I am looking into wiring the office with RFID readers and equipping the engineers with RFID tags that will allow them to beep in and out of the office. Without a valid tag, the doors would not unlock. I've seen this done with smart cards previously, but would like to do it with a more lightweight technology.
The most obvious security risk is that someone steals a tag and enters the premises unnoticed. But there are others that I worry about. Stuff like the ease of replicating an RFID tag or even a hacker passively reading a tag in public then recreating it and gaining access.
I understand the problems many people have with RFID, especially stuff like tracking of purchased items and the like, but I'm more interested in using it for security clearances. Unfortunately, the web is not full of information about this (whereas it is full of information about how RFID is a privacy threat). More information about the practical uses of RFID would be greatly desired.
Just the name brings back memories
on
Cray XT-3 Ships
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In this day and age of very fast computers and clusters built in our basements, there sometimes comes along a story that whispers of the computing age of days long past. Cray is one of those names that can drop a jaw just by the mere utteration of the name.
The name is synonymous with speed and power and the unwillingness to cut corners in order to shave a few dollars off the final product. When you buy a Cray, you know you are getting top of the line hardware.
It looks like Sandia wants to build the fastest supercomputer in the world by clustering a few of these monsters, and I have no doubt that they will. Looks like more fun articles about this in the future.:-D
There are two prominent applications for these machines. The first is nuclear weapons simulation. Personally, I don't see the point to that. The other application is in weather prediction. By feeding in current weather variables into a well-written model, a supercomputer is able to predict to a large degree of accuracy the future weather. Such an application will always be welcome.
I think I'm going to have to fire up the old ][e, the nostalgia is killing me!
The reason they, and the rest of the IETF rejected the original Sender ID proposal was because it seemed to go out on its own track with no regard for other schemes that do similar work. To have incorporated and accepted Sender ID at that time would have meant that other ideas like SPF would have been left by the wayside and Microsoft's vision of email would be dominant.
That whole thing was rejected, thankfully.
Now, Microsoft seems to have actually taken a look at the concerns surrounding their original proposal and formulated a new Sender ID scheme that is inclusive of other existing schemes such as SPF. AOL put a lot of effort in developing this kind of technology and now Microsoft's proposal finally includes them too.
What it sounds like from the Yahoo article is that Microsoft's Sender ID is at best a superset of all authentication schemes and at worst a compatible, though competing, technology. Neither of those are bad things. I think AOL realizes this for what it is, Microsoft actually trying to do something useful to help the ailing email system.
The Sender ID scheme seems to allow for further developments that may or may not be based on Microsoft technology but still be fully compatible nonetheless.
Like providing drug dealers an untraceable line to conduct dealings? When is the last time anyone ever used a public telephone, with its disease-smeared receivers, for anything other than illicit activities?
But now we can download songs? Well! That's something new and useless. Why would I want to do that when I could 1) do it at home more easily or 2) do it at a record store with more selection?
Like many "dot com" ideas, it's a solution looking for a problem.
Basically, Sharp has decided that the PDA market is not expanding fast enough to allow room for more than three fundamentally different platforms in the handheld space. Microsoft pushes the PocketPC. Palm has their little OS. And Sharp was the Linux holdout. I guess there were others like the BlackBerry, but in terms of market size they are non-starters.
But with the market reaching saturation, the only thing Sharp can do, really, is get the hell out and cut their losses. This C3000 is the last in their series.
BUT!! Look for more feature-filled Sharp phones in the future. The cellular phone market is still expanding and the 3G Smartphone/Featurephone market is largely untapped so far. It doesn't take a genius to see how moving the PDA OS to a smaller form factor which EVERYONE wants is good business sense.
The thing you want to ask yourself now is whether getting a pretty nice PDA now is worth it considering you won't have any support for it after a year.
This jives with the latest research that shows that most earthquake activity not related to volcanic activity occurs primarily during full moons.
A little background is probably necessary to explain that non-sequitor.
Einstein predicted that energy can have a gravitational field. This is a direct result of his calculations of General Relativity. Photons, though having no mass, have energy called quanta. Each quanta exerts a very small gravitational force due to GR.
During a full moon, more photons are emitted by the moon (reflected, actually) and thus the moon has a slightly greater gravitational pull during full moons than new moons (where it has very low gravitational force, relatively).
It's interesting to note that the last large earthquake in the Pacific Rim region was predicted to occur in California a month or two ago, but actually it occurred in East Asia, clear on the other side of the Pacific plate. Why? Well, the full moon was on that side of the world during night time causing large changes in the tides.
If this is true, this could lead to a breakthrough in earthquake prediction as well as damage minimization.
My niece was killed by a flying lawnmower when she was 4. The thing leapt off the ground after hitting a stump and the rotation of the blades created enough lift to set it into flight. You'd have expected the automatic cutoff to kill the motor, but my brother in law held on to the thing and it just took off. She was playing on the second floor balcony when my BIL and the mower caught her upside the temple. Took her scalp clean off.
She's better now, but those first few hours were pretty harrowing.
I too think that depletion of our planet's resources is a terrible thing that ought to be avoided. However, this is a gigantic planet. There are places on this globe where Man has yet to set foot, much less look upon with the naked eye.
To start trying to cut back our resource usage when we do not have a clear understanding of the true vastness of the Earth's resources is like pairing up a newbie programmer with an experienced programmer. The results are going to be fine, but it's going to take a hell of a lot longer and with a lot more frustration to do it that way rather than let the expert programmer go it alone. So too is America, the world's greatest consumer of resources, going to be hampered by any sort of "global" effort to stem resource consumption. Forget, of course, that America is also the world's leading producer of high-quality manufactured goods as well as agricultural goods.
In the end, the newbie programmer is only slightly better off but the whole project has been delayed by countless cycles because the slow guy was holding back the fast guy. Perhaps in a Rawlsian system of "justice" this kind of purposeful crippling of the leaders without a systematic way of boosting the losers, this might make sense. But from my perspective this is nothing more than an effort to cripple the American industrial engine and bring the American (along with the world) economy to a standstill.
Say you have a bank account. You are suddenly inundated with tons of cash (almost 2 billion dollars worth!) because you pimped yourself out. Then you stick all that cash in the bank account.
Even at a very low interest rate you can get a significant return on that money.
Obviously, you'd like to do stuff with it like buy jet planes for your managers and little stickers and baseball caps for your engineers, so your total return will be less than expected. But in the end, your huge pile of cash garners you a very nice gain just at basic interest rates. Couple that with some savvy investing (no-load mutual funds!) and you can have yourself quite a bit more "revenue" than before you sold yourself out.
Since it is only one type of molecule and only one molecule thick, the refractive index of the material would be constant. So if it had any color at all, it would be a constant color, not a rainbow like oil or a prism produces.
Something that small and fine could possibly become airborne and eventually irritate allergic responses.
Not to mention that consumption of the material could lead to carcinogenic effects.
Before we start throwing around phrases like "wonder material" and "the future is now", perhaps we should take a closer look at the health risks involved in making/using these practically invisible materials.
Not that they are making another Superman series, but that they are doing this with the full knowledge of the Superman curse.
I don't know who this latest guy is, he doesn't even warrant a picture in IMDB, but we'll soon be seeing him hiding in some bushes or thrown from a moving train or some other strange and inexplicable circumstance.
On top of that, the real Superman, Clark W. Kent, died in the comic books years ago. So did Bruce Wayne, the original Batman. Can't we just let these heroes among us pass in peace? Do we have to drag their dead carcasses out of the grave to squeeze just one more penny out of the franchise?
Obviously, the final application of this kind of technology is to allow the car to take primary control of the vehicle and let the passengers relax in peace.
We already have navigation systems that are accurate to within half a meter in many cities worldwide. We also have collision detection algorithms (aka hashing functions) that can help avoid crashing into other cars. We now can mount cameras onto vehicles to provide visual sensory input.
All we really need is an IR sensory input for fog driving.
In cities, this kind of "decide the destination" driving without the hassle of actually driving the vehicle would be really useful, I think.
"Listen up, Russia. You signed the Bourne treaty, so start living up to your side of the bargain by eradicating these large-scale piracy rings or face the coming winter without trade partners."
or
"Information wants to be Free! That CD wants to cost 15 bucks!"
or
"In Capitalist America, nubile faux-lesbian rock groups ignore YOU!"
Call me old-fashioned, but I really despise when "Intelligent Design" proponents pop up in threads like this. "See, the number of genes to work with is so much lower than you'd expect, so the complexity between each gene is more complex than chance would dictate. Ergo Something had to have designed it."
Please. I find that such distrust in the machinations of Nature itself shows us how narrow minded these "scientists" are. "I can't understand it, so God must have done it," essentially. This does not open the door to further research and understanding. On the contrary it closes the door because there is nothing more to be understood beyond "God did it".
Nature is a truly amazing thing. Evolution, Physics, Gravitation, the Stars, the Cells, everything is absolutely beautiful. Why the need to spoil Gaia with your imaginary friend?
So there couldn't be a slow buildout from high-population centers like NY or LA? I'd think that in those areas you'd be on par with cities like Seoul or Tokyo.
Are you kidding me? Why would the university be playing with live data in the first place? What kind of weak security system are they using in the second place.
I run FreeBSD at home and feel a little safer that a company (WindRiver) puts their reputation on the line with every installation of FreeBSD. But I wonder about other BSD systems that are more "Free" of commercial interests.
Slashdot Mirror
I am looking into wiring the office with RFID readers and equipping the engineers with RFID tags that will allow them to beep in and out of the office. Without a valid tag, the doors would not unlock. I've seen this done with smart cards previously, but would like to do it with a more lightweight technology.
The most obvious security risk is that someone steals a tag and enters the premises unnoticed. But there are others that I worry about. Stuff like the ease of replicating an RFID tag or even a hacker passively reading a tag in public then recreating it and gaining access.
I understand the problems many people have with RFID, especially stuff like tracking of purchased items and the like, but I'm more interested in using it for security clearances. Unfortunately, the web is not full of information about this (whereas it is full of information about how RFID is a privacy threat). More information about the practical uses of RFID would be greatly desired.
In this day and age of very fast computers and clusters built in our basements, there sometimes comes along a story that whispers of the computing age of days long past. Cray is one of those names that can drop a jaw just by the mere utteration of the name.
:-D
The name is synonymous with speed and power and the unwillingness to cut corners in order to shave a few dollars off the final product. When you buy a Cray, you know you are getting top of the line hardware.
It looks like Sandia wants to build the fastest supercomputer in the world by clustering a few of these monsters, and I have no doubt that they will. Looks like more fun articles about this in the future.
There are two prominent applications for these machines. The first is nuclear weapons simulation. Personally, I don't see the point to that. The other application is in weather prediction. By feeding in current weather variables into a well-written model, a supercomputer is able to predict to a large degree of accuracy the future weather. Such an application will always be welcome.
I think I'm going to have to fire up the old ][e, the nostalgia is killing me!
The reason they, and the rest of the IETF rejected the original Sender ID proposal was because it seemed to go out on its own track with no regard for other schemes that do similar work. To have incorporated and accepted Sender ID at that time would have meant that other ideas like SPF would have been left by the wayside and Microsoft's vision of email would be dominant.
That whole thing was rejected, thankfully.
Now, Microsoft seems to have actually taken a look at the concerns surrounding their original proposal and formulated a new Sender ID scheme that is inclusive of other existing schemes such as SPF. AOL put a lot of effort in developing this kind of technology and now Microsoft's proposal finally includes them too.
What it sounds like from the Yahoo article is that Microsoft's Sender ID is at best a superset of all authentication schemes and at worst a compatible, though competing, technology. Neither of those are bad things. I think AOL realizes this for what it is, Microsoft actually trying to do something useful to help the ailing email system.
The Sender ID scheme seems to allow for further developments that may or may not be based on Microsoft technology but still be fully compatible nonetheless.
Revision control via CVS, Subversion, or Clearcase!
Yes, that godforsaken piece of crap administrator's nightmare. That one is supported too.
I'm exaggerating a little, but not much. It's a love/hate relationship with that software.
Like providing drug dealers an untraceable line to conduct dealings? When is the last time anyone ever used a public telephone, with its disease-smeared receivers, for anything other than illicit activities?
But now we can download songs? Well! That's something new and useless. Why would I want to do that when I could 1) do it at home more easily or 2) do it at a record store with more selection?
Like many "dot com" ideas, it's a solution looking for a problem.
Basically, Sharp has decided that the PDA market is not expanding fast enough to allow room for more than three fundamentally different platforms in the handheld space. Microsoft pushes the PocketPC. Palm has their little OS. And Sharp was the Linux holdout. I guess there were others like the BlackBerry, but in terms of market size they are non-starters.
But with the market reaching saturation, the only thing Sharp can do, really, is get the hell out and cut their losses. This C3000 is the last in their series.
BUT!! Look for more feature-filled Sharp phones in the future. The cellular phone market is still expanding and the 3G Smartphone/Featurephone market is largely untapped so far. It doesn't take a genius to see how moving the PDA OS to a smaller form factor which EVERYONE wants is good business sense.
The thing you want to ask yourself now is whether getting a pretty nice PDA now is worth it considering you won't have any support for it after a year.
Perhaps we wouldn't have been in that kind of trouble if we hadn't been in Baghdad in the first place.
Technology is the least of our Middle East problems. Support for Israel may be the greatest cause of our problems.
This jives with the latest research that shows that most earthquake activity not related to volcanic activity occurs primarily during full moons.
A little background is probably necessary to explain that non-sequitor.
Einstein predicted that energy can have a gravitational field. This is a direct result of his calculations of General Relativity. Photons, though having no mass, have energy called quanta. Each quanta exerts a very small gravitational force due to GR.
During a full moon, more photons are emitted by the moon (reflected, actually) and thus the moon has a slightly greater gravitational pull during full moons than new moons (where it has very low gravitational force, relatively).
It's interesting to note that the last large earthquake in the Pacific Rim region was predicted to occur in California a month or two ago, but actually it occurred in East Asia, clear on the other side of the Pacific plate. Why? Well, the full moon was on that side of the world during night time causing large changes in the tides.
If this is true, this could lead to a breakthrough in earthquake prediction as well as damage minimization.
It's just a model airplane, not a real lawnmower.
My niece was killed by a flying lawnmower when she was 4. The thing leapt off the ground after hitting a stump and the rotation of the blades created enough lift to set it into flight. You'd have expected the automatic cutoff to kill the motor, but my brother in law held on to the thing and it just took off. She was playing on the second floor balcony when my BIL and the mower caught her upside the temple. Took her scalp clean off.
She's better now, but those first few hours were pretty harrowing.
I too think that depletion of our planet's resources is a terrible thing that ought to be avoided. However, this is a gigantic planet. There are places on this globe where Man has yet to set foot, much less look upon with the naked eye.
To start trying to cut back our resource usage when we do not have a clear understanding of the true vastness of the Earth's resources is like pairing up a newbie programmer with an experienced programmer. The results are going to be fine, but it's going to take a hell of a lot longer and with a lot more frustration to do it that way rather than let the expert programmer go it alone. So too is America, the world's greatest consumer of resources, going to be hampered by any sort of "global" effort to stem resource consumption. Forget, of course, that America is also the world's leading producer of high-quality manufactured goods as well as agricultural goods.
In the end, the newbie programmer is only slightly better off but the whole project has been delayed by countless cycles because the slow guy was holding back the fast guy. Perhaps in a Rawlsian system of "justice" this kind of purposeful crippling of the leaders without a systematic way of boosting the losers, this might make sense. But from my perspective this is nothing more than an effort to cripple the American industrial engine and bring the American (along with the world) economy to a standstill.
Before running out and stocking up on man-boobifier, please read up on estrogen.
Say you have a bank account. You are suddenly inundated with tons of cash (almost 2 billion dollars worth!) because you pimped yourself out. Then you stick all that cash in the bank account.
Even at a very low interest rate you can get a significant return on that money.
Obviously, you'd like to do stuff with it like buy jet planes for your managers and little stickers and baseball caps for your engineers, so your total return will be less than expected. But in the end, your huge pile of cash garners you a very nice gain just at basic interest rates. Couple that with some savvy investing (no-load mutual funds!) and you can have yourself quite a bit more "revenue" than before you sold yourself out.
Since it is only one type of molecule and only one molecule thick, the refractive index of the material would be constant. So if it had any color at all, it would be a constant color, not a rainbow like oil or a prism produces.
Something that small and fine could possibly become airborne and eventually irritate allergic responses.
Not to mention that consumption of the material could lead to carcinogenic effects.
Before we start throwing around phrases like "wonder material" and "the future is now", perhaps we should take a closer look at the health risks involved in making/using these practically invisible materials.
That writeup made me fall asleep. Literally.
I am writing this post while sleeping. So boring is this story.
Face it. Mergers and acquisitions happen all the time. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for the worse. Frankly, who cares?
Did I mention I was sleeping?
Reeve made Superman III and IV. I don't think he was too worried about diminishing the stature of the character.
Not that they are making another Superman series, but that they are doing this with the full knowledge of the Superman curse.
I don't know who this latest guy is, he doesn't even warrant a picture in IMDB, but we'll soon be seeing him hiding in some bushes or thrown from a moving train or some other strange and inexplicable circumstance.
On top of that, the real Superman, Clark W. Kent, died in the comic books years ago. So did Bruce Wayne, the original Batman. Can't we just let these heroes among us pass in peace? Do we have to drag their dead carcasses out of the grave to squeeze just one more penny out of the franchise?
Obviously, the final application of this kind of technology is to allow the car to take primary control of the vehicle and let the passengers relax in peace.
We already have navigation systems that are accurate to within half a meter in many cities worldwide. We also have collision detection algorithms (aka hashing functions) that can help avoid crashing into other cars. We now can mount cameras onto vehicles to provide visual sensory input.
All we really need is an IR sensory input for fog driving.
In cities, this kind of "decide the destination" driving without the hassle of actually driving the vehicle would be really useful, I think.
"Listen up, Russia. You signed the Bourne treaty, so start living up to your side of the bargain by eradicating these large-scale piracy rings or face the coming winter without trade partners."
or
"Information wants to be Free! That CD wants to cost 15 bucks!"
or
"In Capitalist America, nubile faux-lesbian rock groups ignore YOU!"
Call me old-fashioned, but I really despise when "Intelligent Design" proponents pop up in threads like this. "See, the number of genes to work with is so much lower than you'd expect, so the complexity between each gene is more complex than chance would dictate. Ergo Something had to have designed it."
Please. I find that such distrust in the machinations of Nature itself shows us how narrow minded these "scientists" are. "I can't understand it, so God must have done it," essentially. This does not open the door to further research and understanding. On the contrary it closes the door because there is nothing more to be understood beyond "God did it".
Nature is a truly amazing thing. Evolution, Physics, Gravitation, the Stars, the Cells, everything is absolutely beautiful. Why the need to spoil Gaia with your imaginary friend?
Isn't this just a collection of free software?
Why couldn't you just do an rpm -update -world and get those things yourself?
So there couldn't be a slow buildout from high-population centers like NY or LA? I'd think that in those areas you'd be on par with cities like Seoul or Tokyo.
But it doesn't seem to be the case.
Is there some sort of regulatory problem in America that restricts users to such low (25Mbps) DSL speeds?
Are you kidding me? Why would the university be playing with live data in the first place? What kind of weak security system are they using in the second place.
I run FreeBSD at home and feel a little safer that a company (WindRiver) puts their reputation on the line with every installation of FreeBSD. But I wonder about other BSD systems that are more "Free" of commercial interests.
While screenshots make for nice eyecandy, they tell you very little about an application.
Anyone can put together a fancy UI using a GUI builder, but the functionality behind that UI may not be in any working order.
Featurelists, buglists, and roadmap are the important items of documentation. Not screenshots.