There are some arguments against this: The Norwegian market is small (4.5 million people),
The biggest Norwegian operator (Telenor) has according to wikipedia 143 million subscribers
.
Does Norway have a lot of visitors, a very interesting phone/person ratio, or does Telenor provides service outside the country?
Telenor operates over much of Europe and Asia these days, through subsidiaries and such.
My point was just that enforcing competition is a good thing in the long term, even if the companies involved will complain a lot in the short term. The operators complained a lot when the reforms were implemented, but I don't think they would have been where they are today without being kicked away from their complacent near-monopoly status. Both the companies involved and the consumers (citizens) made a profit from the reforms. IMHO the same would have been true for the banking industry, even if they would have had to hire a lot of cobol programmers to implement bank account portability:P
I forgot to mention the website, it is http://www.telepriser.no./ Oh, and a more accessible site (English, worldwide) is http://www.yr.no/ probably the best weather forecast site on the net.
Since 2002 the "Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authority" has had a calculator offering much of the same for the Norwegian market. In addition to mobile phones it also covers telephony and broadband. Basically, all providers are required by law to provide their pricing structures to the authority, so that the services can be compared. For mobile phones this will involve entering your typical number of minutes (to other mobile phones and landlines), text messages, mms messages and kilobytes.
I'm sure someone will moan that this is socialism, since it is a service that could be offered by the market, or that people could do themselves, or that services such as this can never be efficient anyway. There are some arguments against this: The Norwegian market is small (4.5 million people), with lots of mountains and a low population density, and strict rules about required coverage by the licensees. Manpower is also extremely expensive, and most workers are members of a union. So, clearly, Norway should have really high prices, right?
Wrong - according to the calculator my mobile phone costs should be about 0,- every month, with a 0,- establishment fee for the contract. (About 100 outgoing text messages, 100 minutes outgoing, and 1mb. No mms messages)
Why is this? It is of course hard to find the "perfect truth", but here are some informed guesses: The market is very regulated, in order to enforce competition. Perhaps the most important (to the consumer) point of this is that you can move your phone number to any other operator, either for free or for some very small cost. While there are only three GSM licensees there are 16 or so "virtual operators", who operate by putting a box inside the switches of the GSM licensees, and basically resell their bandwidth. The authority is also able to punish any collusion between the operators, and to require changes in price structures between the operators.
Clearly, all this (regulated) competition is good for the Norwegian consumer, but is it good for the telecom companies? The biggest Norwegian operator (Telenor) has according to wikipedia 143 million subscribers, so clearly all this competition does something to the companies, which can't be all bad. Telenor used to be a state-owned monopoly, which was well known for being hugely inefficient and slow. In markets where there can only be a limited number of providers (such as bandwidth in the GSM bands) there is no natural encouragement for companies to become more efficient, if you want to make more money it is easy to just add another hidden fee. Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.
(The same system was implemented for electrical power providers, but it failed for the banking system - allowing people to move their account numbers between banks was evidently too expensive..)
On my last trip to South-East Asia I flew by way of Moscow. The longest leg was from Moscow to Bangkok, in some old Russian plane. I'm not sure which model, but it had something like 3 rows of seats, in a 3/4/3 configuration, with no overhead compartments above the middle row. During the flight I was wondering why the roof plates looked like they were crooked and not particularly regular, but I didn't think much of it.
That changed when the plane was landing. At first I thought people were applauding, which was a bit surprising, but then I realized that the sound was that of the entire roof shaking, you could actually see the roof plates moving against each other. The flight was certainly simple enough anyway, no entertainment and seats which could be folded forward.
Aeroflot, at least the international trips, is less scary than say Nepal Air though.. A few weeks after I flew Nepal Air out of Kathmandu I saw this quite believable story: http://news.airwise.com/story/view/1189004157.html
With 32gb cards weighting 0.5 grams one terabyte should require 32 cards, or 16 grams. 1024 terabytes should then weight 16384 grams, or a bit more than 16kg.
I don't think there is a storage media with higher density available commercially right now - and probably not until the 64GB microsd cards becomes available.
In Northern Europe the telecoms are forced (by regulation) to rent out space in the switches so that competitors can place their own equipment there. If you're not buying your internet from the "owner" of the telephone cable you pay less than $10 as a line rental fee in addition to whatever your provider charges.
It is the same with mobile phone services - the telecoms must share their network with competitors, and allow them to put their services on the network. This means that if you're a customer of a "virtual phone company" you might use the bandwidth of "big telecom X" until some box in their network, from there it is the virtual phone company which controls your call.
In addition, all providers of internet, mobile phone services and landline phone services (including IP telephony) have to provide their pricing and coverage information to a government run web site, so that it is really simple to check if there is a better deal on the market.
Of course all the providers are endlessly complaining, but the effect is that the market works, you get lots of providers, low prices and lots of services to differentiate, even out in the really really remote areas.
With working competition you only see transfer caps on services where it makes some sense, like during the daytime for internet by 3g. (And I could get up to 50mbit/10mbit for $60 a month if bothered to switch it seems.. I hadn't checked the pricing site in a few months.)
Sun has been making quite a bit of noise in the storage architecture world with their use of SSDs as intermediate cache to improve reading and writing speeds.
Basically, what Sun is claiming is that by adding a SSD cache layer you can improve IOPS by about 5x, for what amounts to a really small amount of money for say a 100tb system. This is being marketed quite heavily by Sun as well. (The numbers look convincing, and the prices for the Sun Storage servers are certainly very competitive, well, compared to say NetApp.)
IMHO this is just a repeat of the well known Microsoft tactic of spreading massive amounts of FUD about any competing technology that you can't reproduce yourself - you'll have to wait until Windows Server 2013 for this.
From the file "protip.txt" in the rapidshare archive:
account recognizes
b-day 2/11/64
ZIP code 99687
for password change.
The zip code is of course that of Wasilla, Alaska.
It would seem that the republican VP candidate is at least twice as security aware as Paris Hilton. Paris' had just one security question, the name of her dog (Tinkerbell), while Palin had two extremely obvious security questions.
Of course, two times "nothing much" is not a lot at all..
It works pretty well to send text messages to at least some Chinese mobile networks with Skype, but AFAIK the SMS option is not enabled in the Linux version yet.
Of course, you can't receive any answers, and you have to be online to send, so it is not really a perfect alternative.
I had the "flash crashes a lot problem", so I did some research.
My first try was to use ndiswrapper. This doesn't fix the problem, at best it makes the flash applet frame grey when it would have crashed the browser. Also, I'm not sure how it works with flash 10.
What solved my problems was to follow the update in bugreport 192888
i.e, remove libflashsupport, use the latest flash 10 beta and create a/etc/asound.conf as described in bug 198453
I've not had any browser crashes since doing this, so cross fingers. This is probably a very common problem..
On my travels I usually bring an old Fujitsu Biblo B2160 where I've replaced the internal drive with a 120gb disk, and a couple of backup hard drives (2.5" externals which run of usb power), one which I always keep in a "secret" compartment in my shoulder bag. The thinking behind this is that it doesn't really matter if I lose the notebook as long as I keep the pictures. Of course, if I was really worried I would probably bring a 20 pack of 9gb DVDs and burn copies of the pictures on those, then email them back. (You can pay to have your pictures written to DVD, or use an internet cafe somewhere)
I've used that computer in 5000m+ altitudes (16000 feet and more) - not at any of the basecamps to Everest, but then you'll probably be so dead tired from the altitude that you won't think of it, besides, I wouldn't trust the generators in the tent villages you stay in. (Going Lhasa -> Kathmandu is a great trip btw)
You should also look into having a zip lock bag of some kind for your notebook, that will keep the moisture out and might even keep the ants out if you go the rain forest.. I would also use a bit of padding around it, it doesn't have to be anything fancy, heavy bubble wrap and gaffer tape is good enough.
A suitable notebook shouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred usd used, buy two or three extra hard drives, and stock up on memory cards for places without power - it should be a lot less expensive than a more high-tech solution. (Some hostels in remote Tibetan villages might lack easily accessible power, but power is more common than running water in such places)
The only problem with cheap used computers is that they might not have usb2.0. That means emptying a 8gb memory card might take 2+ hours, even more if you take backups as you copy (you should do that). This has not been a problem for me, I just let it run overnight if necessary, but you might want to pay the extra money for usb2.0.
Together with the speaker on the wii-remote and the always-on nature of the wii it isn't really that far from a cordless IP phone. I doubt Nintendo would try to become a telecom, but "Nintendo Wiiphone provided by AT&T" might be a possibility. (How about a free wii with a 1 year service contract?)
It also seemed like it would come with Opera as default (The "It starts our Opera browser in seconds" comment during the presentation), so it might work as a simple web browser too. Add a google search box like Firefox has, and I can see that Nintendo could make a profit on providing free access to Nintendo Go - they wouldn't be dependent on a subscription model.
Overal I'm very impressed by the business sense of Nintendo, while Sony and Microsoft seems to compete on who can make the biggest loss Nintendo might steal the show.
With only 1500 votes cast per machine this would be a rather high risk / low reward way of cheating.. It is safe to assume that if it is worth switching the candidate (i.e. the candidate might win) the candidate would also be well known among the voters. So, chances are that at most a handful of voters would vote wrongly before it got discovered. (And then you might spend some quality time in an Indian prison! Who would want to miss that!;)
The Indian system seems easy to verify, if the software is just a few hundred lines of assembly each major party can hire their own team who can verify the software. Try that with the Diebold system.. There would never be any elections at all then.
Of course, the central counting office might still be compromised, but it seems this is made hard by simply following the old way of counting paper ballots. (I.e. looking at each machine as a ballot box)
Re:I respectfully disagree...with you.
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
That depends where you live - if you live somewhere with little or no personal rights and personal freedom, like China, you might have that problem.
Of course, in the free world it is different - I still remember visiting the secured server room of a governmental facility, it was behind a 24h staffed help desk and with signs outside forbidding the use of cameras and mobile phones. Of course, being young and naive I was surprised when I noticed that one of the helpdesk people was using a webcam to update the live feed on her private home page.
It is a clear sign of the paranoia of the old communist regimes that they considered everyone a criminal, ie making controll of photocopiers an important task in the old USSR.
Well, integrated chips such as the Samsung SIP (System-in-Package) is 17x17x1.4mm, in that space you get 256mbit of SDRAM and 256mbit of flash RAM and a 203Mhz ARM CPU.. And even that is on the very low end when you look at what future smartphones will require. Some info on SIP.
I believe the majority of new smartphones introduced this year will have a 2mp or more camera, 240x320 or better resolution, of course a reasonably capable TCP/IP stack for playing online games, 3D accelration, etc.. 100K of ram is not enough, and it hasn't been enough for years. (100K of RAM is about what you have in a modern low end Nokia phone sold in Europe, and that is clearly not a smartphone.)
So, it all comes down to which OS has the most features for the lowest price, and which fits on a computer that would have been considered high-end in the early '90s. If you start from scratch and plan to sell millions of your product, which you have to do to get a reasonable margin, using Linux is a rather obvious choice imho.
The current SCO group is just a renamed Caldera, which bought the Unix group from the old SCO, so it is wrong to say that "SCO didn't know what they bought", as the current SCO isn't the company which bought anything in the first place.
Actually, the current SCO is probably just the 5th owner of the very diluted "Unix licencing rights" - AT&T first sold it to USL (Unix System Labs), which was bought by Novell, which resold the licencing rights to the old SCO, which sold off parts of the company to Caldera, which rebranded itself "The SCO Group".
Of course, the current SCO management tries to confuse this issue, probably as they would rather have everyone forget all their contractual obligations with the previous owners.
1: The day before the alleged attack it was revealed that the "contigency agreement" with Boies (a very high profile lawyer) isn't really a contigency agreement at all, but a bonus on top of already very expensive fees.
The claims of Boies taking the case on contigency is one of the major reasjons for the SCOX market capitalizion to incerease by 20x since he was hired. (SCO is extremely dependent on their inflated stock price for survival)
2: SCO actually paid a PR firm to distribute their press release about the alleged attack - this might be a first by any company.
Now put 1 and 2 together and you get both a motive (get attention away from the Boies deal), and a method (fake a ddos attack, pay for a press release to be distributed).
Gimp-1.3.22 (what I had installed) has no problem either - it opens the example strip, and I can create a 262144x10 picture at least. A 262144x262144 RGB picture requires 512gig, that seems to be the limit. (That is 68 gigapixels btw)
I haven't tried the latest version of photoshop, but when working on 50+ megapixel pictures I found using Gimp under Linux a bit less of a pain than Photoshop under Windows.
What I would like to see is a competion for new ideas in user design - while it is simple to borrow features from existing interfaces (everyone does this), I would much rather see some truly new ideas. Preferrably as working demoes (say, implemented as an OpenGL application) or even HTML and javascript if you must, but still, something new would be nice.
I imagine most spammers have some kind of web page where you can order their "product". It would be rather simple to make something that filled in the form with a random name and random credit card number, then submited the form.
This would be rather effective if they paid a fee for each credit card validation and not each succesfull validation, but I'm not sure of the legality of this. (Of course, spam being international it could always be done from abroad)
My second thought is to see the spam as an order of "fill my http log with random binaries":
while: do
for a in/boot/vmlinuz
wget http://spam.me/$a
next done
(or similar)
A more ethical solution would be to start tracking who is the real "product provider" and their banking contact, then go after the banks - It would be very bad PR to have your bank associated with spammers in the media.
>How about, when they moved it to their PAY SITE, >which is what they did, they screwed up the >Index? >Oh wait, I forgot, everyone does their job >perfectly now except the current administration.
The index from the issue the removed article belongs to is still available: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/toc/ list/0,11627,1101980302,00.html
Of course, this could be the result of a technical bug - I just said it was unlikely. It would be strange for a bug to remove both the static file and the link from the index page for the issue, but sure, it is possible - believe that if that makes you feel better.
But I guess I'm typing to the void here.. Perhaps you could make a better argument for how a technical bug removing a single article is a much more probable reason than _any_ kind of human action?
Eh.. This was a single article from a collection of articles on a theme, and the other articles are still present. (According to the memoryhole page)
So, here are a few alternatives: 1. There is a in the Times archive which physically deletes random static pages. This is just a chance. 2. Somebody, purely on chance, deleted the file. 3. The removal was based on a request from the author, the previous Bush president. 4. The newspaper is afraid to annoy the current government, and is in the process of removing potentially offending articles. 5. The request came from the current government.
Imho the two first alternatives are highly unlikely, alternative 3 is somewhat manageable (old man Bush looking out for his delinquent son), if alternative 4 is true you have to ask "what is the newspaper afraid of?", and if alternative 5 is true you might have the answer.
Have Microsoft pay 20+ billion in cash from their "war chest", then reinvest the money in a mix of commercial Linux companies and a trust fund for developing GPL / OSS software.
Spending "only" 10 billion on developing Open Source software would have an enormous effect - imagine what could be done with the Gimp if you had 20 top developers working on improvements with long term contracts and no marketing pressure.
There is an interview about the latest 3D phone here:
page(EN)
Also check out this page, which has a drawing explaining how this works:
page(JP)
(I guess - it is in Japanese:)
As Sharp also has the Zaurus I'm waiting for a mobile phone with a 3D screen, running linux, and with a full keyboard - perhaps something similar to the C-760, only narrower. Oh, and dual 2mp cameras for taking 3D pictures.. (Sharp already has a 2mp mobile, so why not two of them.)
It might not fly in the US (lots of features = expensive), but I bet it would sell in Europe.. My mobile (a nokia 9210) is still retailing for 1000$ + without a subscription here.
Use something like the new Zalman case / CPU / cooling system (all passive): slashdot link, put a gigabit ethernet card in the computer, and boot over the network from a server on another flor. Or if you need very high latency use a ramdisk & network combination. No moveable parts -> no noise.
Of course, the Zalman case isn't released yet, but you can get nearly the same effect with current off-the-shelf-parts. Fanless PSUs are a bit expensive thought, and you might have to underclock a bit to get a passive cooling system efficient enough.. My passive solution worked well with Linux but crashed mysteriously with Windows98. (Windows98 not doing the hlt instruction.)
Oh, and those people pointing at M1000 based PCs and such are just silly - even if the CPU doesn't have a fan the PSU does. You could use a fanless PSU thought, but that would be the most expensive component in such a system by far.
Slashdot Mirror
.
Does Norway have a lot of visitors, a very interesting phone/person ratio, or does Telenor provides service outside the country?
Telenor operates over much of Europe and Asia these days, through subsidiaries and such.
My point was just that enforcing competition is a good thing in the long term, even if the companies involved will complain a lot in the short term. The operators complained a lot when the reforms were implemented, but I don't think they would have been where they are today without being kicked away from their complacent near-monopoly status. Both the companies involved and the consumers (citizens) made a profit from the reforms. IMHO the same would have been true for the banking industry, even if they would have had to hire a lot of cobol programmers to implement bank account portability :P
I forgot to mention the website, it is http://www.telepriser.no./ Oh, and a more accessible site (English, worldwide) is http://www.yr.no/ probably the best weather forecast site on the net.
Since 2002 the "Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authority" has had a calculator offering much of the same for the Norwegian market. In addition to mobile phones it also covers telephony and broadband. Basically, all providers are required by law to provide their pricing structures to the authority, so that the services can be compared. For mobile phones this will involve entering your typical number of minutes (to other mobile phones and landlines), text messages, mms messages and kilobytes.
I'm sure someone will moan that this is socialism, since it is a service that could be offered by the market, or that people could do themselves, or that services such as this can never be efficient anyway. There are some arguments against this: The Norwegian market is small (4.5 million people), with lots of mountains and a low population density, and strict rules about required coverage by the licensees. Manpower is also extremely expensive, and most workers are members of a union. So, clearly, Norway should have really high prices, right?
Wrong - according to the calculator my mobile phone costs should be about 0,- every month, with a 0,- establishment fee for the contract. (About 100 outgoing text messages, 100 minutes outgoing, and 1mb. No mms messages)
Why is this? It is of course hard to find the "perfect truth", but here are some informed guesses: The market is very regulated, in order to enforce competition. Perhaps the most important (to the consumer) point of this is that you can move your phone number to any other operator, either for free or for some very small cost. While there are only three GSM licensees there are 16 or so "virtual operators", who operate by putting a box inside the switches of the GSM licensees, and basically resell their bandwidth. The authority is also able to punish any collusion between the operators, and to require changes in price structures between the operators.
Clearly, all this (regulated) competition is good for the Norwegian consumer, but is it good for the telecom companies? The biggest Norwegian operator (Telenor) has according to wikipedia 143 million subscribers, so clearly all this competition does something to the companies, which can't be all bad. Telenor used to be a state-owned monopoly, which was well known for being hugely inefficient and slow. In markets where there can only be a limited number of providers (such as bandwidth in the GSM bands) there is no natural encouragement for companies to become more efficient, if you want to make more money it is easy to just add another hidden fee. Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.
(The same system was implemented for electrical power providers, but it failed for the banking system - allowing people to move their account numbers between banks was evidently too expensive..)
That changed when the plane was landing. At first I thought people were applauding, which was a bit surprising, but then I realized that the sound was that of the entire roof shaking, you could actually see the roof plates moving against each other. The flight was certainly simple enough anyway, no entertainment and seats which could be folded forward.
Aeroflot, at least the international trips, is less scary than say Nepal Air though.. A few weeks after I flew Nepal Air out of Kathmandu I saw this quite believable story: http://news.airwise.com/story/view/1189004157.html
I don't think there is a storage media with higher density available commercially right now - and probably not until the 64GB microsd cards becomes available.
Sadly, so far the mobile phones with built in shaves have had two batteries, but they do seem to charge from USB.
Now, if only the shaverphone had wireless and ran say Android.. This is clearly a missed opportunity for the mobile phone makers.
It is the same with mobile phone services - the telecoms must share their network with competitors, and allow them to put their services on the network. This means that if you're a customer of a "virtual phone company" you might use the bandwidth of "big telecom X" until some box in their network, from there it is the virtual phone company which controls your call.
In addition, all providers of internet, mobile phone services and landline phone services (including IP telephony) have to provide their pricing and coverage information to a government run web site, so that it is really simple to check if there is a better deal on the market.
Of course all the providers are endlessly complaining, but the effect is that the market works, you get lots of providers, low prices and lots of services to differentiate, even out in the really really remote areas.
With working competition you only see transfer caps on services where it makes some sense, like during the daytime for internet by 3g. (And I could get up to 50mbit/10mbit for $60 a month if bothered to switch it seems.. I hadn't checked the pricing site in a few months.)
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test has some background information, and http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots and http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/my_sun_storage_7410_perf has some performance numbers.
Basically, what Sun is claiming is that by adding a SSD cache layer you can improve IOPS by about 5x, for what amounts to a really small amount of money for say a 100tb system. This is being marketed quite heavily by Sun as well. (The numbers look convincing, and the prices for the Sun Storage servers are certainly very competitive, well, compared to say NetApp.)
IMHO this is just a repeat of the well known Microsoft tactic of spreading massive amounts of FUD about any competing technology that you can't reproduce yourself - you'll have to wait until Windows Server 2013 for this.
account recognizes
b-day 2/11/64
ZIP code 99687
for password change.
The zip code is of course that of Wasilla, Alaska.
It would seem that the republican VP candidate is at least twice as security aware as Paris Hilton. Paris' had just one security question, the name of her dog (Tinkerbell), while Palin had two extremely obvious security questions.
Of course, two times "nothing much" is not a lot at all..
It works pretty well to send text messages to at least some Chinese mobile networks with Skype, but AFAIK the SMS option is not enabled in the Linux version yet. Of course, you can't receive any answers, and you have to be online to send, so it is not really a perfect alternative.
i.e, remove libflashsupport, use the latest flash 10 beta and create a /etc/asound.conf as described in bug 198453
I've not had any browser crashes since doing this, so cross fingers. This is probably a very common problem..
On my travels I usually bring an old Fujitsu Biblo B2160 where I've replaced the internal drive with a 120gb disk, and a couple of backup hard drives (2.5" externals which run of usb power), one which I always keep in a "secret" compartment in my shoulder bag. The thinking behind this is that it doesn't really matter if I lose the notebook as long as I keep the pictures. Of course, if I was really worried I would probably bring a 20 pack of 9gb DVDs and burn copies of the pictures on those, then email them back. (You can pay to have your pictures written to DVD, or use an internet cafe somewhere)
I've used that computer in 5000m+ altitudes (16000 feet and more) - not at any of the basecamps to Everest, but then you'll probably be so dead tired from the altitude that you won't think of it, besides, I wouldn't trust the generators in the tent villages you stay in. (Going Lhasa -> Kathmandu is a great trip btw)
You should also look into having a zip lock bag of some kind for your notebook, that will keep the moisture out and might even keep the ants out if you go the rain forest.. I would also use a bit of padding around it, it doesn't have to be anything fancy, heavy bubble wrap and gaffer tape is good enough.
A suitable notebook shouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred usd used, buy two or three extra hard drives, and stock up on memory cards for places without power - it should be a lot less expensive than a more high-tech solution. (Some hostels in remote Tibetan villages might lack easily accessible power, but power is more common than running water in such places)
The only problem with cheap used computers is that they might not have usb2.0. That means emptying a 8gb memory card might take 2+ hours, even more if you take backups as you copy (you should do that). This has not been a problem for me, I just let it run overnight if necessary, but you might want to pay the extra money for usb2.0.
Together with the speaker on the wii-remote and the always-on nature of the wii it isn't really that far from a cordless IP phone. I doubt Nintendo would try to become a telecom, but "Nintendo Wiiphone provided by AT&T" might be a possibility. (How about a free wii with a 1 year service contract?)
It also seemed like it would come with Opera as default (The "It starts our Opera browser in seconds" comment during the presentation), so it might work as a simple web browser too. Add a google search box like Firefox has, and I can see that Nintendo could make a profit on providing free access to Nintendo Go - they wouldn't be dependent on a subscription model.
Overal I'm very impressed by the business sense of Nintendo, while Sony and Microsoft seems to compete on who can make the biggest loss Nintendo might steal the show.
With only 1500 votes cast per machine this would be a rather high risk / low reward way of cheating.. It is safe to assume that if it is worth switching the candidate (i.e. the candidate might win) the candidate would also be well known among the voters. So, chances are that at most a handful of voters would vote wrongly before it got discovered. (And then you might spend some quality time in an Indian prison! Who would want to miss that! ;)
The Indian system seems easy to verify, if the software is just a few hundred lines of assembly each major party can hire their own team who can verify the software. Try that with the Diebold system.. There would never be any elections at all then.
Of course, the central counting office might still be compromised, but it seems this is made hard by simply following the old way of counting paper ballots. (I.e. looking at each machine as a ballot box)
That depends where you live - if you live somewhere with little or no personal rights and personal freedom, like China, you might have that problem.
Of course, in the free world it is different - I still remember visiting the secured server room of a governmental facility, it was behind a 24h staffed help desk and with signs outside forbidding the use of cameras and mobile phones. Of course, being young and naive I was surprised when I noticed that one of the helpdesk people was using a webcam to update the live feed on her private home page.
It is a clear sign of the paranoia of the old communist regimes that they considered everyone a criminal, ie making controll of photocopiers an important task in the old USSR.
[only slightly tongue in cheek]
I believe the majority of new smartphones introduced this year will have a 2mp or more camera, 240x320 or better resolution, of course a reasonably capable TCP/IP stack for playing online games, 3D accelration, etc.. 100K of ram is not enough, and it hasn't been enough for years. (100K of RAM is about what you have in a modern low end Nokia phone sold in Europe, and that is clearly not a smartphone.)
So, it all comes down to which OS has the most features for the lowest price, and which fits on a computer that would have been considered high-end in the early '90s. If you start from scratch and plan to sell millions of your product, which you have to do to get a reasonable margin, using Linux is a rather obvious choice imho.
The current SCO group is just a renamed Caldera, which bought the Unix group from the old SCO, so it is wrong to say that "SCO didn't know what they bought", as the current SCO isn't the company which bought anything in the first place.
Actually, the current SCO is probably just the 5th owner of the very diluted "Unix licencing rights" - AT&T first sold it to USL (Unix System Labs), which was bought by Novell, which resold the licencing rights to the old SCO, which sold off parts of the company to Caldera, which rebranded itself "The SCO Group".
Of course, the current SCO management tries to confuse this issue, probably as they would rather have everyone forget all their contractual obligations with the previous owners.
1: The day before the alleged attack it was revealed that the "contigency agreement" with Boies (a very high profile lawyer) isn't really a contigency agreement at all, but a bonus on top of already very expensive fees.
The claims of Boies taking the case on contigency is one of the major reasjons for the SCOX market capitalizion to incerease by 20x since he was hired. (SCO is extremely dependent on their inflated stock price for survival)
2: SCO actually paid a PR firm to distribute their press release about the alleged attack - this might be a first by any company.
Now put 1 and 2 together and you get both a motive (get attention away from the Boies deal), and a method (fake a ddos attack, pay for a press release to be distributed).
Gimp-1.3.22 (what I had installed) has no problem either - it opens the example strip, and I can create a 262144x10 picture at least. A 262144x262144 RGB picture requires 512gig, that seems to be the limit. (That is 68 gigapixels btw)
I haven't tried the latest version of photoshop, but when working on 50+ megapixel pictures I found using Gimp under Linux a bit less of a pain than Photoshop under Windows.
This is perhaps something OSDL could sponsor?
I imagine most spammers have some kind of web page where you can order their "product". It would be rather simple to make something that filled in the form with a random name and random credit card number, then submited the form.
: /boot/vmlinuz
This would be rather effective if they paid a fee for each credit card validation and not each succesfull validation, but I'm not sure of the legality of this. (Of course, spam being international it could always be done from abroad)
My second thought is to see the spam as an order of "fill my http log with random binaries":
while
do
for a in
wget http://spam.me/$a
next
done
(or similar)
A more ethical solution would be to start tracking who is the real "product provider" and their banking contact, then go after the banks - It would be very bad PR to have your bank associated with spammers in the media.
>How about, when they moved it to their PAY SITE,
/ list/0,11627 ,1101980302,00.html
>which is what they did, they screwed up the >Index?
>Oh wait, I forgot, everyone does their job
>perfectly now except the current administration.
The index from the issue the removed article belongs to is still available:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/toc
Of course, this could be the result of a technical bug - I just said it was unlikely. It would be strange for a bug to remove both the static file and the link from the index page for the issue, but sure, it is possible - believe that if that makes you feel better.
But I guess I'm typing to the void here.. Perhaps you could make a better argument for how a technical bug removing a single article is a much more probable reason than _any_ kind of human action?
Eh.. This was a single article from a collection of articles on a theme, and the other articles are still present. (According to the memoryhole page)
So, here are a few alternatives:
1. There is a in the Times archive which physically deletes random static pages. This is just a chance.
2. Somebody, purely on chance, deleted the file.
3. The removal was based on a request from the author, the previous Bush president.
4. The newspaper is afraid to annoy the current government, and is in the process of removing potentially offending articles.
5. The request came from the current government.
Imho the two first alternatives are highly unlikely, alternative 3 is somewhat manageable (old man Bush looking out for his delinquent son), if alternative 4 is true you have to ask "what is the newspaper afraid of?", and if alternative 5 is true you might have the answer.
Have Microsoft pay 20+ billion in cash from their "war chest", then reinvest the money in a mix of commercial Linux companies and a trust fund for developing GPL / OSS software.
:)
Spending "only" 10 billion on developing Open Source software would have an enormous effect - imagine what could be done with the Gimp if you had 20 top developers working on improvements with long term contracts and no marketing pressure.
I love google, but not at any cost
There is an interview about the latest 3D phone here: page(EN)
Also check out this page, which has a drawing explaining how this works: page(JP) (I guess - it is in Japanese :)
As Sharp also has the Zaurus I'm waiting for a mobile phone with a 3D screen, running linux, and with a full keyboard - perhaps something similar to the C-760, only narrower. Oh, and dual 2mp cameras for taking 3D pictures.. (Sharp already has a 2mp mobile, so why not two of them.)
It might not fly in the US (lots of features = expensive), but I bet it would sell in Europe.. My mobile (a nokia 9210) is still retailing for 1000$ + without a subscription here.
Use something like the new Zalman case / CPU / cooling system (all passive): slashdot link, put a gigabit ethernet card in the computer, and boot over the network from a server on another flor. Or if you need very high latency use a ramdisk & network combination. No moveable parts -> no noise.
Of course, the Zalman case isn't released yet, but you can get nearly the same effect with current off-the-shelf-parts. Fanless PSUs are a bit expensive thought, and you might have to underclock a bit to get a passive cooling system efficient enough.. My passive solution worked well with Linux but crashed mysteriously with Windows98. (Windows98 not doing the hlt instruction.)
Oh, and those people pointing at M1000 based PCs and such are just silly - even if the CPU doesn't have a fan the PSU does. You could use a fanless PSU thought, but that would be the most expensive component in such a system by far.