Good point, but somewhere along the road the DSL ISP, cable company, or dialup ISP is going to have a router which really -SHOULD- know what a valid IP address range is for the computers downstream from it. Therefore it should at least be able to eliminate packets which claim to be originating from locations other than these. This would at least force people doing IP spoofing attacks to use IP ranges inside their segment, which makes it a lot easier to figure out than packets which might have come from 'anywhere on the internet'.
I have yet another 'horror story' to relate, though it ended happily. There was a domain two of my friends and I greatly desired. It was unregistered. We submitted our registration for it, and was told during the time our registration request was being processed, that the domain had just been purchased! It was by a domain prospector who was selling it for $15000. I found it very suspicious that a domain that had been unregistered would -suddenly- just be registered right when we requested it. It could have been coincidence. It could have been either an individual or NSI itself getting kickbacks from the domain prospectors (Aka, leaching vermin) for tipping them off on domain requests prior to their being processed.
Anyway, on the bright side of this, after several emails expressing our irritation to both the domain prospecting company and NSI, the domain prospectors agreed to give us back the name. (Something which surprised the heck out of me.) It really wasn't that great a name, I guess they figured it wasn't worth the hassle.
As some people here have pointed out this is both good and bad. It's good from the perspective of the individual who registers a domain name to run his personal web site off of, and who happens to end up with a name that is trademarked or ends up being trademarked. I certainly dislike companies strong arming individuals out of their domain names with lawyers. (I think, in a good percentage of cases, if the company contacted the individual owning the domain and offered fair recompense in exchange for the domain, instead of immediately serving a cease and desist notice, they would get a much warmer response, and probably for less than the lawyer fees!)
The decision has a bad side however because it means it is more difficult to wrest control of domain names from parasitical domain name registration companies that register mass blocks of domains and sell them for outrageous prices. Companies may be able to afford the markup, but individuals certainly can not. I really wish something would/could be done about companies like that, they provide no services, they just leech off the system.
Yup. Anyone who enters a lot of numeric data pretty quickly finds that one hand over the numeric keypad allows you to enter data -much- faster than the regular number keys. I worked for a summer at a reception desk, and had to process requests from clients, each of which needed to be assigned a lot of very long numbers. My job would have been a lot slower without the keypad...
My understanding is that there is a great deal of tectonic activity on titan due to tidal forces exerted by Saturn... the result is a great deal of heat. The investigation of thermal vents on earth has led to the discovery of life in extremely high temperature conditions (and some scientists now suspect these conditions may have been the origination of life on earth), leading to the hypothesis that similar conditions might exist on Titan. Hence, there may in fact be life on Titan.
Can anyone provide more details on the purpose of the explosive device they through overboard after the recovery was? I find it difficult to believe they wanted to use this to locate the capsule. That would seem like it would put the astronaut's life in considerable jeopardy? Why not use some kind of flare?
I was trying to think of explanations for it and the only thing I could come up with was that they wanted the capsule destroyed in case the Soviet's attempted to recover it? But I don't really know how much real 'secret' technology was on the thing at the time. Was their anything to protect? Not a lot of electronics. Maybe the metal alloys of the pod, but I don't think these would be too secret?
Anyway, if anyone knows the answer, I'm curious to hear it.
I always thought it would be kinda neat to have one of those little training droids around to fry mosquitos.:> Great thing to have around the cottage or camp fire, it can just float around and fry any of the the little buggers that come inside a certain perimeter. All we need is anti-gravity...:)
The Minolta RD-175 probably qualifies as a 'mid range' digital camera (last time I priced it, almost a year ago, it was $7,500 Canadian) and it uses a 3 CCD architecture. It's in an SLR body, so it can take pretty much the whole range of Minolta SLR lenses. It's a decent camera, pretty steep price tag still though for anyone who is simply looking to take a few quick photos for their web page... You can look at it at: http://www.minoltausa.com/mainframe.asp?productID= 87&whichProductSection=1&whichSection=2
Can someone 'in the know' clarify for me when a statement becomes potentially liable as "defamation"?
I understand it has to be 'published' materials, and I assume there has to be some component of the statement that can be empirically shown to be false? (And also that the person making the statement can be reasonably shown to have known the statement was false? Not sure about that part, but I assume so...)
Is there a spoken defamation component?
Some examples:
"Company XYZ sucks because their product breaks."
Well, maybe I bought 3 widgets from them, and all three broke down. But for most everyone else they work fine. Is XYZ being defamed because I say they suck?
I'm curious as to how precisely this can co-exist with free speech laws. There seems to be a lot of hazy cases. Clearly if I said about my neighbour, "He tortures small animals." And published it in the newspaper it would be a case of defamation, plain and simple... but if I'm talking about my experiences with XYZ's products, and my opinions of their quality... I don't see how this can be defamation, as it is something of a 'subjective' area.
Anyway, if anyone has the exact details, or knows links to the resources which have details I'd be interested to know.
I have to agree it's too pricey. I'm a student. I can't justify $125 before travel expenses to attend something like this, though I certainly would like to. Let's see, go to linux conference or eat next month. Tough choice!
I think they need to bump their student rates down considerably. Oh well.
I wondered about this as well. With a drive of this kind of capacity I would think doing FAT lookups would be just brutal. Already for most servers it's better to go with 3x9 gig drives then buy 1 27 gig drive, and use striping. It's an awful lot of data to lose if your 200 gig drive fails! (Of course, you can always mirror...) I'm beginning to think we're starting to push the boundaries of magnetic storage as far as they can be usefully stretched. Well. Perhaps not.
I suppose it should also be examined that a higher density doesn't necessarily mean they'll build a hard disk of that capacity - they could just make existing hard disk capacities, 9 gig, 20 gig etc. on hard drives that are physically a whole lot smaller! Of course, I wonder what the new system for aligning the heads does to power consumption... it would be nice to get 20 gig laptop hard disks.:) Hmm, it'd be nice to have a laptop, period.:)
Something I've thought about as drives get larger would be dividing the FAT and data segments. Use solid state circuitry to store the fat - instantaneous lookups - and then the platter holds only data. This way, the heads don't have to scan back and forth while doing lookups. But, what do I know?:)
Well, some good points were certainly made here but I think something has been missed... Many people have (or will have) DVD drives in their computer/anyway/ for games and so on, where as they may not have a seperate DVD movie player. Why buy two when you can do it all with one? Obviously for those on an unlimited budget it's better to buy a seperate unit for television and so on... but, being in the student category, that's not me.:) I'd be far more likely to buy a DVD drive for my computer for data discs than I would buying a DVD player for just watching movies. I'd run it through the hardware decoder then use the analog NTSC out to my television, or I assume I could watch it in a window on my monitor. Since my stereo is also plugged into my computer... Well, I'd need to get a new one that could do Dolby Digital, but still. You can do software decoding of course. I don't have first hand experience running this. I would/assume/ it's pretty CPU intensive decoding MPEG audio and video streams. So if you don't have SMP and you want to do something useful with your computer while watching the movie... Of course, this is dependant on having computer and television in reasonably close proximity... but conveniently enough, my TV room is also my server room. Still, I'd have to agree this falls under the category of 'geek toy'. I can't really see hardware mpeg becoming something the average user will have in their PC's anytime soon, unless the chips somehow become inexpensive enough graphic card manufacturers start throwing them on for nothing. Cheers, Obasan
I'm in Toronto as well. Very recently moved here and was looking at both Bell's ADSL service and Rogers@Home. I eventually went with the latter, and have been very happy with it.
They have a 'self install' option which is _free_ if you don't need an ethernet card. The techinician came, dropped off the cable modem and tested the line, and didn't come within 10 feet of my computer - just how I like it. I plugged my machine in, and presto. I have been quite impressed with transfer rates. I don't run web service/ftp service from my machine except to share specific files to friends, and most of them are on modems so we can't really test upload bandwidth. Downloads are normally in the range of 50KBytes/s, sometimes as high as 80, sometimes as low as 20.
I have only one or two beefs about this service. 1) You need to have the hostname of your computer set to some ridiculous code they give you otherwise the service won't function. Bleah. But not a big deal to me.
2) Due to certain users being too stupid to figure out how to use windows sharing properly, they felt it necessary to 'protect' their customers by blocking ports 137 and 139, so windows networking is quite impossible. I never even noticed this however until a fellow employee with the service asked if I could help her map drives. When I went over and checked out her Rogers connection and couldn't figure out what was wrong I called them and they confirmed they were filtering those ports.
They use DHCP, and like most cable companies probably most people you talk to on the tech support side won't have a fargin' clue what your talking about if you ask about static IP's.:P Don't expect 'clueful' support. These are big bureaucracies breaking into a (for them) new market. Trouble is to be expected... Still, compared to the nightmare I had dealing with Cogeco in Kingston... I'm quite happy with the service.
The biggest problem I'd see with this is slow speed. CDRom drives have terrible seek time compared to hard disks, no matter what that the 'spin multiplier' says on the packaging. Sure, they can read a lot of data if the data requested happens to be neatly aligned along the tracks... but, on a web site chances are people are going to be hitting left right and center, meaning your cdrom will spend most of it's time seeking back and forth, not moving data. You could resolve this by putting a gig of ram in the machine and caching the whole CDrom or running a ramdisk, but... why?:) Just jumper the hard disk read only if you really feel paranoid. As to CDROM based distros. I ran Red Hat 4.2 for a while with only a 12 meg hard disk footprint; lilo, the kernel, very base utilities etc. My entire/usr tree was mounted from cdrom. Not exactly what your looking for, but really if you want features like logging and so on you at the very least need to provide writeable hard disk space for/var! Cheers...
I have heard, though it is second hand, that Intel is employing two fellows in Ottawa to work on porting the Linux kernel to operate on the Merced platform. Maybe someone else has more information on this? It's from a source I trust, but as I said, I don't have the info first hand, nor a link to it...
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, but somewhere along the road the DSL ISP, cable company, or dialup ISP is going to have a router which really -SHOULD- know what a valid IP address range is for the computers downstream from it. Therefore it should at least be able to eliminate packets which claim to be originating from locations other than these. This would at least force people doing IP spoofing attacks to use IP ranges inside their segment, which makes it a lot easier to figure out than packets which might have come from 'anywhere on the internet'.
I have yet another 'horror story' to relate, though it ended happily. There was a domain two of my friends and I greatly desired. It was unregistered. We submitted our registration for it, and was told during the time our registration request was being processed, that the domain had just been purchased! It was by a domain prospector who was selling it for $15000. I found it very suspicious that a domain that had been unregistered would -suddenly- just be registered right when we requested it. It could have been coincidence. It could have been either an individual or NSI itself getting kickbacks from the domain prospectors (Aka, leaching vermin) for tipping them off on domain requests prior to their being processed.
Anyway, on the bright side of this, after several emails expressing our irritation to both the domain prospecting company and NSI, the domain prospectors agreed to give us back the name. (Something which surprised the heck out of me.) It really wasn't that great a name, I guess they figured it wasn't worth the hassle.
As some people here have pointed out this is both good and bad. It's good from the perspective of the individual who registers a domain name to run his personal web site off of, and who happens to end up with a name that is trademarked or ends up being trademarked. I certainly dislike companies strong arming individuals out of their domain names with lawyers. (I think, in a good percentage of cases, if the company contacted the individual owning the domain and offered fair recompense in exchange for the domain, instead of immediately serving a cease and desist notice, they would get a much warmer response, and probably for less than the lawyer fees!)
The decision has a bad side however because it means it is more difficult to wrest control of domain names from parasitical domain name registration companies that register mass blocks of domains and sell them for outrageous prices. Companies may be able to afford the markup, but individuals certainly can not. I really wish something would/could be done about companies like that, they provide no services, they just leech off the system.
Yup. Anyone who enters a lot of numeric data pretty quickly finds that one hand over the numeric keypad allows you to enter data -much- faster than the regular number keys. I worked for a summer at a reception desk, and had to process requests from clients, each of which needed to be assigned a lot of very long numbers. My job would have been a lot slower without the keypad...
My understanding is that there is a great deal of tectonic activity on titan due to tidal forces exerted by Saturn... the result is a great deal of heat. The investigation of thermal vents on earth has led to the discovery of life in extremely high temperature conditions (and some scientists now suspect these conditions may have been the origination of life on earth), leading to the hypothesis that similar conditions might exist on Titan. Hence, there may in fact be life on Titan.
Can anyone provide more details on the purpose of the explosive device they through overboard after the recovery was? I find it difficult to believe they wanted to use this to locate the capsule. That would seem like it would put the astronaut's life in considerable jeopardy? Why not use some kind of flare?
I was trying to think of explanations for it and the only thing I could come up with was that they wanted the capsule destroyed in case the Soviet's attempted to recover it? But I don't really know how much real 'secret' technology was on the thing at the time. Was their anything to protect? Not a lot of electronics. Maybe the metal alloys of the pod, but I don't think these would be too secret?
Anyway, if anyone knows the answer, I'm curious to hear it.
I always thought it would be kinda neat to have one of those little training droids around to fry mosquitos. :> Great thing to have around the cottage or camp fire, it can just float around and fry any of the the little buggers that come inside a certain perimeter. All we need is anti-gravity... :)
(Mmm... anti-gravity...)
The Minolta RD-175 probably qualifies as a 'mid range' digital camera (last time I priced it, almost a year ago, it was $7,500 Canadian) and it uses a 3 CCD architecture. It's in an SLR body, so it can take pretty much the whole range of Minolta SLR lenses. It's a decent camera, pretty steep price tag still though for anyone who is simply looking to take a few quick photos for their web page... You can look at it at: http://www.minoltausa.com/mainframe.asp?productID= 87&whichProductSection=1&whichSection=2
I agree. The Cantina song was ok, but this one was great! :>
I understand it has to be 'published' materials, and I assume there has to be some component of the statement that can be empirically shown to be false? (And also that the person making the statement can be reasonably shown to have known the statement was false? Not sure about that part, but I assume so...)
Is there a spoken defamation component?
Some examples:
"Company XYZ sucks because their product breaks."
Well, maybe I bought 3 widgets from them, and all three broke down. But for most everyone else they work fine. Is XYZ being defamed because I say they suck?
I'm curious as to how precisely this can co-exist with free speech laws. There seems to be a lot of hazy cases. Clearly if I said about my neighbour, "He tortures small animals." And published it in the newspaper it would be a case of defamation, plain and simple... but if I'm talking about my experiences with XYZ's products, and my opinions of their quality... I don't see how this can be defamation, as it is something of a 'subjective' area.
Anyway, if anyone has the exact details, or knows links to the resources which have details I'd be interested to know.
Obasan
I think they need to bump their student rates down considerably. Oh well.
Obasan
I suppose it should also be examined that a higher density doesn't necessarily mean they'll build a hard disk of that capacity - they could just make existing hard disk capacities, 9 gig, 20 gig etc. on hard drives that are physically a whole lot smaller! Of course, I wonder what the new system for aligning the heads does to power consumption... it would be nice to get 20 gig laptop hard disks. :) Hmm, it'd be nice to have a laptop, period. :)
Something I've thought about as drives get larger would be dividing the FAT and data segments. Use solid state circuitry to store the fat - instantaneous lookups - and then the platter holds only data. This way, the heads don't have to scan back and forth while doing lookups. But, what do I know? :)
Obasan
Well, some good points were certainly made here but I think something has been missed... Many people have (or will have) DVD drives in their computer /anyway/ for games and so on, where as they may not have a seperate DVD movie player. Why buy two when you can do it all with one? Obviously for those on an unlimited budget it's better to buy a seperate unit for television and so on... but, being in the student category, that's not me. :) I'd be far more likely to buy a DVD drive for my computer for data discs than I would buying a DVD player for just watching movies. I'd run it through the hardware decoder then use the analog NTSC out to my television, or I assume I could watch it in a window on my monitor. Since my stereo is also plugged into my computer... Well, I'd need to get a new one that could do Dolby Digital, but still. You can do software decoding of course. I don't have first hand experience running this. I would /assume/ it's pretty CPU intensive decoding MPEG audio and video streams. So if you don't have SMP and you want to do something useful with your computer while watching the movie... Of course, this is dependant on having computer and television in reasonably close proximity... but conveniently enough, my TV room is also my server room. Still, I'd have to agree this falls under the category of 'geek toy'. I can't really see hardware mpeg becoming something the average user will have in their PC's anytime soon, unless the chips somehow become inexpensive enough graphic card manufacturers start throwing them on for nothing. Cheers, Obasan
They have a 'self install' option which is _free_ if you don't need an ethernet card. The techinician came, dropped off the cable modem and tested the line, and didn't come within 10 feet of my computer - just how I like it. I plugged my machine in, and presto. I have been quite impressed with transfer rates. I don't run web service/ftp service from my machine except to share specific files to friends, and most of them are on modems so we can't really test upload bandwidth. Downloads are normally in the range of 50KBytes/s, sometimes as high as 80, sometimes as low as 20.
I have only one or two beefs about this service. 1) You need to have the hostname of your computer set to some ridiculous code they give you otherwise the service won't function. Bleah. But not a big deal to me.
2) Due to certain users being too stupid to figure out how to use windows sharing properly, they felt it necessary to 'protect' their customers by blocking ports 137 and 139, so windows networking is quite impossible. I never even noticed this however until a fellow employee with the service asked if I could help her map drives. When I went over and checked out her Rogers connection and couldn't figure out what was wrong I called them and they confirmed they were filtering those ports.
They use DHCP, and like most cable companies probably most people you talk to on the tech support side won't have a fargin' clue what your talking about if you ask about static IP's. :P Don't expect 'clueful' support. These are big bureaucracies breaking into a (for them) new market. Trouble is to be expected... Still, compared to the nightmare I had dealing with Cogeco in Kingston... I'm quite happy with the service.
Obasan
The biggest problem I'd see with this is slow speed. CDRom drives have terrible seek time compared to hard disks, no matter what that the 'spin multiplier' says on the packaging. Sure, they can read a lot of data if the data requested happens to be neatly aligned along the tracks... but, on a web site chances are people are going to be hitting left right and center, meaning your cdrom will spend most of it's time seeking back and forth, not moving data. You could resolve this by putting a gig of ram in the machine and caching the whole CDrom or running a ramdisk, but... why? :) Just jumper the hard disk read only if you really feel paranoid. As to CDROM based distros. I ran Red Hat 4.2 for a while with only a 12 meg hard disk footprint; lilo, the kernel, very base utilities etc. My entire /usr tree was mounted from cdrom. Not exactly what your looking for, but really if you want features like logging and so on you at the very least need to provide writeable hard disk space for /var! Cheers...
I have heard, though it is second hand, that Intel is employing two fellows in Ottawa to work on porting the Linux kernel to operate on the Merced platform. Maybe someone else has more information on this? It's from a source I trust, but as I said, I don't have the info first hand, nor a link to it...