I've just bought my first wireless kit (DLink 802.11b wireless router plus card for $60).
I did some reading on WEP and it sounds pretty frightening. Today I'm going over to set up the same kit for a friend who's NOT a slashdot type. I'm pretty-well used to data protection issues, and I take reasonable precautions and would also not freak out if something Bad happened. But I'm wondering what I should tell my non-techie friend.
Practically speaking, just how vulnerable is WEP? If my friend has a good non-dictionary password and uses "256 bit" encryption, is he reasonably safe from casual hijacking?
That's certainly what the manufacturers would have us believe, and the low prices and ubiquitous Starbucks access points seem to be causing a lot of folks to adopt wireless, at least out here in silicon valley.
Having read up on the security problems, I'm now hoping some of you can provide or point to real-world scenarios.
It's so odd that the caffeine-shock drink originally advertized as something for very active, sexy people playing around outdoors in the mountains ended up as the mascot drink of one of the most sendentary class of professionals...
I agree completely on the name, though of course it would be painful as SuSe has a lot of name recognition right now, especially in Europe.
The problem is that, although the name sounds great in German (like John Philip), it's pronounced very differently from place to place and person to person, sowing even greater confusion than "Linux" (let alone "GNU/Linux").
Sad as it may be, English is the default language for tech stuff, and most people around the world will figure out that LinuxWare is like SoftWare, and we will only have to deal with the much smaller Line-Ucks/Linn-Ucks issue.
Google lately has been consistently returning large numbers of useless matches in the first pages of many of my searches.
The two categories most affected are searches for information on specific products and on things like restaurants and hotels.
With product searches, I almost always have to wade through a lot of "Read opinions and get latest prices on..." crap before I find any really useful links. And I'm not just being cranky - most of said craplinks do not actually contain any reviews, they just contain maybe a couple prices and the opportunity to "be the first to review..."
With restaurants and hotels I get a lot of similar stuff, ranging from fake (or "under construction") yellow pages to unpopulated review sites. Almost all of them try to sell me ads.
Now, I realize I can get better results by putting in more specific search terms, like "vaio geforce p4 ddr" or similar, but that's not much of a solution. And it's certainly no help to Mr. Sixpaque.
It seems to me these are very much the kinds of searches people would be likely to enter into "Start->Search->On the Internet..." in Windows.
And even if MS skewed results dramatically towards their advertisers or themselves, at the moment it would still be easy to beat Google in terms of usefulness to the non-geek on these types of subjects.
I like Google and I hope they improve and stay on top.
But if I were Gates, I'd most definitely be thinking of having a default internet search in Windows that average users would not readily ditch in favor of Google.
Also, there's no real way to tell which ones have lower real costs.
If you're handing out contracts, you can choose the lower-priced of two equally-good products.
If the lower-priced isn't truly the lower-cost, you don't care, because it's a contract and MegaCorp has promised to deliver it for $X. If it costs them more than it costs MacroCorp to make the competing product that costs more, you can just assume they have their reasons - maybe they have lower profit margins, or have other products that also benefit from the R&D, etc.
If, on the other hand, you're giving away a prize and just asking people or trying to figure out what the "cost" of the various competitors is, you're just gathering FUD.
I don't know a whole lot about autonomous vehicles, but your post got me thinking: why not do the civilian challenge over a smaller but more challenging course?
I come from an area that's something of a mountain bike mecca lately, and I'm sure there are lots of small communities like mine with extensive and interesting trail networks that could be great tests for autonomous vehicles. And the communities would love it...
As a painter, I'd like to add to your point that much of the best art ever created was directly supported by the patronage of powerful individuals (sometimes in the name of the State, often in the name of the Church).
Of course you'd be in pretty deep trouble if you painted an unflattering Lorenzo the Magnificent, but hey, you could always move to a rival town and sell it to the rival boss...
It seems that most dedicated hosting providers currently offer a choice of RH9 or FreeBSD, with quite a few offering RH7 and a few offering other Linux distributions.
What will this mean for them? Although direct support isn't really their problem (once they give you root, anything you ask them about non-hardware costs money), I can't imagine their marketing people will feel warm and fuzzy offering "unsupported" distros.
Do you think they'll just fork over for RH Enterprise? Or maybe switch to something else? I think their profit margins are fairly thin to begin with.
Once again, I don't think many of those providers actually have service contracts with RedHat et al, but shared hosting providers may well have.
Anybody work in that industry and have any insights?
I actually read the NYT article in the print edition a few days ago (nice scoopin'/.!), and my understanding of the article was that Google planned to do an IPO that would value it at about $15B, and later issue about $2B more of stock that would be sold through alternative means.
The idea being that the $2B issue gets you a lot of individual investors who are passionate about your company, as well as $2B in cash if you're lucky.
The $15B is sought from the IPO because, Google being a hot property, buzzword-compliant Wall Street investors will probably give you more money than the little guys.
I'll give you a reason, although it might be a lame one.
The best keyboards, the truly great ones, the ones that those of us who type super duper fast love, the ones you can whack the moles with and go right back to work - these are still not available as USB keyboards.
So to hardcore typists, it is still necessary to have PS/2 for the keyboard.
It might be a lame excuse, though, since you can get a perfectly good USB-PS/2 adapter for $12 at RadioShack, and I bet that would be extremely cheap at the OEM level.
Also, after Pulp Fiction, "the Gimp" got to be an even worse insult in the popular mind.
I was just wondering today, after talking to a friend who's upgrading to Photoshop CS, how far one might get repackaging GIMP, getting rid of all GIMP references except in the copyright, making nice installers for OSX, and selling it for $20 in KMart.
Is this really a Toughbook? That's the ruggedized line. But the review says:
While the plastic housing is convincing, it feels easy to scratch or crack. Our biggest annoyance was the placement of the eject and power buttons. Both are the same style, size, and located in adjacent sides of the front left corner. Nearly every other attempt to eject the CD resulted in the computer shutting down. Also, the ports appear to just be cut out of the case with no protection to keep pins from bending, which takes away from the overall aesthetics.
Has there been a mistake? Or does Tough have some radically different meaning for the Japanese models?
I know someone who has used various Toughbook models in harsh environments (flight testing etc), and he recently commented that the things seemed virtually unbreakable.
I would, of course, love to test that out myself, but if I can ever afford milspec anything, I'm getting a ruggedized iPod first.
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
The Founders knew full well that doing the former is almost guaranteed to lead to the latter.
In the interest of protecting religious freedom, we need to prevent the state giving any sort of special treatment to any religion. Because sooner or later your religion may end up being on the disrespected side, and your free exercise in effect curtailed.
I find it unfortunate that many of the same people who would in fact be persecuted for their beliefs in certain other countries so easily wish for official recognition of their religion in the USA.
On the other hand, I don't think that "under God" should be assumed to apply to any specific religion. I just think that official Government musings shouldn't presume to comment on God or Gods or their lack or anything of the kind.
The real problem with the Pledge is that it teaches young children that in a Democracy, in which the Government serves at the pleasure of the People, one must publicly and ritually swear allegiance to the Flag (first!) and the Republic.
A lot of my friends grew up under Communism, and they would find that little ritual utterly familiar.
Funny, I use WordPad a lot too. I bet a lot of 'doze users do.
Since I can easily change the font, and change it on different bits of text, I find it's perfect for:
1. Anything I need to quickly write & print but still want pretty.
2. Printing Web content (since I have yet to find a browser that prints well). Select in news page, copy, paste into WordPad, select all, Ariel/9, print! Saves TONS of paper and eyewear.
3. Important documents that don't need fancy pagination but DO need to be easily converted to ASCII - such as a press release you want to both e-mail and fax.
4. Things that need to be highly-compatible.DOCs. I have yet to see Word fail to read WordPad-created content, but the reverse is quite common.
So here's a question about OpenOffice: does it include a WordPad equivalent?
Slashdot Mirror
I've just bought my first wireless kit (DLink 802.11b wireless router plus card for $60).
I did some reading on WEP and it sounds pretty frightening. Today I'm going over to set up the same kit for a friend who's NOT a slashdot type. I'm pretty-well used to data protection issues, and I take reasonable precautions and would also not freak out if something Bad happened. But I'm wondering what I should tell my non-techie friend.
Practically speaking, just how vulnerable is WEP? If my friend has a good non-dictionary password and uses "256 bit" encryption, is he reasonably safe from casual hijacking?
That's certainly what the manufacturers would have us believe, and the low prices and ubiquitous Starbucks access points seem to be causing a lot of folks to adopt wireless, at least out here in silicon valley.
Having read up on the security problems, I'm now hoping some of you can provide or point to real-world scenarios.
Hope this isn't too off-topic...
It's so odd that the caffeine-shock drink originally advertized as something for very active, sexy people playing around outdoors in the mountains ended up as the mascot drink of one of the most sendentary class of professionals...
OK, or maybe it's not so odd...
I agree completely on the name, though of course it would be painful as SuSe has a lot of name recognition right now, especially in Europe.
The problem is that, although the name sounds great in German (like John Philip), it's pronounced very differently from place to place and person to person, sowing even greater confusion than "Linux" (let alone "GNU/Linux").
Sad as it may be, English is the default language for tech stuff, and most people around the world will figure out that LinuxWare is like SoftWare, and we will only have to deal with the much smaller Line-Ucks/Linn-Ucks issue.
Google lately has been consistently returning large numbers of useless matches in the first pages of many of my searches.
The two categories most affected are searches for information on specific products and on things like restaurants and hotels.
With product searches, I almost always have to wade through a lot of "Read opinions and get latest prices on..." crap before I find any really useful links. And I'm not just being cranky - most of said craplinks do not actually contain any reviews, they just contain maybe a couple prices and the opportunity to "be the first to review..."
With restaurants and hotels I get a lot of similar stuff, ranging from fake (or "under construction") yellow pages to unpopulated review sites. Almost all of them try to sell me ads.
Now, I realize I can get better results by putting in more specific search terms, like "vaio geforce p4 ddr" or similar, but that's not much of a solution. And it's certainly no help to Mr. Sixpaque.
It seems to me these are very much the kinds of searches people would be likely to enter into "Start->Search->On the Internet..." in Windows.
And even if MS skewed results dramatically towards their advertisers or themselves, at the moment it would still be easy to beat Google in terms of usefulness to the non-geek on these types of subjects.
I like Google and I hope they improve and stay on top.
But if I were Gates, I'd most definitely be thinking of having a default internet search in Windows that average users would not readily ditch in favor of Google.
Mirror just in case that server (which seems piddly) gets /.'ed...
But didn't Piddly just raise $2M for good causes?
Oh wait, different charity...
Also, there's no real way to tell which ones have lower real costs.
If you're handing out contracts, you can choose the lower-priced of two equally-good products.
If the lower-priced isn't truly the lower-cost, you don't care, because it's a contract and MegaCorp has promised to deliver it for $X. If it costs them more than it costs MacroCorp to make the competing product that costs more, you can just assume they have their reasons - maybe they have lower profit margins, or have other products that also benefit from the R&D, etc.
If, on the other hand, you're giving away a prize and just asking people or trying to figure out what the "cost" of the various competitors is, you're just gathering FUD.
I don't know a whole lot about autonomous vehicles, but your post got me thinking: why not do the civilian challenge over a smaller but more challenging course?
I come from an area that's something of a mountain bike mecca lately, and I'm sure there are lots of small communities like mine with extensive and interesting trail networks that could be great tests for autonomous vehicles. And the communities would love it...
Or are the UAVs not ready for rugged terrain yet?
This is the third slashdot item I've read in the last few days that's based on old news from the Times.
Is there some special slashdot anti-NYT filter that won't accept stories newer than three days old?
As a painter, I'd like to add to your point that much of the best art ever created was directly supported by the patronage of powerful individuals (sometimes in the name of the State, often in the name of the Church).
Of course you'd be in pretty deep trouble if you painted an unflattering Lorenzo the Magnificent, but hey, you could always move to a rival town and sell it to the rival boss...
It seems that most dedicated hosting providers currently offer a choice of RH9 or FreeBSD, with quite a few offering RH7 and a few offering other Linux distributions.
What will this mean for them? Although direct support isn't really their problem (once they give you root, anything you ask them about non-hardware costs money), I can't imagine their marketing people will feel warm and fuzzy offering "unsupported" distros.
Do you think they'll just fork over for RH Enterprise? Or maybe switch to something else? I think their profit margins are fairly thin to begin with.
Once again, I don't think many of those providers actually have service contracts with RedHat et al, but shared hosting providers may well have.
Anybody work in that industry and have any insights?
I actually read the NYT article in the print edition a few days ago (nice scoopin' /.!), and my understanding of the article was that Google planned to do an IPO that would value it at about $15B, and later issue about $2B more of stock that would be sold through alternative means.
The idea being that the $2B issue gets you a lot of individual investors who are passionate about your company, as well as $2B in cash if you're lucky.
The $15B is sought from the IPO because, Google being a hot property, buzzword-compliant Wall Street investors will probably give you more money than the little guys.
Or did I misread TFA on Friday?
I'll give you a reason, although it might be a lame one.
The best keyboards, the truly great ones, the ones that those of us who type super duper fast love, the ones you can whack the moles with and go right back to work - these are still not available as USB keyboards.
So to hardcore typists, it is still necessary to have PS/2 for the keyboard.
It might be a lame excuse, though, since you can get a perfectly good USB-PS/2 adapter for $12 at RadioShack, and I bet that would be extremely cheap at the OEM level.
the Moon and Mars...
Well, lots of people did buy plots on planet Enron, which sure sounded like a planet...
Mr. Lay subsequently laughed all the way to the Moon Bank.
Hmmmm.....
Extremely well-put on the naming issue.
Also, after Pulp Fiction, "the Gimp" got to be an even worse insult in the popular mind.
I was just wondering today, after talking to a friend who's upgrading to Photoshop CS, how far one might get repackaging GIMP, getting rid of all GIMP references except in the copyright, making nice installers for OSX, and selling it for $20 in KMart.
Hmmm.....
I loved the fact that the words Koogle and Google both showed up in the same article.
How often does that happen?
(Excluding the kosher web of course.)
As another poster pointed out, the idea isn't ridiculous on the face of it: think of the Ford/Toyota example.
;-)
I don't think the court is suggesting that nobody could buy a link on the word "Ford." Rather, nobody who competes with Ford could buy such a link.
If you want to advertise the collected works of Harrison Ford on DVD, you could buy links that show up with searches for "Ford."
However, Toyota couldn't buy those links.
It sounds to me like Google would have to do a lot more screening of their ads. But they're smart folks, they can probably figure it out.
Linking their servers into MiniTel to get the French trademark list will be another challenge.
PS - Homework: If Harrison Ford does a Toyota commercial in France, can Opel buy an ad on French-language searches for "Ford?"
Is this really a Toughbook? That's the ruggedized line. But the review says:
Has there been a mistake? Or does Tough have some radically different meaning for the Japanese models?
I know someone who has used various Toughbook models in harsh environments (flight testing etc), and he recently commented that the things seemed virtually unbreakable.
I would, of course, love to test that out myself, but if I can ever afford milspec anything, I'm getting a ruggedized iPod first.
Anybody complaining about adults smoking...
At least in the US.
Though to be fair, the Cops don't usually want to be involved.
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
The Founders knew full well that doing the former is almost guaranteed to lead to the latter.
In the interest of protecting religious freedom, we need to prevent the state giving any sort of special treatment to any religion. Because sooner or later your religion may end up being on the disrespected side, and your free exercise in effect curtailed.
I find it unfortunate that many of the same people who would in fact be persecuted for their beliefs in certain other countries so easily wish for official recognition of their religion in the USA.
On the other hand, I don't think that "under God" should be assumed to apply to any specific religion. I just think that official Government musings shouldn't presume to comment on God or Gods or their lack or anything of the kind.
The real problem with the Pledge is that it teaches young children that in a Democracy, in which the Government serves at the pleasure of the People, one must publicly and ritually swear allegiance to the Flag (first!) and the Republic.
A lot of my friends grew up under Communism, and they would find that little ritual utterly familiar.
</rant>
Funny, I use WordPad a lot too. I bet a lot of 'doze users do.
.DOCs. I have yet to see Word fail to read WordPad-created content, but the reverse is quite common.
Since I can easily change the font, and change it on different bits of text, I find it's perfect for:
1. Anything I need to quickly write & print but still want pretty.
2. Printing Web content (since I have yet to find a browser that prints well). Select in news page, copy, paste into WordPad, select all, Ariel/9, print! Saves TONS of paper and eyewear.
3. Important documents that don't need fancy pagination but DO need to be easily converted to ASCII - such as a press release you want to both e-mail and fax.
4. Things that need to be highly-compatible
So here's a question about OpenOffice: does it include a WordPad equivalent?
...fortunately, I soon enough learned about other languages, not to mention the opposite sex.
I mostly wrote slightly-sluggish video games with my Super Expander plugged in.
The world is in every way a better place for there not having been Flash when I was 13.
DOH!
I use Lynx regularly, and I still posted that. Where's the "Retract Embarrassing Comment" button?
So, if we all just took a few minutes to surf around there with lynx, could we potentially force the company to deploy good JS-less pages?
I know it's easy to make German jokes, and the review linked to was German, but it looks to me like Zalman is a Korean company.
Anybody know different?