price should be somehow proportional to the effort spent creating and delivering the goods. For physical goods this holds more or less true. For virtual goods this is not much the case.
I'm aware that it is impossible to go to the extreme here, other wise the only buyer of an obscure song would have to cough up the entire cost while the songs at the top of the charts would sell at fractions of cents.
Markus
This is just completely wrong and defies common market mechanism. A popular song should be cheaper and a niche song more expensive. That's what happens with all products in a market economy, there are economies of scale in production of goods. These economies of scale are even bigger in with virtual goods like music and software.
If popular songs are sold more expensive this is only to fill the pockets of very few (top stars and top label managers) at the expense of very many (normal artists and small labels).
Markus
Actually one of the projects running on the BlueGene at EPFL is to simulate plasma turbulences in magnetical fields. This is part if the international ITER project for the fusion reactor to be built in south France.
Markus
Yes the address space is large enough. This is one important point. It allows Walmart to track products individually instead of anonymously (In store 123 we have can 234, 543 and 567 of milk instead of in store 123 we have 3 cans of milk). If you have a product recall or a similar occurrence, this makes finding the items much easier and faster.
The second part is the wireless stuff. This makes scanning stuff easier and faster, you don't have to point a scanner at a barcode any longer. Just having a wireless reader in the vicinity is sufficient.
Markus
The main problem is that building a fault-tolerant server is an ardous task. It take a lot of engineering and testing. This slows you down and your product cycles get long. When you bring your new machine to the market it will look old and slow compared to 'standard' competitors. In addition your database will be a specialized, proprietary version which does not work with any tool and the admin staff needs special education to manage and operate it.
Clusters are different. Just take your latest and greatest server and middleware, package it with a version of your clustering glue and voila - instant high availability. All your tools and admin knowledge is applicable because it's built on the same stuff you know already.
In addition, the real test, a real emergency is unlikely to happen anyway. Even if it does happen and your cluster fails to provide the promised availability there is no real problem besides your 1000 users beeing without application for a day. You'll blame the problem on the vendor and your reputation is safe. This is why you bought the cluster in place of a single system anyway.
Markus
Yes it is wrong to love Microsoft.
Microsoft is ripping us off constantly. If I buy Windows for $100 then I pay $20 for the product and $80 into Bills pocket. The profit margin (around 80%) is way too big. Windows is the only part of a PC which increased in price in the last decade.
Microsoft is using unethical bully tactics to get rid of competitiors (Windows 3.1: if DrDOS then crash with obscure error, Internet Explorer is an 'integral part' of the operating system, etc.).
For me, these are enough reasons to hate em.
Markus
There is map.search.ch with this feature since a long time. In addition map.search.ch feature satellite images of higher resolution, is very intuitive to use, and has many nifty features when hovering over displayed icons (schedules on bus-stops or train stations, temperature reading of public swimming-pools, amount of free lots on parkings).
Markus
The Linkify and 'Popup Window Fixer' functions are quite obvious and enough for an average user to see that 'it does something'. The iframe remover does some magic which will mostly break sites instead of adding a convenience.
I'll update my (ignored) bug to change the Iframe remover to default to off to prevent unintended obscure problems.
Markus
It looks like this was a partial example of the problem sitting between chair and screen.
The particlar site is using iframes and GreaseMonkey summarily hides those tags in its default configuration. Excluding the site manually brings it back to life.
However, this means GreaseMonkey becomes thus a Geek-only tool. I can not ask of my mother or wife to know about such problems and manually configure exceptions if things don't work.
Markus
While I like the features of Greasemonkey lot, I had to uninstall it because it is incompatible with some websites I use often. They jut plain don't work with Greasemonkey enabled.
Example: map.search.ch/etoy (The map does not display at all)
I've submitted a bug about it, but my submission has been completely ignored (as mozdev.org is slashdotted right now I don't have the reference handy).
Markus
Until it's released it's vaporware. Vaporware is something announced, with no real stuff available. Open source Solaris fits this description nicely right now.
If it takes until July to get ready, what was the point announcing it so early ?
Markus
The banks *know* their customers are technically inept and *will* be working with infected PC's. By not *requiring* their customers to use a phishing-safe authentication mechanism i'd accuse them of aiding the criminals.
Markus
The solution is quite simple: Require more than a simple password.
Since remote access to bank accounts became possible, somewhere in the late eighties, every financial institution did use more than a password for authentification. Either a one time password pad or challenge/response procedure is used. This might have to do with Swiss paranoia, but I think it as an absolute necessity.
Why oh why do US banks think they can get away with a simple, cheap password ?
Markus
Blinking lights on bikes should be forbidden. The blinking of bike taillights is as annoying and distrubing as blinking ads on a web page. It disturbs the attention of all other users of the road and should not be permitted.
Imagine in 10 years all tail-lights of all other users of the road to blink to stay visible among the blinkers...
Markus
The Swiss mapping site map.search.ch does have satellite images since a long time.
Here a sample link map.search.ch/etoy of my village. Click more to zoom in !
Markus
AIX, IBM's Unix, does the same thing with its filesystem. All files are memory mapped and I/O is done by paging in or out.
This is one of the reasons the AIX JFS filesystem was tied tightly to the Power MMU hardware. When AIX was ported to IA64 this required the adoption of the new JFS2 (OS/2 heritage) which is the preferred filesystem on AIX now. This OS/2 derived JFS is the one available in Linux.
Markus
Most Swiss cantonal (=state) authorities provide a tax application for free. Just download and fill in. The program is written in Java and works on most platforms, including Windows, Mac and Linux. Printing generates PDF files with a special barcode, the tax office scans that page and does not have to retype the data.
It's not open source, but supported freeware.
For my canton you can get it here
Markus
There is no brand name anywhere on the calculator thingy and it does not look like the Vasco devices. I don't know.
Markus
This is very true. For a long time our banks did claim that ATM cards and PIN numbers were absolutely safe and unhackable. This has changed now as criminals mounted very elaborate attacks with magstripe readers and hidden cameras to create duplicate cards with known PIN's.
For the time beeing I still prefer to have a tiny weeny little chance that the scheme is hacked and I'm a choosen victim having to fight my bank than to have a big risk of having my account 0wn3d and having to fight my bank anyway.
Markus
The PIN number is no Problem for the inventive criminal. We had ATM's modified with a thin card reader in front of the card slot and a hidden wireless camera over the keyboard. The customers didn't notice the (well done) modifications, plugged in their cards and typed the PIN.
After a couple of hours the equipment was collected and the criminals made fake cards with the same magnetic information. The card, together with the PIN, allows you to withdraw the daily maximum until the account owner notices, which can take weeks. How often do you check your account balance ?.
Here an illustrated example
Markus
This is indeed a problem. But the problem is the same if you use strong authentication or not. If there is a sudden transfer of the account contents to a obscure foreign bank the problem, is obvious with or without strong authentication. In addition, if the scheme is cracked there will be plenty of different customers having the same problem when the crackers move to get at the cash.
And here we are just talking about Bank of America, even when using a simple authetication scheme, does not cover their customers when shit happens. Here we are discussing a cheated customer suing his bank because the bank does not want to take responsability for the $90k gone off to Latvia.
I prefer the better safety, even if it is limited, over the completely unsafe userid/password stuff. While I think I'm alert enough not to fall for a phishing attempt, I'm sure my mother and my wife are not.
Markus
The UBS calculator is a limitation, you need to have it with you. However, the one-time pads are just perfect, in my wallet I have them with me, even in you thai internet café.
There is a regulation that a banks has to protect its clients data. This beats the patriot act every day. I suppose even with a allegedly unregulated US bank I can not walk up to the counter and ask the teller to hand me your account contents over.
There is no regulation asking for strong authentication, but all of them adopted a scheme to make sure there is good security fro their customers. For the time beeing I've yet to come across a phishing attempt for one of them, it looks like this added security helps to prevent those annoyances too.
Markus
Over here in Switzerland all banks use a strong authentication scheme to make sure only the owner of an account can get in. My UBS account has a challenge/response system (needs a special calculator and account-specific chipcard). My two other banks use a one-time pad where the same code is only valid for a single login. When the old pad is almost finished they just send a new one.
Simple passwords are just not safe enough on the internet. Unfortunately in the real world the real joe user is just not able to make absolutely sure that no cheating is going on.
The banks should at least take a part of the blame if they are too lazy to implement something safe.
Markus