A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.
Bruce Schneier explained this very well in a recent article...or maybe it was in "Beyond Fear". Probably both. At any rate, his general thinking goes like this: terrorist detection methods are only particularly useful if they generate a low number of false positives and a low number of false negatives.
Paragraphs 5, 6, 7, and 8 are the most relevant. So basically, the NSA has built a system that is absolutely unable to do the job that it was designed for (or at least for the job that they are claiming it is designed for). There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA, and no doubt they have arrived at this conclusion on their own. So why are they building this surveillance network then, if they know that it will not work? Since there's no way that they could follow up on all of the leads such a system would generate, there must be some other use for it.
You can't use the system to find the needle in the random, anonymized haystack. But if you have an suspected terrorist, then you have an idea where to start looking. If the CIA or FBI has identified Mohammed Smith as a terrorist, they could use this system to analyze his calling patterns and associations to find other potential terrorists, and analyze those numbers to find other terrorists, etc. By this method they could potentially identify, thwart, and capture the terrorsts threatening the country. Of course, they don't actually need this secret domestic spying system to do this though. If they have identified a suspect then they can get a warrant from a court, or file a FISA letter with the FISA court to get the same information.
There are already appropriate and effective legal channels to obtain the information that this system provides. So why the alternate system? The only answer that remains is that it would be used for purposes outside the scope of the law. An effective use would be to see who has been calling journalists and blowing the whistle on illegeal wiretapping programs. Hmm...
They're actually pretty lucky. The article says that they were trapped for 45 minutes, but the pictures looks like they were trapped in the night/evening time. Had they been trapped in the glass elevantor at the top of the lift (street level) during a 90 degree day in NYC, they could have fried. Maybe not literally, but my car gets over 120 degrees on a hot day in 15 minutes, how much less time would it take a contraption made entirely of glass?
Step 1: Analyze your network traffic and determine if more bandwidth is really necessary. I am an engineer for a company of 300 users, and we get by just fine on a pair of T1 circuits. If you're having bandwidth problems there is a fair chance that someone is hogging all of the bandwidth. Once you filter out the guys streaming audio, video, and using P2P clients (either restrict them to a trickle with QoS or block it completely) I suspect that you will have a lot more bandwidth than you need.
Now, if you still find that you need more bandwidth, the easiest solution is to purchase a nice router that can handle routing and load balancing over multiple connections. Forget about a cheap LinkSys or NetGear DSL router, get yourself a serious router like the Cisco Integrated Services Routers. For under $3000 you can get one that has expansion slots for up to 4 WICs, and it can handle T1/E1, DSL, voice, etc.
I would also recommend that you talk to data providers in your area, as they are the people who build and sell these solutions every day. Don't just talk to the telco, talk to other providers as well. Where I work we get our T1 lines from AT&T, but there are several other providers that we could get them from, and the prices do vary some. There is also at least one provider that offers a wireless RF solution for Internet access that works as a line-of-sight basis. In this case you would essentially mount an antenna on your building, point it at their tower, and then hook it into your network. They were offerring speeds significantly faster than T1 but slower than T3 for very competitive prices, and they also offerred bandwidth on demand services (i.e., your usual allotted bandwidth was 10 Mbps, but they had excess capacity to handle spikes in traffic up to 15 Mbps or whatever).
Honestly, if you have to ask Slashdot how to scale your company's Internet bandwidth, odds are you're working for a pretty small company (because if you're working for a much larger company you would seem to be fairly incompetent for a network engineer). Most small companies wouldn't normally need more bandwidth than can be provided over a couple of T1 connections.
Personally, I will be buying Episode one due to exchange rates, and a love of the Half Life series. Let me explain, the game costs $20, with 10% off special offer means 4-6 hours of game play, which I'll likely replay for:
I agree, the price is key. I will probably pre-order the first episode of theHalf-Life 2 episodes and pay $17.95 (though I'd rather pay $15), but I can't really justify $20 for such a short game. Sure, I've spent way more than $20 for 5-7 hours of entertainment before (theme parks, sporting events, etc), but I think that for the gaming market it's just too high.
I can understand that if they want to put the box in stores then there must be a certain minimum price point to meet, but since Steam is required for the game I see no reason to bother with the stores to begin with. Or if they must, sell the box for $20 in stores and let us purchase it for $15 over Steam. I suspect that they would still make more money off of a $15 Steam download than they would from a $20 retail box.
Skype kan be used as an IM client, MSN Messenger is an IM client..... That's the only I can think of.
True, but that is a pretty big stretch if you ask me. MSN messenger is a free text-based chat system. Skype is a subscription-based VOIP telephony system. Sure, you can voice and video chat over some IM clients (don't know if MSN allows this or not), but can you dial up somebody's phone?
With MS already in trouble over abuse of market share, I can't see any anti-monopoly commission approving a buyout of this size.
I just woke up, so I may be missing something bleedingly obvious, but I don't see what sort of anti-trust issues exist here. Microsoft is the worlds biggest software company, and one of the webs top 5 or so search companies. Ebay is the worlds biggest auction house (online or otherwise), and owns one of the world's biggest VOIP services (Skype) and online payment systems (Paypal). I just don't see the overlap.
I do, however, see lots of interesting business opportunities there for Microsoft.
But with only one stick you couldn't profit of the dual channel memory controller. This sucks.
It doesn't suck. Any other hardware review site would have had another DDR2 stick to put in, or would have at least gone out and bought one. The reviewer sucks.
With Linux, if a virus were known well enough to detect it, the fix would be applied to the kernel or related application. The only point of having a 'virus scan' against known patterns is to catch the ones that the OS or application vendor doesn't bother to fix.
You make the mistake of equating a virus with an exploit of a security hole. They are usually two different things. But assuming that they were the same thing, and assuming that the kernel or application is patched as soon as possible, there is no guarantee that everybody can (or would) update the application or kernel (or at least do so immediately).
I use a combination of tools to lock down my registry, find and destroy adware, monitor mail and new files as needed.
If AVG or any of the packages listed have a good real-time scanner great, more power to ya. I don't see real time scanning as the most important feature in desktop security.
Great. Now if we could only convince the other 99.99999999% of computer users that your method is the best way to do things, then we'd be in great shape. Maybe. But probably not.
In the meantime, we're going to need antivirus software with a real-time scanner.
But I'm also going to make an obligatory dig at windows. Consider downloading some software that means you wont have to run anti-virus software.
Every computer needs antivirus software, period. Sure, Linux hasn't been the target that Windows has because it has been a niche product. The same used to be true of Macs, but now we are beginning to see viruses for OSX. And since OSX is so close to Linux, one has to wonder how long it will be before we start seeing Linux viruses. If you truly think that you are immune from viruses simply because of the OS you run, then you are deluding yourself.
BitDefender 8 free edition, lacks real time scanner but has scheduler, auto updates and so on.
How can you possibly recommend an anti-virus program - free or otherwise - that doesn't do real-time scanning? Especially when the OP specifically stated that they were excluding products that don't do real-time scans? The whole point of anti-virus software is to prevent a virus from damaging your system. To be effective it has to catch the virus before it installs. If you catch it via a scheduled scan later that day, it could have already delivered it's payload and done the damage.
Does anyone else suspect that AT&T may be receiving special treatment for getting in bed with the fed? The anti-molopy police seem to have been looking the other way as AT&T snatched up BellSouth (the rest of Cingular with it) and SBC.
I'm pretty sure that it is actually SBC that has been doing the acquiring. They just decided that when they bought AT&T that AT&T had a better name and decided to use it.
The mechanism for rewarding outstanding performance exists: it's called promotion.
Every union job that I have ever been in did not use promotions to reward outstanding performance. If there was a position open it had to be posted. If you were interested you had to apply/sign up for the promotion. If you had the most seniority of the people who had applied then you got the job. If you didn't have the most seniority, you didn't get it. The only thing that the union jobs rewarded was seniority. With it you got better pay, better benefits, and better opportunities to get better positions with more pay and benefits.
Bullshit. The American Medical Association, the American Bar Association are unions. Professionals now form "associations" which they pay membership fees do just like unions.
The purpose of a union isn't "just" to level the playing field. It's also to lobby for your members. AMA gets legislation passed, hell they write legislation and demand that politicians vote for it.
Those aren't unions. They are trade organizations. They're actually closer to being guilds than they are unions. But they don't set wages. They don't do collective bargaining. They don't regulate employment terms between their members and those members' employers (especially since many of those members are either self-employed or business partners in the practice to begin with). And they don't threaten employers with strikes if they don't get their way. Calling them unions only displays a massive lack of knowledge about the subject at hand, and I am speaking as a former union member.
Reading in the TDI Club I was surprised to read that Ethanol provides worst MPG than pure gasoline.
Does anyone have information on this topic?
Because if Ethanol provides worst milleage, and it is not energy-efficient to prodce Ethanol... this might be just a marketing campaign, not a fuel product.
It depends on how you look at it. It is a fact that ethanol generates less power per unit than gasoline. Based from this, 10 gallons of gasoline will get you further in a flex fuel vehicle than would 10 gallons of ethanol. I have read somewhere than 1 gallon of gasoline has the energy of roughly 1.5 gallons of ethanol. However, ethanol is also considerably cheaper at the pump than gasoline (at least in countries like Brazil with strong ethanol industries) and even after accounting for the lower fuel economy it is still a net cost savings over gasoline.
There is also tremendous benefit in being less dependent on importing oil from countries that want to destroy America. Firstly, we're not giving money to people who want to blow us up. Secondly, we're not putting our economy in the hands of a country full of people who want to blow us up. Of course, there is also the added benefit of redirecting all of those US oil dollars to the American heartland instead of sending them overseas.
Finally, there is a great deal of debate about the efficiency of ethanol production. Some studies show that for typical corn-based ethanol you get 1.3 units of energy out for every 1.0 unit you put in. That's not terribly efficient. Other studies say you get.8 units out for every 1.0 unit you put in. That's even worse. However, there are several other useful products that are generated from the process of turning corn into ethanol (animal feeds, etc) that may increase the value, if not the efficiency, of the process. Then there is the ability to produce ethanol from other products besides corn, which have a much much higher energy yield ratio than 1.3:1. Brazil uses sugar cane, but you can also use waste from paper mills or even prarie grass.
If you're really interested, posting on Slashdot isn't the best way to find out. Try Googling ethanol and cellulose.
If the sugary sugarcane is more efficient than using corn, why not try to convert sugarbeets into ethanol? Granted I don't know all the complexities of generating ethanol from biomass products, but just following the seeming link between high sugar content of the cane and applying it to our beets.
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think that the higher yield has less to do with the sugary content of the cane and more to do with the cellulose content of the stalks. That's why they're talking about making cellulose deriveed ethanol from the waste products of paper mills (no sugar there) or orange juice plants (from the leftover peels and skin of the fruit).
The thing is, this is what consumers should demand. This isn't something the governments of states or the Federal government of the United States has ANY business in.
Absolute nonsense. While I'm all for consumers demanding this, it is also absolutely the business of the Federal government. Or have you not heard fo a little thing called "sational necurity"? Here, let me use it in a sentence:
"The economy of the United States has become nearly inextricably tied to the import of foreign oil from countries in the middle east, many of which are hostile to the United States."
All it would take is one major middle-eastern oil producing country to stop selling oil for a few months and the economy of the United States would melt down almost overnight. A prime example is Saudi Arabia. They are one of the worlds largest oil producers and sit on top of one of the world's largest oil reserves. They are ruled by a royal family who spends most of their time walking the delicate line between appeasing the Islamic conservative movements (who believe that the US and Israel should be destroyed) and eliminating the more radical elements of those conservative movements (who are actually trying to do the destroying, and wouldn't mind eliminating the Saudi royal family either). A coup in Saudi Arabia isn't all that far-fetched of a notion, and it would be absolutely devastating to the US both politically and economically.
Now whether or not that coup happens (or some other devastating event) is up for debate. But the potential downside is far too large to ignore, which is why from a national security standpoint it is imperative that the United States government move as quickly as possible to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Right now one of the best options for a petroleum replacement (at least as an energy source) is ethanol, and it absolutely is the government's job to encourage developement and use of ethanol and other alternative energy sources.
No kidding? I remember seeing an episode of the Jetsons 30-40 years ago and everyone had flying cars. Sometimes manufacturing reality doesn't live up to engineering dreams.
OK...I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. The article that I read in Wired so long ago was about people who were actually building electric cars that were specifically faster than street cars and specifically used in drag racing. Then I posted a link to the electric drag racing organization in question. The point of my post was that this "news" article isn't news at all, by any standard. They've been building electric cars that were faster than production gasoline cars for at least a decade.
What that has to do with your idiotic and irrelevant Jetson's comment is beyond me.
You don't understand, there WILL be another flu epidemic, whether it is H5N1 or another strain. If we do not prepare then we will lose about 5%-20% of the population, so putting the efforts of a millionth of one percent of the world population to stopping it seems like pretty damn cheap insurance. Now should there be all the media hype, not sure but if the population isn't aware then there is little chance of an effective widespread action being manageable.
No, I understand that perfectly. What I don't understand is why we're focusing all of our efforts on bird flu, when there are plenty of other bugs out there that have as much potential. The problem I have with it is that people have made the jump from "it is 100% certain that there will eventually be another flu epidemic/pandemic" to "it's going to be bird flu, it's going to kill 10% of the world's population, and it's coming any minute now." Here's a news flash for you: every year there is a worldwide flu epidemic. Every year. Sometimes it's mild, sometimes it's more severe. But it happens every year.
Also, I don't believe that a bird flu epidemic is going to take out 5-10% of our population. In the brifings this week the US government was talking about potentially 2 million deaths in the US being caused by bird flu, and while that's a lot that's far less than 5% of our population.
Is anyone here old enough to remember the swine flu "epidemic" of 1976? It also turned out to be all hype, though the vaccinations killed more people than the flu did.
Any engineer worth his salt can tell you that electric motors put out a hell of a lot more torque than gasoline engines. Gasoline engines are restricted by the tolerances of their mechanical parts, even if the engine is capable of producing more horsepower under load. That's why raw horsepower figures are often a poor indicator of a vehicle's acceleration.
No kidding. I recall 8-10 years ago reading an issue of Wired where they talked about electric powered cars that can produce more torgue than gasoline powered cars. Then they pointed out that people have been racing electric powered cards for years.
Just check out NEDRA if you have any doubts. It must have been a slow news day at CNN.
Sooner or later there WILL be another flu with the ability to kill millions. The only way we have of preventing another 1919 is to spot the threat before it gets going and prepare a vaccine. Hence the worry over H5N1. It's entirely possible that it will all blow over. It's also possible that it will mutate to a form that can spread from one human to another, and become pandemic. If it doesn't, well, great. If it does, we'll be glad we prepared.
Maybe it's flu, maybe it's something else. If we spent so much hype, time, energy, and effort preparing for every possible bug that could become an epidemic or pandemic, we would never get anything done. Personally, I am far more concerned about the epidemics that we know about (HIV for example) than I am about bird flu. I think that the main reason that bird flu (which has only infected a couple dozen people and killed even fewer) gets so much press is two fold:
1. The majority of the media-embracing public understands the concepts of birds and flu.
2. The Bush administration is zero for two on preventing, mitigating, or responding to major US disasters (9/11 and Katrina) and they're desperate to look like they're doing something to prepare for future disasters.
That may address computer programming specifically, but I believe that his post was in response to someone claiming that "If you are salaried, you are not entitled to overtime, period." In that context it is still valid, as there are many many possible salaried jobs out there that are not exempt from overtime by the Department of Labor.
Furthermore, most states have additional employment laws that may be even more strict than the federal laws, and those laws may further limit who can be considered an "exempt" employee.
If it were as simple as "you are salaried and therefore exempt from overtime" then people wouldn't be filing lawsuits and winning overtime pay.
What do we do? I'm getting just what they said -- about 50 emails since they started last night. I can't even get to bluesecurity.com to unsubscribe if I wanted to. I can handle 50 or so I suppose and want to continue to support BS (hmmm...) but what would you do?
Step one, get over it. "Oh my god, I'm getting 50 spam emails a day now! What should I do?!?!?!" Delete them, duh! Most of us have to contend with hundreds or thousands of spam messages a day. 50 is chump change.
Step two, get a good anti-spam solution that plugs into your mailserver or email client, preferably one with Bayesian or similar filtering capability. Those tend to work well.
Step three, realize that whether or not you subscribe to BlufeFrog is meaningless. The spammers have your email address now. Of course, they had it before too, or else you wouldn't have needed BlueFrog. So what's the difference?
Step four, realize that there is no story here. "Scumbag spammers continue to act like scumbags and continue spamming!" You might as well say that the sun rises every morning.
I have a PC with a ATi 9800 Pro in it which I use for gaming. I've had this since 2003 and it still plays a mean game of Battlefield 2 when I feel like it. If it runs a bit slow then I plonk the resolution down. This is by far the best way to get your game to run faster. Anyway, bottom line is - it runs whatever current game I'd care to buy for it.
I once paid $300 for a video card. It was a 9700 Pro, right after they first came out, and it last me about 4 years. I eventually upgraded my system from a 1600+ to a 3000+, but kept the video card. It had no problems keeping up, even through the release of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. I got a lot of life out of that card.
Now I've thought about upgrading, but two things have hampered me. The first is strictly technical - I have an AGP machine, so there's not a huge amount of difference over a 9800 Pro whatever I plug in there because it'll always be limited by the bus speed.
It's not really a factor of bus speeds, as most PCI-e cards don't come anywhere close to saturating the PCI-e x16 bus. That's why when SLI on PCI-e first came out (not to be confused with the original SLI back in the 3Dfx days) your pair of x16 cards in x16 slots reverted to x8 rates. I can't speak for what's on the ATI side of the fence, but there was a very noticeable improvement going from a 9700 Pro AGP to a 6800GS AGP (almost double the frame rates in some games).
The second is probably more of a personal thing - I've got mates who have the latest and greatest GFX cards in their machines, but I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between their games and mine. Sure, it's a slightly higher res, but are there any bonus features like fog or smoke? No. Better anti-aliasing? No. I spent my hard-earned cash on a Dell 20" widescreen monitor and I can assure you that as far as gaming experiences go, this added to mine much more than a new GFX card would.
Yes, actually there are newer features. SM 3.0 mainly (and along with it HDR), but a lot of those effects make a very noticeable "eye candy" difference to the games. And of course you can always crank up the resolution, turn on higher detail levels, or start using AA and AF features for an even better picure. Granted, the 20" widescreen probably isn't a bad investment either.
I use and recommend XWall for Exchange by DataEnter. Go to www.dataenter.at and check it out. There is a 30-day eval that you can download, and it is extremely cheap (something like $250 per server). It is basically a gateway product, so you only install it on your SMTP gateways. My company with 3 Exchange servers only has it installed on the single SMTP gateway server, so we only needed one license.
XWall does pretty much everything that you could want. It supports greylisting, blacklisting, whitelisting, multiple SLS and blackhole services, and you can make exceptions or additions to just about any filtering criteria. It also has plug-ins for anti-virus capability. It has a large number of heuristic detection settings that you can enable/disable individually, and it even supports bayesian filtering. It also lets you flag, forward to an admin, bounce, or blackhole suspicious email as needed. It's really about the most feature-complete spam filter I've ever seen, and since it runs on the gateway it doesn't slow down client-side operations like many other products do.
At my company we installed it, turned on greylisting, turned on a couple of the heuristic options (failing RDNS lookups, having an internal address in the FROM: field on a message from an external source, etc), and set it to query two RBLs and our spam problem was literally gone overnight. It's actually very easy to set up, and the documentation and support are excellent.
My boss was a little leery of buying something via credit card from Austria (we're in the states), but I had used it at my previous employer's (for a Fortune 50 company with over 100 Exchange servers and 60,000 users), and had no problems at all. It's worth it's weight in gold.
Slashdot Mirror
A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.
Bruce Schneier explained this very well in a recent article...or maybe it was in "Beyond Fear". Probably both. At any rate, his general thinking goes like this: terrorist detection methods are only particularly useful if they generate a low number of false positives and a low number of false negatives.
Hey, I found the article: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70357-1.html
Paragraphs 5, 6, 7, and 8 are the most relevant. So basically, the NSA has built a system that is absolutely unable to do the job that it was designed for (or at least for the job that they are claiming it is designed for). There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA, and no doubt they have arrived at this conclusion on their own. So why are they building this surveillance network then, if they know that it will not work? Since there's no way that they could follow up on all of the leads such a system would generate, there must be some other use for it.
You can't use the system to find the needle in the random, anonymized haystack. But if you have an suspected terrorist, then you have an idea where to start looking. If the CIA or FBI has identified Mohammed Smith as a terrorist, they could use this system to analyze his calling patterns and associations to find other potential terrorists, and analyze those numbers to find other terrorists, etc. By this method they could potentially identify, thwart, and capture the terrorsts threatening the country. Of course, they don't actually need this secret domestic spying system to do this though. If they have identified a suspect then they can get a warrant from a court, or file a FISA letter with the FISA court to get the same information.
There are already appropriate and effective legal channels to obtain the information that this system provides. So why the alternate system? The only answer that remains is that it would be used for purposes outside the scope of the law. An effective use would be to see who has been calling journalists and blowing the whistle on illegeal wiretapping programs. Hmm...
They're actually pretty lucky. The article says that they were trapped for 45 minutes, but the pictures looks like they were trapped in the night/evening time. Had they been trapped in the glass elevantor at the top of the lift (street level) during a 90 degree day in NYC, they could have fried. Maybe not literally, but my car gets over 120 degrees on a hot day in 15 minutes, how much less time would it take a contraption made entirely of glass?
Step 1: Analyze your network traffic and determine if more bandwidth is really necessary. I am an engineer for a company of 300 users, and we get by just fine on a pair of T1 circuits. If you're having bandwidth problems there is a fair chance that someone is hogging all of the bandwidth. Once you filter out the guys streaming audio, video, and using P2P clients (either restrict them to a trickle with QoS or block it completely) I suspect that you will have a lot more bandwidth than you need.
Now, if you still find that you need more bandwidth, the easiest solution is to purchase a nice router that can handle routing and load balancing over multiple connections. Forget about a cheap LinkSys or NetGear DSL router, get yourself a serious router like the Cisco Integrated Services Routers. For under $3000 you can get one that has expansion slots for up to 4 WICs, and it can handle T1/E1, DSL, voice, etc.
I would also recommend that you talk to data providers in your area, as they are the people who build and sell these solutions every day. Don't just talk to the telco, talk to other providers as well. Where I work we get our T1 lines from AT&T, but there are several other providers that we could get them from, and the prices do vary some. There is also at least one provider that offers a wireless RF solution for Internet access that works as a line-of-sight basis. In this case you would essentially mount an antenna on your building, point it at their tower, and then hook it into your network. They were offerring speeds significantly faster than T1 but slower than T3 for very competitive prices, and they also offerred bandwidth on demand services (i.e., your usual allotted bandwidth was 10 Mbps, but they had excess capacity to handle spikes in traffic up to 15 Mbps or whatever).
Honestly, if you have to ask Slashdot how to scale your company's Internet bandwidth, odds are you're working for a pretty small company (because if you're working for a much larger company you would seem to be fairly incompetent for a network engineer). Most small companies wouldn't normally need more bandwidth than can be provided over a couple of T1 connections.
Personally, I will be buying Episode one due to exchange rates, and a love of the Half Life series. Let me explain, the game costs $20, with 10% off special offer means 4-6 hours of game play, which I'll likely replay for:
I agree, the price is key. I will probably pre-order the first episode of theHalf-Life 2 episodes and pay $17.95 (though I'd rather pay $15), but I can't really justify $20 for such a short game. Sure, I've spent way more than $20 for 5-7 hours of entertainment before (theme parks, sporting events, etc), but I think that for the gaming market it's just too high.
I can understand that if they want to put the box in stores then there must be a certain minimum price point to meet, but since Steam is required for the game I see no reason to bother with the stores to begin with. Or if they must, sell the box for $20 in stores and let us purchase it for $15 over Steam. I suspect that they would still make more money off of a $15 Steam download than they would from a $20 retail box.
Skype kan be used as an IM client, MSN Messenger is an IM client..... That's the only I can think of.
True, but that is a pretty big stretch if you ask me. MSN messenger is a free text-based chat system. Skype is a subscription-based VOIP telephony system. Sure, you can voice and video chat over some IM clients (don't know if MSN allows this or not), but can you dial up somebody's phone?
With MS already in trouble over abuse of market share, I can't see any anti-monopoly commission approving a buyout of this size.
I just woke up, so I may be missing something bleedingly obvious, but I don't see what sort of anti-trust issues exist here. Microsoft is the worlds biggest software company, and one of the webs top 5 or so search companies. Ebay is the worlds biggest auction house (online or otherwise), and owns one of the world's biggest VOIP services (Skype) and online payment systems (Paypal). I just don't see the overlap.
I do, however, see lots of interesting business opportunities there for Microsoft.
But with only one stick you couldn't profit of the dual channel memory controller. This sucks.
It doesn't suck. Any other hardware review site would have had another DDR2 stick to put in, or would have at least gone out and bought one. The reviewer sucks.
With Linux, if a virus were known well enough to detect it, the fix would be applied to the kernel or related application. The only point of having a 'virus scan' against known patterns is to catch the ones that the OS or application vendor doesn't bother to fix.
You make the mistake of equating a virus with an exploit of a security hole. They are usually two different things. But assuming that they were the same thing, and assuming that the kernel or application is patched as soon as possible, there is no guarantee that everybody can (or would) update the application or kernel (or at least do so immediately).
I use a combination of tools to lock down my registry, find and destroy adware, monitor mail and new files as needed.
If AVG or any of the packages listed have a good real-time scanner great, more power to ya. I don't see real time scanning as the most important feature in desktop security.
Great. Now if we could only convince the other 99.99999999% of computer users that your method is the best way to do things, then we'd be in great shape. Maybe. But probably not.
In the meantime, we're going to need antivirus software with a real-time scanner.
But I'm also going to make an obligatory dig at windows. Consider downloading some software that means you wont have to run anti-virus software.
Every computer needs antivirus software, period. Sure, Linux hasn't been the target that Windows has because it has been a niche product. The same used to be true of Macs, but now we are beginning to see viruses for OSX. And since OSX is so close to Linux, one has to wonder how long it will be before we start seeing Linux viruses. If you truly think that you are immune from viruses simply because of the OS you run, then you are deluding yourself.
BitDefender 8 free edition, lacks real time scanner but has scheduler, auto updates and so on.
How can you possibly recommend an anti-virus program - free or otherwise - that doesn't do real-time scanning? Especially when the OP specifically stated that they were excluding products that don't do real-time scans? The whole point of anti-virus software is to prevent a virus from damaging your system. To be effective it has to catch the virus before it installs. If you catch it via a scheduled scan later that day, it could have already delivered it's payload and done the damage.
Does anyone else suspect that AT&T may be receiving special treatment for getting in bed with the fed? The anti-molopy police seem to have been looking the other way as AT&T snatched up BellSouth (the rest of Cingular with it) and SBC.
I'm pretty sure that it is actually SBC that has been doing the acquiring. They just decided that when they bought AT&T that AT&T had a better name and decided to use it.
The mechanism for rewarding outstanding performance exists: it's called promotion.
Every union job that I have ever been in did not use promotions to reward outstanding performance. If there was a position open it had to be posted. If you were interested you had to apply/sign up for the promotion. If you had the most seniority of the people who had applied then you got the job. If you didn't have the most seniority, you didn't get it. The only thing that the union jobs rewarded was seniority. With it you got better pay, better benefits, and better opportunities to get better positions with more pay and benefits.
Bullshit. The American Medical Association, the American Bar Association are unions. Professionals now form "associations" which they pay membership fees do just like unions.
The purpose of a union isn't "just" to level the playing field. It's also to lobby for your members. AMA gets legislation passed, hell they write legislation and demand that politicians vote for it.
Those aren't unions. They are trade organizations. They're actually closer to being guilds than they are unions. But they don't set wages. They don't do collective bargaining. They don't regulate employment terms between their members and those members' employers (especially since many of those members are either self-employed or business partners in the practice to begin with). And they don't threaten employers with strikes if they don't get their way. Calling them unions only displays a massive lack of knowledge about the subject at hand, and I am speaking as a former union member.
Reading in the TDI Club I was surprised to read that Ethanol provides worst MPG than pure gasoline. Does anyone have information on this topic? Because if Ethanol provides worst milleage, and it is not energy-efficient to prodce Ethanol... this might be just a marketing campaign, not a fuel product.
.8 units out for every 1.0 unit you put in. That's even worse. However, there are several other useful products that are generated from the process of turning corn into ethanol (animal feeds, etc) that may increase the value, if not the efficiency, of the process. Then there is the ability to produce ethanol from other products besides corn, which have a much much higher energy yield ratio than 1.3:1. Brazil uses sugar cane, but you can also use waste from paper mills or even prarie grass.
It depends on how you look at it. It is a fact that ethanol generates less power per unit than gasoline. Based from this, 10 gallons of gasoline will get you further in a flex fuel vehicle than would 10 gallons of ethanol. I have read somewhere than 1 gallon of gasoline has the energy of roughly 1.5 gallons of ethanol. However, ethanol is also considerably cheaper at the pump than gasoline (at least in countries like Brazil with strong ethanol industries) and even after accounting for the lower fuel economy it is still a net cost savings over gasoline.
There is also tremendous benefit in being less dependent on importing oil from countries that want to destroy America. Firstly, we're not giving money to people who want to blow us up. Secondly, we're not putting our economy in the hands of a country full of people who want to blow us up. Of course, there is also the added benefit of redirecting all of those US oil dollars to the American heartland instead of sending them overseas.
Finally, there is a great deal of debate about the efficiency of ethanol production. Some studies show that for typical corn-based ethanol you get 1.3 units of energy out for every 1.0 unit you put in. That's not terribly efficient. Other studies say you get
If you're really interested, posting on Slashdot isn't the best way to find out. Try Googling ethanol and cellulose.
If the sugary sugarcane is more efficient than using corn, why not try to convert sugarbeets into ethanol? Granted I don't know all the complexities of generating ethanol from biomass products, but just following the seeming link between high sugar content of the cane and applying it to our beets.
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think that the higher yield has less to do with the sugary content of the cane and more to do with the cellulose content of the stalks. That's why they're talking about making cellulose deriveed ethanol from the waste products of paper mills (no sugar there) or orange juice plants (from the leftover peels and skin of the fruit).
The thing is, this is what consumers should demand. This isn't something the governments of states or the Federal government of the United States has ANY business in.
Absolute nonsense. While I'm all for consumers demanding this, it is also absolutely the business of the Federal government. Or have you not heard fo a little thing called "sational necurity"? Here, let me use it in a sentence:
"The economy of the United States has become nearly inextricably tied to the import of foreign oil from countries in the middle east, many of which are hostile to the United States."
All it would take is one major middle-eastern oil producing country to stop selling oil for a few months and the economy of the United States would melt down almost overnight. A prime example is Saudi Arabia. They are one of the worlds largest oil producers and sit on top of one of the world's largest oil reserves. They are ruled by a royal family who spends most of their time walking the delicate line between appeasing the Islamic conservative movements (who believe that the US and Israel should be destroyed) and eliminating the more radical elements of those conservative movements (who are actually trying to do the destroying, and wouldn't mind eliminating the Saudi royal family either). A coup in Saudi Arabia isn't all that far-fetched of a notion, and it would be absolutely devastating to the US both politically and economically.
Now whether or not that coup happens (or some other devastating event) is up for debate. But the potential downside is far too large to ignore, which is why from a national security standpoint it is imperative that the United States government move as quickly as possible to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Right now one of the best options for a petroleum replacement (at least as an energy source) is ethanol, and it absolutely is the government's job to encourage developement and use of ethanol and other alternative energy sources.
No kidding? I remember seeing an episode of the Jetsons 30-40 years ago and everyone had flying cars. Sometimes manufacturing reality doesn't live up to engineering dreams.
OK...I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. The article that I read in Wired so long ago was about people who were actually building electric cars that were specifically faster than street cars and specifically used in drag racing. Then I posted a link to the electric drag racing organization in question. The point of my post was that this "news" article isn't news at all, by any standard. They've been building electric cars that were faster than production gasoline cars for at least a decade.
What that has to do with your idiotic and irrelevant Jetson's comment is beyond me.
You don't understand, there WILL be another flu epidemic, whether it is H5N1 or another strain. If we do not prepare then we will lose about 5%-20% of the population, so putting the efforts of a millionth of one percent of the world population to stopping it seems like pretty damn cheap insurance. Now should there be all the media hype, not sure but if the population isn't aware then there is little chance of an effective widespread action being manageable.
No, I understand that perfectly. What I don't understand is why we're focusing all of our efforts on bird flu, when there are plenty of other bugs out there that have as much potential. The problem I have with it is that people have made the jump from "it is 100% certain that there will eventually be another flu epidemic/pandemic" to "it's going to be bird flu, it's going to kill 10% of the world's population, and it's coming any minute now." Here's a news flash for you: every year there is a worldwide flu epidemic. Every year. Sometimes it's mild, sometimes it's more severe. But it happens every year.
Also, I don't believe that a bird flu epidemic is going to take out 5-10% of our population. In the brifings this week the US government was talking about potentially 2 million deaths in the US being caused by bird flu, and while that's a lot that's far less than 5% of our population.
Is anyone here old enough to remember the swine flu "epidemic" of 1976? It also turned out to be all hype, though the vaccinations killed more people than the flu did.
Any engineer worth his salt can tell you that electric motors put out a hell of a lot more torque than gasoline engines. Gasoline engines are restricted by the tolerances of their mechanical parts, even if the engine is capable of producing more horsepower under load. That's why raw horsepower figures are often a poor indicator of a vehicle's acceleration.
No kidding. I recall 8-10 years ago reading an issue of Wired where they talked about electric powered cars that can produce more torgue than gasoline powered cars. Then they pointed out that people have been racing electric powered cards for years.
Just check out NEDRA if you have any doubts. It must have been a slow news day at CNN.
Sooner or later there WILL be another flu with the ability to kill millions. The only way we have of preventing another 1919 is to spot the threat before it gets going and prepare a vaccine. Hence the worry over H5N1. It's entirely possible that it will all blow over. It's also possible that it will mutate to a form that can spread from one human to another, and become pandemic. If it doesn't, well, great. If it does, we'll be glad we prepared.
Maybe it's flu, maybe it's something else. If we spent so much hype, time, energy, and effort preparing for every possible bug that could become an epidemic or pandemic, we would never get anything done. Personally, I am far more concerned about the epidemics that we know about (HIV for example) than I am about bird flu. I think that the main reason that bird flu (which has only infected a couple dozen people and killed even fewer) gets so much press is two fold:
1. The majority of the media-embracing public understands the concepts of birds and flu.
2. The Bush administration is zero for two on preventing, mitigating, or responding to major US disasters (9/11 and Katrina) and they're desperate to look like they're doing something to prepare for future disasters.
That may address computer programming specifically, but I believe that his post was in response to someone claiming that "If you are salaried, you are not entitled to overtime, period." In that context it is still valid, as there are many many possible salaried jobs out there that are not exempt from overtime by the Department of Labor.
Furthermore, most states have additional employment laws that may be even more strict than the federal laws, and those laws may further limit who can be considered an "exempt" employee.
If it were as simple as "you are salaried and therefore exempt from overtime" then people wouldn't be filing lawsuits and winning overtime pay.
What do we do? I'm getting just what they said -- about 50 emails since they started last night. I can't even get to bluesecurity.com to unsubscribe if I wanted to. I can handle 50 or so I suppose and want to continue to support BS (hmmm...) but what would you do?
Step one, get over it. "Oh my god, I'm getting 50 spam emails a day now! What should I do?!?!?!" Delete them, duh! Most of us have to contend with hundreds or thousands of spam messages a day. 50 is chump change.
Step two, get a good anti-spam solution that plugs into your mailserver or email client, preferably one with Bayesian or similar filtering capability. Those tend to work well.
Step three, realize that whether or not you subscribe to BlufeFrog is meaningless. The spammers have your email address now. Of course, they had it before too, or else you wouldn't have needed BlueFrog. So what's the difference?
Step four, realize that there is no story here. "Scumbag spammers continue to act like scumbags and continue spamming!" You might as well say that the sun rises every morning.
I have a PC with a ATi 9800 Pro in it which I use for gaming. I've had this since 2003 and it still plays a mean game of Battlefield 2 when I feel like it. If it runs a bit slow then I plonk the resolution down. This is by far the best way to get your game to run faster. Anyway, bottom line is - it runs whatever current game I'd care to buy for it.
I once paid $300 for a video card. It was a 9700 Pro, right after they first came out, and it last me about 4 years. I eventually upgraded my system from a 1600+ to a 3000+, but kept the video card. It had no problems keeping up, even through the release of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. I got a lot of life out of that card.
Now I've thought about upgrading, but two things have hampered me. The first is strictly technical - I have an AGP machine, so there's not a huge amount of difference over a 9800 Pro whatever I plug in there because it'll always be limited by the bus speed.
It's not really a factor of bus speeds, as most PCI-e cards don't come anywhere close to saturating the PCI-e x16 bus. That's why when SLI on PCI-e first came out (not to be confused with the original SLI back in the 3Dfx days) your pair of x16 cards in x16 slots reverted to x8 rates. I can't speak for what's on the ATI side of the fence, but there was a very noticeable improvement going from a 9700 Pro AGP to a 6800GS AGP (almost double the frame rates in some games).
The second is probably more of a personal thing - I've got mates who have the latest and greatest GFX cards in their machines, but I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between their games and mine. Sure, it's a slightly higher res, but are there any bonus features like fog or smoke? No. Better anti-aliasing? No. I spent my hard-earned cash on a Dell 20" widescreen monitor and I can assure you that as far as gaming experiences go, this added to mine much more than a new GFX card would.
Yes, actually there are newer features. SM 3.0 mainly (and along with it HDR), but a lot of those effects make a very noticeable "eye candy" difference to the games. And of course you can always crank up the resolution, turn on higher detail levels, or start using AA and AF features for an even better picure. Granted, the 20" widescreen probably isn't a bad investment either.
I use and recommend XWall for Exchange by DataEnter. Go to www.dataenter.at and check it out. There is a 30-day eval that you can download, and it is extremely cheap (something like $250 per server). It is basically a gateway product, so you only install it on your SMTP gateways. My company with 3 Exchange servers only has it installed on the single SMTP gateway server, so we only needed one license.
XWall does pretty much everything that you could want. It supports greylisting, blacklisting, whitelisting, multiple SLS and blackhole services, and you can make exceptions or additions to just about any filtering criteria. It also has plug-ins for anti-virus capability. It has a large number of heuristic detection settings that you can enable/disable individually, and it even supports bayesian filtering. It also lets you flag, forward to an admin, bounce, or blackhole suspicious email as needed. It's really about the most feature-complete spam filter I've ever seen, and since it runs on the gateway it doesn't slow down client-side operations like many other products do.
At my company we installed it, turned on greylisting, turned on a couple of the heuristic options (failing RDNS lookups, having an internal address in the FROM: field on a message from an external source, etc), and set it to query two RBLs and our spam problem was literally gone overnight. It's actually very easy to set up, and the documentation and support are excellent.
My boss was a little leery of buying something via credit card from Austria (we're in the states), but I had used it at my previous employer's (for a Fortune 50 company with over 100 Exchange servers and 60,000 users), and had no problems at all. It's worth it's weight in gold.