If you have a CompactFlash card, then making the switch is very easy and if you don't like it, it's also trivial to switch back to Sharp's ROM. So my suggestion is to try it out early before you get too comfortable and spend a lot of time setting up the PDA just the way you like it.
Err perhaps someone could explain to me what is better about openZaurus, I mean apart from knowing that nobody made any money out of writing the code why am i meant to think this a good thing?
Does it have a better version of mastermind? a better jpg viewer that might allow me to see large pictures direct off my digital camera in full screen mode (can't rotate is a lame excuse, like what stops the thing just swapping X and Y coordinates on display).
The problem I have with my zaurus is that is does not work with my wireless card. Damn thing simply won't recognise my home network.
It's already been held to be constitutional to limit spam. That was settled in Ferguson vs. Friendfinder last year.
Yes but the first court that heard the Nixon case had a judge who was a complete idiot and rulled that the junk fax laws were unconstitutional. The judgement basically said that the judge thought he knew better than Congress. He basically dismissed all the evidence that junk faxes cause the victims unnecessary expense on flimsy grounds and then claimed that there was nothing to support the law.
I did not expect the original Nixon judgement to stand. Fortunately it was completely unreasonable and the reasoning plain stupid. However there is an argument that the judge made (not the defending council, the judge, which kinda shows what an idological twit he was), that may well stand. That is that the junk fax law is overbroad since an opt-out list like there is now for junk marketting calls could meet the same requirement without restricting free speech.
I have been pushing for the spam laws to include a one-way encrypted opt out list provision for this very reason. I think that ultimately the Nixon argument might hold in the case of spam, especially since the cost per spam is less.
Incidentally, I got a piece of info from the Microsoft lawyers on the reason they are taking the line they are on the Washington state spam law. The piece that has not made the public yet is that the scheme the DMA is currently up to is to pass a law in DC that guts all the state spam laws and replaces them with a law that says that ISPs MUST deliver all spam from DMA members. The plan of the DMA is to bribe enough members of Congress to pass an 'anti-spam' law that is in fact a 'pro-spam' law.
If IBM patented Spam, the world would be a better place.
If you had read this months Tech Review you would know that IBM policy is to allow open licensing of its patents. As a result they earned $10 billion on their patent portfolio last year. Universities file patents at the same rate (3,500 a year) but generally license them on sole license terms, netting only $1 billion.
So what you should hope is that MIT, or better yet Harvard had invented SPAM and patented it. History demonstrates that they have been much better at keeping technology off the market.
Excuse the cliche' but 'ignorance really must be bliss'for some. There are many reasons why the extinction of 90 percent of the world's languages is potentially devastating however I realise that for YOU, the speakers of a majority language, such devastation seems remote, uninteresting and irrelevant to your already complicated and complex lives.
Nahh, we have just met language nut bigotts.
Take Irish for example, a language that had all but died out and was resurected for the sole purpose of preserving gaelic identity which comes down to defining THEM and US and making things as unpleasant as possible for THEM in the hope they will leave. Then in Turkey we have the government brutally supressing the speaking of Kurdish.
This is of course what drives the hyper-biggots who police the suppression of all languages other than french in Quebec. These are deeply unimpressive individuals who know their limitations, the only chance they have of gaining some power is through division.
Culture and cultural differences are great when people are happy to share in good faith and charity. The problem is that you get the thugs and biggots who have to use them as a means of division.
Unfortunately language is a particularly powerful method of defining them and us - if you don't know the language you are automatically one of THEM. That is why language differences tend to create even more division than religious ones.
But this isn't just a loss of quality, it's a total loss of features. This device is nothing more than a crippled VCR, except that it stores stuff digitally.
No, this is actualy just Time Warner going back to their pre-Ineternet per-AOL fiasco, Interactive TV. The model is completely unchanged from 1992, content to be stored in distribution hubs and downloaded on demand. The only thing that is interactive is you get to shop while you watch the crap.
These days I am pretty much a post-Tivo TV viewer. I don't rate the tivo features because I simply don't watch network TV - PERIOD. Heck we didn't even get the local network channels for over a year when we first got Dish TV and we never missed them.
The problem is that network TV gets worse and worse as the cost gets higher and higher. The last decent shows on US TV were Seinfeld and the X-Files, both long gone to reruns. Ad skiping technology is superfluous when the shows on offer are Joe Millionaire and the bachelorette.
The only significant feature missing from my dishplayer as far as I am concerned is removable storage. Give me the ability to plug in nice fat 160 Gb drives at a time via serial ATA and I can actually get to record some of my own stuff. At the moment we have 4 hours teletubbies, 16 hours Dora the Explorer, 8 episodes of Blues Clues and some sessamee street. I have one episode of the sopranos. Funny thing is that when I think about it most of the stuff on my dishplayer is actually more intellectually demanding than the average network tv show.
If a Windows build takes 12 hours, and you don't come in until 8, that means the build won't be build for a minimum of 24 hours.
That is probably why they build each night...
Last I heard they had some mondo build system that compiles everything each night from scratch then pushes the updates out onto willing victims desktops. So you can sometimes call up a Microsoftie in the morning and hear that they got a bum distro pushed onto their machine and it will take them a little time to get their machine going.
Some of the structural differences between Java and C# look to me like they are there to allow incremental compilation to be used. OK this is a theoretical possibility with C++ and make but there are actually a lot of pretty wierd interactions that can happen between modules in an incremental build. Java has had a bunch of modifications to address this in part, C# goes a bit further.
Nukes don't go off from normal explosions -- it takes a lot more energy that a simple explosion to start a fusion reaction.
Yes but you still need a conventional explosive to get stuff started. What you have in an A bomb is conventional explosive wrapped arround a core of the fissile material. An H bomb is the same thing with an outer wrapper of Deuterium/Tritium. There are several ways to get the fission bomb to critical mass, but you have to do that real fast or else you get a flop, the chain reaction starts blowing the thing apart before you get to the critical. So they use explosives.
I don't think it is very likely that an nuclear bomb would be set off accidentally by a laser.
Remember -- there's a big different between nuclear and atomic weapons -- nuclear weapons mimic the sun, by fusing multiple atoms together. Atomic weapons split atoms.
No, there are fission bombs and fussion bombs, They both use nuclear processes. The term Atomic bomb was a misnomer, it was a nuclear bomb. Although people do talk about A-Bombs and H-Bombs.
The bit I don't get with this laser scheme is how well it works if the missile has a really shiny, mirror finish outer casing.
Yeah, IBM never makes bad decisions about how to license operating systems.
*cough*MS*cough*
IBM bought a non-exclusive license from Microsoft for a number of reasons, all of which make sense. First they did not have a big budget for the PC project, it was a skunkworks project outside the normal IBM development line. Second their original plan had been to buy a CP/M license but Kildall went surfing instead. Third Microsoft probably would not have written MSDOS if IBM was going to keep the exclusive license. Fourth a large part of the success of the IBM PC platform was the fact it could be cloned. Without that the IBM would have been just another proprietary platform, the independents would have got together an built a competing system on CP/M and that would eventually have dominated the market.
I read through the SCO complaint, it is very short on actual facts. It is all inferences. It is like the case Powell was making at the security council 'Saddam must be building WMDs so Inspectors failure to find them indicates he must be breaking 1441 by hiding them'.
Particularly risible is the bit where SCO sniff that it took them 20 years to get UNIX to work on 4 processors. Multiprocessor UNIX appeared on Intel very shortly after Intel produced their first multi-processor chip, the PentiumPro, but leave that to one side. Just how many multiprocessor O/S has IBM put together over the years? If you count the prototype systems they have probably done 20 or more.
Expect IBM to retaliate with a metric shitload of patent infringement countersuits. Although IBM does charge for licensing some of its patents, they have a lot more that they don't eforce except defensively.
This suit is just like the Intertrust suit. You have a company that is going to the wall rapidly looking for something that can save them. They want to be taken over so they sue a larger company hoping they will recon that buying them out is a better plan than the cost of the lawsuit.
Until recently SCOX was trading at a Market cap of $10 millon. Heck the Intellectual property is worth much more than that. The lawsuit boosted the price from $2 to $3, so SCOX would now cost a total of $35 million. This is a no-brainer for Big Blue. Just get out the check book and sign on the dotted line.
Those of us who use MS products, and rely on modified versions of dlls for proper functionality, (Macrovision removal in powerdvd, for instance) will be screwed.
What about the people who don't want the Macrovision 'copy-protection' in their version of Turbo-Tax. Or Gator or any of the slimeware programs that rewrite the TCP/IP stack so it redirects all calls to a premium number in Elbonia?
I don't think that this is going to have the effect you state, at least not until Palladium. Basically you will just have to modify the.EXE to pull in a different DLL, this is not too difficult on a one off basis. Gator and its ilk are likly to have more serious problems.
But for an organization which *has* to make decisions on protocols or assignments of address blocks, or dispute resolution, the ability for one member state to render the whole organization indecisive really can't be tolerated.
This is pretty much off-topic since although the ITU is now an accredited member body of the UN it actually existed before the UN and has a very different history.
The security council is only one part of the UN. The rules were written with one aim in mind, to prevent proxy wars between the permanent members turning into direct wars between the permanent members. It has succeeded in this.
The current impasse is actually how the system is supposed to work. There is no military power that can constrain the US, however the rest of the world community has a degree of constraint through the security council. The US recognises that it will look pretty stupid using enforcement of a UN resolution as casus belli if the UN withholds its support for the action.
The noise being made about the Iraq issue discredting the security council is hogwash. It has never had any credibility in the first place. It only authorized one action in the cold war - Korea that turned into a minor fiasco. The next action it authorized was Iraq after the USSR collapsed. It had a brief spell of activity in a peace keeping mode afterwards until Somalia turned into a disaster.
The French position actually makes sense if you are French. Their principal fear is that the US will become a hegemonic power. Clearly if they simply buckle under the case being made by this administration they lose that battle. The French hope is that the US will go in, get maulled in urban warfare, conduct an increasingly unpopular occupation and finally retreat with tail between legs. It is not the outcome I prefer, but looking at the difference between claims made for the ecconomic plan and the results of the ecconomic plan I think Bush's shower could screw up anything.
Just how many treaties has the US abrogated lately? The only one that comes to mind was
How many murders has OJ Simpson committed recently? The only ones that come to mind are...
In terms of International relations abrogating a treaty is pretty much the worst thing you can do. The ABM treaty was far from obsolete - it was the basis on which SALT-II and the post-USSR disarmament treaties had been agreed.
The protectionist tarrifs imposed on imported steel are a violation of the WTO treaty, as are the US laws that allow corporations to shelter their foreign earnings against tax.
The US has been demonstrated to be a country that does not keep its word on treaties. That is a very major issue, it means that other countries are unable to trust the US. If you take the time to read the foreign press on the mess with Turkey you will find that a major reason they have turned down the generous offer of 15 billion in aid for use of their bases is that many of their MPs simply don't think the US will keep its word.
There are plenty of treaties that are considered obsolete by most countries apart from the US. Holland and much of Europe would like to ditch the agreement to control trade in cannabis. More dangerously North Korea has just decided that if the US can withdraw from the ABM treaty it can withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
To bring the subject back to China, the US is not guaranteed its current position as top banana. Like the UK it faces the problem that it is a relatively small country compared to the rapidly industrial powers. China and India both have larger populations than the US, they have also got rapidly expanding economies with significant hi-tech sectors.
According to the CIA world fact book the US has a GDP only twice that of China, but the growth rate is 0.3% versus 7.3%. At those growth rates China becomes the worlds biggest economy in 2010. Oh you say the US is in recession, well so is China (relatively speaking) but even if the US returns to Clintonian growth rates of 3% and China has no recovery China still overtakes the US in 2016. It is likely that China will continue growing that way until the GDP per capita is aproiximately 75% of the US figure, that is until 2040 or so.
The point about the GDP inbalance is that the US currently spends as much on arms as the rest of the world combined. It can only do that because it has a huge economy - although it is nowhere near equal to the rest of the world combined. By 2030 China and India will both be so far ahead of the US that there is no way that the US will be able to keep up.
The point here is that the US is not going to be the only superpower forever. It is likely to be so until 2020, after that it can only maintain its position at disproportionate cost which will only slow the rate of growth. So it makes no sense for the US to go pissing on the rest of the world to score points for domestic consuption as this administration is fond of doing. The US should stick to its treaties because in a realatively short time it is going to be depending on other countries sticking to theirs. Force Majeure will no longer be an option.
And no, this is not anti-Americanism, it is merely facing the brutal facts. Just as the UK could not maintain its position as the worlds only superpower in the 1920s the US simply does not have the population to maintain its current position.
It is the conspiracy theory du jour. Only this one is actually true. It is pretty well known that Ashcroft is a member of a cultish extreemist 'Christian' sect. Well it is called the Fellowship Foundation and they think Hitler, Suharto and Pinochet are ideal role models for leadership. Other members of the sect include Ed Messe and a number of (unspecified) Senators. At least according to this month's copy of harpers
For three weeks Jeffrey Sharlet lived at Ivanwald, home of the Fellowship Foundation or "the Family," as they call themselves--a secretive religious organization, based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., whose membership is teeming with United States senators and congressman. In JESUS PLUS NOTHING: Undercover among America's secret theocrats (p. 53), Sharlet huddles with the "brothers" in prayer, competes with them in "bump," a basketball game meant to "sharpen both body and soul," and reveals the Foundation's goals which are as political as they are spiritual. "We recognize the place and responsibility of national secular leaders in the work of advancing His kingdom," states the Family's literature. Since the group was founded in 1935 it has influenced administrations and financed anti-Communist regimes (many less than democratic and even murderous). Through the National Prayer Breakfast, held annually in the capital, the Family recruits the powerful to meet Jesus "man to man." "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't," remarks the Family's leader Doug Coe, a man who admires the unifying tactics of Hitler and the Mafia and is considered by the Family to be "Christ's closest disciple."
Going to the mood will certainly be a great part national pride, but don't underestimate the amount of scientific / engineering data china will get out of it for other purposes.
If China want to do science they can become kings in the life sciences for a tenth the cost of a properly funded space program. The whole human genome project cost about a billion, that is less than the cost of two shuttle launches. There are plenty of first class questions that can be answered for less than a billion, like working out how human memory works, or precisely how DNA sequences are activated and deactivated to cause cell differentiation.
I think that China has hit on the real interesting space challenge here. Design a craft that can go to the moon, mine it for materials and replicate itself. If you can do that you can collonize the moon, or mars come to that. OK that is a somewhat ambitious goal so do it in stages, first go to the moon and mine minerals, then refine them then use them to build something, then build something that replicates itself.
Article II Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
Of course the US could decide to abrogate this treaty like so many others of late. However it does not seem likely that even 'The Family' want to start a war with China at this point, they probably don't even rate a mention in the top ten.
The point about manned spaceflight is irrelevant, it is like saying that the New Yorkers can't build the tallest skyscraper until they have duplicated the great pyramid. The justification for manned exploration is pretty tenuous at this point, we now have robots that do the job better. The Appolo missions were about winning the cold war, science was a byproduct.
China is persuing this project for political reasons too. It is a Jim Collins style Big Hairy Audacious Goal, the whole point is that it is hard. But China wants to do it to prove it is a major power and that the US and others should not underestimate them.
It wont stop spam. People are getting spam on their text based phones, I get full color spam in my mailbox. Bulk advertisers have no problem paying a few cents per spamee, when one gullible shmuck in 1000 orders the penis enlargement pills.
There might be a slight improvement in targetting. However any level that is high enough to deter spam is high enough to deter legitimate uses.
The folk at C|Net send out a billion emails a year, all sent to people who opted in to a mailing list. A charge of a cent per mail would cost them $10 million to do that. Currently advertising rates on the web are $8 CPM - That is per thousand (its the latin thing you know) So that is less than a cent per email sent in revenue. Many emails are sent out without paid advertisements at the moment because of the state of the market.
A charge would shut down many of the free mailing lists. It would also shut down Yahoo and Hotmail.
So just grow up Barry, it ain't going to happen, not now not ever. No matter how bad spam gets nobody is going to pay a charge per message.
I don't find the 'well someone will work out a way to collect the payments' cuts it either. I have been doing Micropayments for almost ten years, I have discussed them at length with the people who have tried to deploy. I don't think we are any closer - and no Ron and Silvo's peppercorn scheme isn't the answetr either. The closest to a micropayment scheme that works is the Lamport Hash chain, (Torben Pederson's phone tick modus, Ron's Payword), but those won't work in this case.
Do these guys have anything in common with the Xupiter/Gator/Whenu.com people? I'm wondering if maybe there's some connection that could confirm any conspiracy theories about the internet.
Yes, they are both run by complete and total shits.
Scumware is a major problem in its own right. One of the rising vectors for scumware is spam. People are sent spam with active-x components, javascript exploits etc. that try to install the scumware without notifying the user. [Yes toto, they do do that even though they claim that they don't]. Alternatively the user is sent to a web page which tried to download the component.
The interesting question to me is how these scumware companies make money. Selling demographic information can be profitable, but the figures don't add up. How can it be profitable to spend $3 a user to install a component? Net advertsing is in a slump, few sites can cover their costs. How on earth can the scumware vendors with disreputable business practices get advertisers in this market?
While it is likely that a spammer (not sure why you call them bulk mailers)
Which indicates that like most of the idiots who are proposing these types of hack-back schemes you have not bothered to even try to understand the full problem.
A bulk mailer is a program that sends out mail in bulk. A bulk mailer can be used to send spam but not all bulk mail is spam. One of the largest bulk mailers on the internet is C|Net which sends out a billion pieces of mail a year. Other bulk mailers include American express and United Airlines, all of which send 100% opted in messages to their customers who requested them.
will want to modify his software to drop slow connections, he often doesn't have control over the SMTP server he is using. It may belong to his ISP, or be an open relay.
Very few of the spam senders are using open relays these days. Most have their own dedicated connections. ISPs who block outgoing port 25 usually implement rate limiting as well.
I don't see why adding heuristics to a spam throttling device will make it work worse. It should make it work a lot better.
Put the bullshit aside. Spam Bayes is not infallible, it is a guess. It is not a good idea to select hack-back targets by guessing.
My company does managed security services. A huge proportion of attacks turn out to be hack-back attempts gone wrong.
The problem of spam is minor compared to the problem of chronic unreliability that half baked anti-spam schemes are creating in the email system. Ten years ago you used email because it was reliable, not any more.
I started using it because some customers would mailbomb remote users
Outgoing rate limitations are one thing. Teergrubbing is completely different. What is needed however is fixing the SMTP protocol to deal with mail bombing. Add a refused code to the SMTP protocol so that a mail server knows that the recipient is not going to accept further mails from an abuser
What do you mean by inocent victim? The spammers arn't and neither....
I mean that I simply don't believe that crappy heuristics are accurate enough to use to target attacks. Paul Graham's claim of zero false positives is simply not credible when you compare his claims against the prior experience of using naive (and not so naive) Bayesian filtering.
So don't imagine for a second that this plan to hurt spamers is not going to backfire on people who are neither spam senders or run misconfigured email relays. This plan is not going to hurt a single spam sender, competent bulk email software has always ontained measures to abandon attempts to connect to slow hosts.
If the fantasyland claims about the effectiveness of filtering technology were true spam would be an easily solved problem. Unfortunately the MIT conference had only two decent research papers on applying Bayesian filtering to spam, this despite the fact that these were the only solutions papers selected - Judge, Shein and Berkowitz were providing informal descriptions of the problem and not solutions. The first was the talk by the Microsoft research group guy who set out the way to measure the effectiveness of spam detection algorithms. The second was the talk by the MIT undergrad on his class project which was the only one that presented actual comparative data. Unsurprisingly to those of us who have worked on Bayesian approaches to events data in the past the results were considerably mixed. In the end it turned out that the most effective scheme was to use least squares fit rather than the Baysian stuff and the most effective technique turned out to be to look at the message headers rather than the content.
And about bulk mailers aborting on slow connections, isn't that the point? Hasn't the throttling software just succeeded by stopping 1 or more spams?
No the point of teergrubbing is to try to hurt the spam sender. As I showed it does not hurt the spam sender at all. You can stop the spam by simply aborting the connection on the server side so no teergrubbing does nothing to stop spam, the premise the scheme starts from is that you already have a mechanism that does that.
Ultimately this proposal is simply another well intentioned scheme by someone who simply can't see or does not care that their half-baked idea might backfire baddly and create more problems than it solves. It is the same sort of thinking that is behind the idots who run SPEWS. I was at a recent meeting of the top ISPs to discuss the spam problem, turned out that everyone of them had been listed on SPEWS. So 70%++ of the US Internet population has been b,ocked by SPEWS how can people claim that there is NO collateral damage with a straight face? Oh yes that's right they don't answer anything they are completely unaccountable. And yes contrary to the lies put out on the SPEWS site they do list for frivolous reasons, one of the things that can get you listed on SPEWS is simply complaining about them.
Tarpitting is a pretty cool idea if you ask me - it hurts no one but the spammer, if implemented properly.
As with all vigilante actions, it works pretty well if only the bad guys get a lynching.
The problem with these teergrubbing type schemes is that they typically only hurt the innocent victims caught by accident. It is very unlikely that a bulk email sender program does not have code in it to detect slow connections and abort. Otherwise the bulk sender is going to fail at the least network problem.
Bulk senders are in any case coded with multiple threads, either by using a threads package like pthreads or in some cases the threading is simulated by maintaining a state machine for each connection. The teergrubbing scheme described only causes pain if the bulk sender is single threaded and blocks when connecting to a single slow server.
Vigilante hacking frequently goes wrong. Coupling a vigilantge hacking scheme up to a heuristic detection scheme is pure stupidity.
Nah, you will have to do better than that, Mutlu would have said something more like 'these transparent lies only reveal your bottomless stupidity.'
The EFF only have half the story. The person 'working' for AT&T who called himself Hasan Mutlu was connected to the plot. However Mutlu was not his real name and AT&T was unaware that he was working for them. Mutlu was not acting alone there were several people involved including co-conspirators in England and Germany.
That is why the serdar argic posts were created at a far faster rate than the Mutlu posts.
"Mutlu" disappeared after certain inconsistencies were pointed out to the INS as did 'CoSar' who was alleged to be the sysop.
Modded as "interesting"? I'm sure more viruses have come out the USA than China.
Actually some versions of code red did have code to detect the language that a site's web pages were in and trashed the site if it wasn't in Chineese. Then a few days after this was discovered a second verison of the same worm appeared which did the opposite. Code Red hit at the time that the US spy plane was forced down in China.
There are plenty of examples of politically motivated hacking, the Palestinians and Israelis have been having an ongoing proxy war for some time. However almost all the events appear to be the work of independent agents working on their own rather than being coordinated cyber-warfare.
The only example of state sponsored cyberwarfare I am aware of is the attacks on Usenet by Hasan B-) Mutlu and Serdar Argic who roboposted thousands of anti-armenian propaganda messages. Mutlu and Argic were both pseudonyms used by an officer of thr turkish intelligence service which was concerned that reports on the Turkish massacre of Armenians during world war I were circulating on Usenet and damaging the image of Turkey abroad at a time when the post USSR CIS was fragmenting into racial warfare. So they roboposted claims of a bogus masacre of turks by armenians repeatedly in order to drown out and discredit the genuine claims that the turks massacred the armenians.
Grantsdale is going to have such a dramatic effect on PC architecture, what is this going to do for sales of graphics cards? Of sound cards?
Nothing, sound is now considered to be part of the basic PC motherboard package, as is USB, firewire, the PS/2 rodent and keyboard connectors and at least one ethernet connection.
Unless a motherboard is aimed at the server segment alone, sound and graphics are going to be part of the basic package by the time the grantsdale motherboards come on stream. Sound is going to mean stereo and 5.1 dolby digital. Graphics is going to mean the legacy analog 15 pin plug and a DVI plug as basic with TV-out and TV-in being common.
I don't think that many people are going to be asking 'how can I plug my PCI card into my PCI-Express motherboard'. Most features you had to buy a PCI card for in the past are already available on the motherboard.
I think that folk on slashdot are missing the fact that the principal movement going on here is that the PC is becomming a home appliance rather than office equipment. Unless you are writing video games or such there is no reason why you should need an expansion slot today in an office PC.
The biggest single limitation in the current PC design is the mechanical form factor, in particular the way that the design places expansion boards at right angles to the motherboard so the basic PC ends up being at least 5" thick with 7" or more being more common. That is deadly if what you are trying to do is to provide a sleek unit that will sit underneath the VCR and receiver in a HiFi / Home video tower.
To create a slimline PC today you have to do one of two things, either you put in a riser board and crank the PCI slots at right angles or you do without expansion slots altogether. The riser board solution is pretty icky, its basically limited to 2 cards worth and you have a fragile mechanical connection.
A much better solution would be to get rid of the PCI expansion slot part of the motherboard entirely. make a cut out in the motherboard the way a large PCATX board has a cut out for the power supply. Then connect the expansion cards in via an edce connector the way that PCMCIA cards do. That way you get the convenience of PCMCIA without the power constraints imposed by limited cooling.
Don't be a dick. A simple, "I'm sorry, I'm just not interested. If you don't mind, could you take me off your list?" goes a hell of a long way.
Oh I will be polite, if the other person is polite. All my numbers are on the state do not call list. If you call me you are breaking the law.
However if your girlfired makes an unsolicited call to my home phine number I fully reserve the right to tell her what a complete and utter piece of crap she is and ask her if she took that job because she was too ugly to make it as a streetwalker.
It takes like 2 extra seconds of your day to be polite.
Being polite has no deterent effect. Being psychologically vicious has 1) a deterent effect, 2) imposes a cost on the service by reducing the number of calls the canvaser can make 3) increases the staff turnover rate of the telemarketer.
Slashdot Mirror
Err perhaps someone could explain to me what is better about openZaurus, I mean apart from knowing that nobody made any money out of writing the code why am i meant to think this a good thing?
Does it have a better version of mastermind? a better jpg viewer that might allow me to see large pictures direct off my digital camera in full screen mode (can't rotate is a lame excuse, like what stops the thing just swapping X and Y coordinates on display).
The problem I have with my zaurus is that is does not work with my wireless card. Damn thing simply won't recognise my home network.
Anyone ported PocketPC to Zaurus?
How about Microsoft Bob?
Yes but the first court that heard the Nixon case had a judge who was a complete idiot and rulled that the junk fax laws were unconstitutional. The judgement basically said that the judge thought he knew better than Congress. He basically dismissed all the evidence that junk faxes cause the victims unnecessary expense on flimsy grounds and then claimed that there was nothing to support the law.
I did not expect the original Nixon judgement to stand. Fortunately it was completely unreasonable and the reasoning plain stupid. However there is an argument that the judge made (not the defending council, the judge, which kinda shows what an idological twit he was), that may well stand. That is that the junk fax law is overbroad since an opt-out list like there is now for junk marketting calls could meet the same requirement without restricting free speech.
I have been pushing for the spam laws to include a one-way encrypted opt out list provision for this very reason. I think that ultimately the Nixon argument might hold in the case of spam, especially since the cost per spam is less.
Incidentally, I got a piece of info from the Microsoft lawyers on the reason they are taking the line they are on the Washington state spam law. The piece that has not made the public yet is that the scheme the DMA is currently up to is to pass a law in DC that guts all the state spam laws and replaces them with a law that says that ISPs MUST deliver all spam from DMA members. The plan of the DMA is to bribe enough members of Congress to pass an 'anti-spam' law that is in fact a 'pro-spam' law.
If you had read this months Tech Review you would know that IBM policy is to allow open licensing of its patents. As a result they earned $10 billion on their patent portfolio last year. Universities file patents at the same rate (3,500 a year) but generally license them on sole license terms, netting only $1 billion.
So what you should hope is that MIT, or better yet Harvard had invented SPAM and patented it. History demonstrates that they have been much better at keeping technology off the market.
Nahh, we have just met language nut bigotts.
Take Irish for example, a language that had all but died out and was resurected for the sole purpose of preserving gaelic identity which comes down to defining THEM and US and making things as unpleasant as possible for THEM in the hope they will leave. Then in Turkey we have the government brutally supressing the speaking of Kurdish.
This is of course what drives the hyper-biggots who police the suppression of all languages other than french in Quebec. These are deeply unimpressive individuals who know their limitations, the only chance they have of gaining some power is through division.
Culture and cultural differences are great when people are happy to share in good faith and charity. The problem is that you get the thugs and biggots who have to use them as a means of division.
Unfortunately language is a particularly powerful method of defining them and us - if you don't know the language you are automatically one of THEM. That is why language differences tend to create even more division than religious ones.
No, this is actualy just Time Warner going back to their pre-Ineternet per-AOL fiasco, Interactive TV. The model is completely unchanged from 1992, content to be stored in distribution hubs and downloaded on demand. The only thing that is interactive is you get to shop while you watch the crap.
These days I am pretty much a post-Tivo TV viewer. I don't rate the tivo features because I simply don't watch network TV - PERIOD. Heck we didn't even get the local network channels for over a year when we first got Dish TV and we never missed them.
The problem is that network TV gets worse and worse as the cost gets higher and higher. The last decent shows on US TV were Seinfeld and the X-Files, both long gone to reruns. Ad skiping technology is superfluous when the shows on offer are Joe Millionaire and the bachelorette.
The only significant feature missing from my dishplayer as far as I am concerned is removable storage. Give me the ability to plug in nice fat 160 Gb drives at a time via serial ATA and I can actually get to record some of my own stuff. At the moment we have 4 hours teletubbies, 16 hours Dora the Explorer, 8 episodes of Blues Clues and some sessamee street. I have one episode of the sopranos. Funny thing is that when I think about it most of the stuff on my dishplayer is actually more intellectually demanding than the average network tv show.
That is probably why they build each night...
Last I heard they had some mondo build system that compiles everything each night from scratch then pushes the updates out onto willing victims desktops. So you can sometimes call up a Microsoftie in the morning and hear that they got a bum distro pushed onto their machine and it will take them a little time to get their machine going.
Some of the structural differences between Java and C# look to me like they are there to allow incremental compilation to be used. OK this is a theoretical possibility with C++ and make but there are actually a lot of pretty wierd interactions that can happen between modules in an incremental build. Java has had a bunch of modifications to address this in part, C# goes a bit further.
Yes but you still need a conventional explosive to get stuff started. What you have in an A bomb is conventional explosive wrapped arround a core of the fissile material. An H bomb is the same thing with an outer wrapper of Deuterium/Tritium. There are several ways to get the fission bomb to critical mass, but you have to do that real fast or else you get a flop, the chain reaction starts blowing the thing apart before you get to the critical. So they use explosives.
I don't think it is very likely that an nuclear bomb would be set off accidentally by a laser.
Remember -- there's a big different between nuclear and atomic weapons -- nuclear weapons mimic the sun, by fusing multiple atoms together. Atomic weapons split atoms.
No, there are fission bombs and fussion bombs, They both use nuclear processes. The term Atomic bomb was a misnomer, it was a nuclear bomb. Although people do talk about A-Bombs and H-Bombs.
The bit I don't get with this laser scheme is how well it works if the missile has a really shiny, mirror finish outer casing.
IBM bought a non-exclusive license from Microsoft for a number of reasons, all of which make sense. First they did not have a big budget for the PC project, it was a skunkworks project outside the normal IBM development line. Second their original plan had been to buy a CP/M license but Kildall went surfing instead. Third Microsoft probably would not have written MSDOS if IBM was going to keep the exclusive license. Fourth a large part of the success of the IBM PC platform was the fact it could be cloned. Without that the IBM would have been just another proprietary platform, the independents would have got together an built a competing system on CP/M and that would eventually have dominated the market.
I read through the SCO complaint, it is very short on actual facts. It is all inferences. It is like the case Powell was making at the security council 'Saddam must be building WMDs so Inspectors failure to find them indicates he must be breaking 1441 by hiding them'.
Particularly risible is the bit where SCO sniff that it took them 20 years to get UNIX to work on 4 processors. Multiprocessor UNIX appeared on Intel very shortly after Intel produced their first multi-processor chip, the PentiumPro, but leave that to one side. Just how many multiprocessor O/S has IBM put together over the years? If you count the prototype systems they have probably done 20 or more.
Expect IBM to retaliate with a metric shitload of patent infringement countersuits. Although IBM does charge for licensing some of its patents, they have a lot more that they don't eforce except defensively.
This suit is just like the Intertrust suit. You have a company that is going to the wall rapidly looking for something that can save them. They want to be taken over so they sue a larger company hoping they will recon that buying them out is a better plan than the cost of the lawsuit.
Until recently SCOX was trading at a Market cap of $10 millon. Heck the Intellectual property is worth much more than that. The lawsuit boosted the price from $2 to $3, so SCOX would now cost a total of $35 million. This is a no-brainer for Big Blue. Just get out the check book and sign on the dotted line.
What about the people who don't want the Macrovision 'copy-protection' in their version of Turbo-Tax. Or Gator or any of the slimeware programs that rewrite the TCP/IP stack so it redirects all calls to a premium number in Elbonia?
I don't think that this is going to have the effect you state, at least not until Palladium. Basically you will just have to modify the .EXE to pull in a different DLL, this is not too difficult on a one off basis. Gator and its ilk are likly to have more serious problems.
This is pretty much off-topic since although the ITU is now an accredited member body of the UN it actually existed before the UN and has a very different history.
The security council is only one part of the UN. The rules were written with one aim in mind, to prevent proxy wars between the permanent members turning into direct wars between the permanent members. It has succeeded in this.
The current impasse is actually how the system is supposed to work. There is no military power that can constrain the US, however the rest of the world community has a degree of constraint through the security council. The US recognises that it will look pretty stupid using enforcement of a UN resolution as casus belli if the UN withholds its support for the action.
The noise being made about the Iraq issue discredting the security council is hogwash. It has never had any credibility in the first place. It only authorized one action in the cold war - Korea that turned into a minor fiasco. The next action it authorized was Iraq after the USSR collapsed. It had a brief spell of activity in a peace keeping mode afterwards until Somalia turned into a disaster.
The French position actually makes sense if you are French. Their principal fear is that the US will become a hegemonic power. Clearly if they simply buckle under the case being made by this administration they lose that battle. The French hope is that the US will go in, get maulled in urban warfare, conduct an increasingly unpopular occupation and finally retreat with tail between legs. It is not the outcome I prefer, but looking at the difference between claims made for the ecconomic plan and the results of the ecconomic plan I think Bush's shower could screw up anything.
How many murders has OJ Simpson committed recently? The only ones that come to mind are...
In terms of International relations abrogating a treaty is pretty much the worst thing you can do. The ABM treaty was far from obsolete - it was the basis on which SALT-II and the post-USSR disarmament treaties had been agreed.
The protectionist tarrifs imposed on imported steel are a violation of the WTO treaty, as are the US laws that allow corporations to shelter their foreign earnings against tax.
The US has been demonstrated to be a country that does not keep its word on treaties. That is a very major issue, it means that other countries are unable to trust the US. If you take the time to read the foreign press on the mess with Turkey you will find that a major reason they have turned down the generous offer of 15 billion in aid for use of their bases is that many of their MPs simply don't think the US will keep its word.
There are plenty of treaties that are considered obsolete by most countries apart from the US. Holland and much of Europe would like to ditch the agreement to control trade in cannabis. More dangerously North Korea has just decided that if the US can withdraw from the ABM treaty it can withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
To bring the subject back to China, the US is not guaranteed its current position as top banana. Like the UK it faces the problem that it is a relatively small country compared to the rapidly industrial powers. China and India both have larger populations than the US, they have also got rapidly expanding economies with significant hi-tech sectors.
According to the CIA world fact book the US has a GDP only twice that of China, but the growth rate is 0.3% versus 7.3%. At those growth rates China becomes the worlds biggest economy in 2010. Oh you say the US is in recession, well so is China (relatively speaking) but even if the US returns to Clintonian growth rates of 3% and China has no recovery China still overtakes the US in 2016. It is likely that China will continue growing that way until the GDP per capita is aproiximately 75% of the US figure, that is until 2040 or so.
The point about the GDP inbalance is that the US currently spends as much on arms as the rest of the world combined. It can only do that because it has a huge economy - although it is nowhere near equal to the rest of the world combined. By 2030 China and India will both be so far ahead of the US that there is no way that the US will be able to keep up.
The point here is that the US is not going to be the only superpower forever. It is likely to be so until 2020, after that it can only maintain its position at disproportionate cost which will only slow the rate of growth. So it makes no sense for the US to go pissing on the rest of the world to score points for domestic consuption as this administration is fond of doing. The US should stick to its treaties because in a realatively short time it is going to be depending on other countries sticking to theirs. Force Majeure will no longer be an option.
And no, this is not anti-Americanism, it is merely facing the brutal facts. Just as the UK could not maintain its position as the worlds only superpower in the 1920s the US simply does not have the population to maintain its current position.
It is the conspiracy theory du jour. Only this one is actually true. It is pretty well known that Ashcroft is a member of a cultish extreemist 'Christian' sect. Well it is called the Fellowship Foundation and they think Hitler, Suharto and Pinochet are ideal role models for leadership. Other members of the sect include Ed Messe and a number of (unspecified) Senators. At least according to this month's copy of harpers
For three weeks Jeffrey Sharlet lived at Ivanwald, home of the Fellowship Foundation or "the Family," as they call themselves--a secretive religious organization, based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., whose membership is teeming with United States senators and congressman. In JESUS PLUS NOTHING: Undercover among America's secret theocrats (p. 53), Sharlet huddles with the "brothers" in prayer, competes with them in "bump," a basketball game meant to "sharpen both body and soul," and reveals the Foundation's goals which are as political as they are spiritual. "We recognize the place and responsibility of national secular leaders in the work of advancing His kingdom," states the Family's literature. Since the group was founded in 1935 it has influenced administrations and financed anti-Communist regimes (many less than democratic and even murderous). Through the National Prayer Breakfast, held annually in the capital, the Family recruits the powerful to meet Jesus "man to man." "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't," remarks the Family's leader Doug Coe, a man who admires the unifying tactics of Hitler and the Mafia and is considered by the Family to be "Christ's closest disciple."
If China want to do science they can become kings in the life sciences for a tenth the cost of a properly funded space program. The whole human genome project cost about a billion, that is less than the cost of two shuttle launches. There are plenty of first class questions that can be answered for less than a billion, like working out how human memory works, or precisely how DNA sequences are activated and deactivated to cause cell differentiation.
I think that China has hit on the real interesting space challenge here. Design a craft that can go to the moon, mine it for materials and replicate itself. If you can do that you can collonize the moon, or mars come to that. OK that is a somewhat ambitious goal so do it in stages, first go to the moon and mine minerals, then refine them then use them to build something, then build something that replicates itself.
Owned by no nation per international treaty
Of course the US could decide to abrogate this treaty like so many others of late. However it does not seem likely that even 'The Family' want to start a war with China at this point, they probably don't even rate a mention in the top ten.The point about manned spaceflight is irrelevant, it is like saying that the New Yorkers can't build the tallest skyscraper until they have duplicated the great pyramid. The justification for manned exploration is pretty tenuous at this point, we now have robots that do the job better. The Appolo missions were about winning the cold war, science was a byproduct.
China is persuing this project for political reasons too. It is a Jim Collins style Big Hairy Audacious Goal, the whole point is that it is hard. But China wants to do it to prove it is a major power and that the US and others should not underestimate them.
There might be a slight improvement in targetting. However any level that is high enough to deter spam is high enough to deter legitimate uses.
The folk at C|Net send out a billion emails a year, all sent to people who opted in to a mailing list. A charge of a cent per mail would cost them $10 million to do that. Currently advertising rates on the web are $8 CPM - That is per thousand (its the latin thing you know) So that is less than a cent per email sent in revenue. Many emails are sent out without paid advertisements at the moment because of the state of the market.
A charge would shut down many of the free mailing lists. It would also shut down Yahoo and Hotmail.
So just grow up Barry, it ain't going to happen, not now not ever. No matter how bad spam gets nobody is going to pay a charge per message.
I don't find the 'well someone will work out a way to collect the payments' cuts it either. I have been doing Micropayments for almost ten years, I have discussed them at length with the people who have tried to deploy. I don't think we are any closer - and no Ron and Silvo's peppercorn scheme isn't the answetr either. The closest to a micropayment scheme that works is the Lamport Hash chain, (Torben Pederson's phone tick modus, Ron's Payword), but those won't work in this case.
It is oracle without the obsolete relational object model and the seven to eight figure price tag.
Yes, they are both run by complete and total shits.
Scumware is a major problem in its own right. One of the rising vectors for scumware is spam. People are sent spam with active-x components, javascript exploits etc. that try to install the scumware without notifying the user. [Yes toto, they do do that even though they claim that they don't]. Alternatively the user is sent to a web page which tried to download the component.
The interesting question to me is how these scumware companies make money. Selling demographic information can be profitable, but the figures don't add up. How can it be profitable to spend $3 a user to install a component? Net advertsing is in a slump, few sites can cover their costs. How on earth can the scumware vendors with disreputable business practices get advertisers in this market?
Something does not ad up here.
Which indicates that like most of the idiots who are proposing these types of hack-back schemes you have not bothered to even try to understand the full problem.
A bulk mailer is a program that sends out mail in bulk. A bulk mailer can be used to send spam but not all bulk mail is spam. One of the largest bulk mailers on the internet is C|Net which sends out a billion pieces of mail a year. Other bulk mailers include American express and United Airlines, all of which send 100% opted in messages to their customers who requested them.
will want to modify his software to drop slow connections, he often doesn't have control over the SMTP server he is using. It may belong to his ISP, or be an open relay.
Very few of the spam senders are using open relays these days. Most have their own dedicated connections. ISPs who block outgoing port 25 usually implement rate limiting as well.
Put the bullshit aside. Spam Bayes is not infallible, it is a guess. It is not a good idea to select hack-back targets by guessing.
My company does managed security services. A huge proportion of attacks turn out to be hack-back attempts gone wrong.
The problem of spam is minor compared to the problem of chronic unreliability that half baked anti-spam schemes are creating in the email system. Ten years ago you used email because it was reliable, not any more.
I started using it because some customers would mailbomb remote users
Outgoing rate limitations are one thing. Teergrubbing is completely different. What is needed however is fixing the SMTP protocol to deal with mail bombing. Add a refused code to the SMTP protocol so that a mail server knows that the recipient is not going to accept further mails from an abuser
I mean that I simply don't believe that crappy heuristics are accurate enough to use to target attacks. Paul Graham's claim of zero false positives is simply not credible when you compare his claims against the prior experience of using naive (and not so naive) Bayesian filtering.
So don't imagine for a second that this plan to hurt spamers is not going to backfire on people who are neither spam senders or run misconfigured email relays. This plan is not going to hurt a single spam sender, competent bulk email software has always ontained measures to abandon attempts to connect to slow hosts.
If the fantasyland claims about the effectiveness of filtering technology were true spam would be an easily solved problem. Unfortunately the MIT conference had only two decent research papers on applying Bayesian filtering to spam, this despite the fact that these were the only solutions papers selected - Judge, Shein and Berkowitz were providing informal descriptions of the problem and not solutions. The first was the talk by the Microsoft research group guy who set out the way to measure the effectiveness of spam detection algorithms. The second was the talk by the MIT undergrad on his class project which was the only one that presented actual comparative data. Unsurprisingly to those of us who have worked on Bayesian approaches to events data in the past the results were considerably mixed. In the end it turned out that the most effective scheme was to use least squares fit rather than the Baysian stuff and the most effective technique turned out to be to look at the message headers rather than the content.
And about bulk mailers aborting on slow connections, isn't that the point? Hasn't the throttling software just succeeded by stopping 1 or more spams?
No the point of teergrubbing is to try to hurt the spam sender. As I showed it does not hurt the spam sender at all. You can stop the spam by simply aborting the connection on the server side so no teergrubbing does nothing to stop spam, the premise the scheme starts from is that you already have a mechanism that does that.
Ultimately this proposal is simply another well intentioned scheme by someone who simply can't see or does not care that their half-baked idea might backfire baddly and create more problems than it solves. It is the same sort of thinking that is behind the idots who run SPEWS. I was at a recent meeting of the top ISPs to discuss the spam problem, turned out that everyone of them had been listed on SPEWS. So 70%++ of the US Internet population has been b,ocked by SPEWS how can people claim that there is NO collateral damage with a straight face? Oh yes that's right they don't answer anything they are completely unaccountable. And yes contrary to the lies put out on the SPEWS site they do list for frivolous reasons, one of the things that can get you listed on SPEWS is simply complaining about them.
As with all vigilante actions, it works pretty well if only the bad guys get a lynching.
The problem with these teergrubbing type schemes is that they typically only hurt the innocent victims caught by accident. It is very unlikely that a bulk email sender program does not have code in it to detect slow connections and abort. Otherwise the bulk sender is going to fail at the least network problem.
Bulk senders are in any case coded with multiple threads, either by using a threads package like pthreads or in some cases the threading is simulated by maintaining a state machine for each connection. The teergrubbing scheme described only causes pain if the bulk sender is single threaded and blocks when connecting to a single slow server.
Vigilante hacking frequently goes wrong. Coupling a vigilantge hacking scheme up to a heuristic detection scheme is pure stupidity.
Nah, you will have to do better than that, Mutlu would have said something more like 'these transparent lies only reveal your bottomless stupidity.'
The EFF only have half the story. The person 'working' for AT&T who called himself Hasan Mutlu was connected to the plot. However Mutlu was not his real name and AT&T was unaware that he was working for them. Mutlu was not acting alone there were several people involved including co-conspirators in England and Germany.
That is why the serdar argic posts were created at a far faster rate than the Mutlu posts.
"Mutlu" disappeared after certain inconsistencies were pointed out to the INS as did 'CoSar' who was alleged to be the sysop.
Actually some versions of code red did have code to detect the language that a site's web pages were in and trashed the site if it wasn't in Chineese. Then a few days after this was discovered a second verison of the same worm appeared which did the opposite. Code Red hit at the time that the US spy plane was forced down in China.
There are plenty of examples of politically motivated hacking, the Palestinians and Israelis have been having an ongoing proxy war for some time. However almost all the events appear to be the work of independent agents working on their own rather than being coordinated cyber-warfare.
The only example of state sponsored cyberwarfare I am aware of is the attacks on Usenet by Hasan B-) Mutlu and Serdar Argic who roboposted thousands of anti-armenian propaganda messages. Mutlu and Argic were both pseudonyms used by an officer of thr turkish intelligence service which was concerned that reports on the Turkish massacre of Armenians during world war I were circulating on Usenet and damaging the image of Turkey abroad at a time when the post USSR CIS was fragmenting into racial warfare. So they roboposted claims of a bogus masacre of turks by armenians repeatedly in order to drown out and discredit the genuine claims that the turks massacred the armenians.
Nothing, sound is now considered to be part of the basic PC motherboard package, as is USB, firewire, the PS/2 rodent and keyboard connectors and at least one ethernet connection.
Unless a motherboard is aimed at the server segment alone, sound and graphics are going to be part of the basic package by the time the grantsdale motherboards come on stream. Sound is going to mean stereo and 5.1 dolby digital. Graphics is going to mean the legacy analog 15 pin plug and a DVI plug as basic with TV-out and TV-in being common.
I don't think that many people are going to be asking 'how can I plug my PCI card into my PCI-Express motherboard'. Most features you had to buy a PCI card for in the past are already available on the motherboard.
I think that folk on slashdot are missing the fact that the principal movement going on here is that the PC is becomming a home appliance rather than office equipment. Unless you are writing video games or such there is no reason why you should need an expansion slot today in an office PC.
The biggest single limitation in the current PC design is the mechanical form factor, in particular the way that the design places expansion boards at right angles to the motherboard so the basic PC ends up being at least 5" thick with 7" or more being more common. That is deadly if what you are trying to do is to provide a sleek unit that will sit underneath the VCR and receiver in a HiFi / Home video tower.
To create a slimline PC today you have to do one of two things, either you put in a riser board and crank the PCI slots at right angles or you do without expansion slots altogether. The riser board solution is pretty icky, its basically limited to 2 cards worth and you have a fragile mechanical connection.
A much better solution would be to get rid of the PCI expansion slot part of the motherboard entirely. make a cut out in the motherboard the way a large PCATX board has a cut out for the power supply. Then connect the expansion cards in via an edce connector the way that PCMCIA cards do. That way you get the convenience of PCMCIA without the power constraints imposed by limited cooling.
Oh I will be polite, if the other person is polite. All my numbers are on the state do not call list. If you call me you are breaking the law.
However if your girlfired makes an unsolicited call to my home phine number I fully reserve the right to tell her what a complete and utter piece of crap she is and ask her if she took that job because she was too ugly to make it as a streetwalker.
It takes like 2 extra seconds of your day to be polite.
Being polite has no deterent effect. Being psychologically vicious has 1) a deterent effect, 2) imposes a cost on the service by reducing the number of calls the canvaser can make 3) increases the staff turnover rate of the telemarketer.