Just to show that I'm not completely without humor, I for one welcome our new space-faring colleagues.
Sure you're humorous.
You took a common slashdot joke and reworded it to fit the current story. Badly. As a matter of fact you mangled it so badly that all humorous aspects have been completely beaten out of it, as surely as if you had a Humorless Staff +3 of Beating in your right hand and a Ring of Silent Laughter on your left.
Speaking of things you mangled in that post, how about the truth?
I can not condone the advanced fee fraud Nigeria is famous for [...] Maybe there will be a few less scammers as young Nigerians realize there are higher goals worth pursuing
While there is an international group of criminals that was originally housed in Nigeria that is well documented prepatrators of the advanced fee fraud (commonly called the 419 scam), I would certainly think that it is not charitable to attribute this scam to the Nigerian people as a whole.
Sounds like changes are infrequent... in which case a good caching strategy is your key.
My suggestion would be to build a proxy/caching server and specifically set the no-cache directive for dynamic content. If you have dynamic content within most pages that would take a slightly different approach; I would suggest hosting dynamic content on seperate pages on the server and have the proxy server stitch the two together. A proprietary HTML extension (similar to IFRAME) and slight modification of the proxy server is all that would be required...
Then you can run the proxy server on commodity hardware and when it's time to scale, go to a dynamic load-balanced environment, with your java app on the backend and the webcluster in front. Buy a ton of commodity servers and stack them to the roof in your data center.
If you want to get smarter about it, recode the proxy servers to replicate their caches to each other...
And I would have a cache invalidate command... so when you publish new content you just click a button and all the caches invalidate, guaranteeing that you're serving fresh content.
Of course if you want off the shelf, Microsoft's Content Management server can do all of this relatively cheaply.
And the.NET framework has built-in directives for kernel-level page caching and userspace-level page fragment caching.
Sorry human rights and the right to fair treatment below to EVERYBODY, regardless of citizenship. We have accepted standards of treatment for people we are actively at war with. People who have no apparent hostile intent should get treated at least as well.
While I agree with you that there needs to be an accepted standard of treatment for terrorist actions, similar to the Geneva Accord for wartime, the sad fact is that such a standard does not, at this time, exist.
And these people aren't being treated unfairly; we're not letting them come to the United States without explaining terrorist connections. The United States doesn't belong to the world, it belongs to us, and we can say who we do and do not want to let in.
While I do feel that there should be some oversight over who gets put on this list and how they are selected, that the list should be made publicly available, and that there should be an appeal process to be taken off the list if necessary, none of those is an inalienable right.
I don't have a right to come into your home at any time I like. I can knock on your door and ask if I can come into your home. But if we don't really know each other, and you've seen me in the neighborhood a couple times with some known violent criminals, you would certainly think twice about inviting me in.
I don't see how the United States implementing a similar policy is any different.
In many ways these people's rights are now forfeit.
Bullshit. These people are foreign citizens; what rights exactly do they have in the sovereignity of the United States that are now forfeit? All the rights guaranteed to them by national and international law are still in place; the only thing being denied them is entry into the United States, and if you're not a citizen of the US, you have no RIGHT to come here...
This got modded as a troll last time. I'm not trolling. Read the mod guidelines. I am seriously asking, what rights do these people have that are forfeit? I can't think of a single right that they had that being on this list denies them...
Modding down a post that you disagree with as a troll is an abuse of mod power. If you don't agree, then respond.
In many ways these people's rights are now forfeit.
Bullshit. These people are foreign citizens; what rights exactly do they have in the sovereignity of the United States that are now forfeit? All the rights guaranteed to them by national and international law are still in place; the only thing being denied them is entry into the United States, and if you're not a citizen of the US, you have no RIGHT to come here...
The trick is to start at the table which defines the initial ordering.
No, the trick is getting a dll that likes your particular version of the.NET framework, interoperates with the other developer's, and doesn't throw license errors every few minutes...
Want to see something more amusing than boring business reports?
No offense, but who cares? Fulfilling business needs pays the bills. I post asking about compelling uses and you give me a clock? I mean really. The goal here is to meet the needs of people who pay for technology. If I want to buy a clock I go to Walmart, not my friendly neighborhood consulting firm...
Well I don't have any pictures of this particular board for comparison... but all Mini-ITX boards are the exact same size (170mmx170mm) so here are some pics I found real quick of other Mini-ITX boards:
Here's one with a CD next to it... http://mini-itx.com/reviews/b860t/images/B8 60T0001.jpg
Here's one with a coke can next to it (REALLY puts it into perspective): http://mini-itx.com/news/images/sto ry0026.jpg
Here's one inside a humidor: http://mini-itx.com/projects/humidor64/i mages/humi dor0001.jpg
And inside an NES: http://mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/images/ne s0009. jpg
And inside a breadbox: http://mini-itx.com/projects/images/pro ject0020c.j pg
And inside a PS2: http://mini-itx.com/projects/playstation2pc/ images/ps2pc0000.jpg
The only thing more evil than Crystal Reports is crystal meth
Funny you should mention that... I'm at work right now (10:00 PM local time; been here since 9:00 AM) for that very reason! And I'll give you a hint, I've never touched crystal meth
Well I don't know about Free/Open/Libre or XML development for Office... but I do know about the proprietary APIs Microsoft distributes for Office.
If you wanna give them a try sometime, assuming you got Windows, VB5+, and Office installed... just add Office to your references (try Microsoft Office in the Project References menu) and give it a whorl. It's fairly easy to program in if you've used Office... most of the concepts that make for a good Office user translate directly into programming concepts for the Office object model.
And yet Office Automation programmers are in scarce supply.
Microsoft even offers a cert specifically for Office Automation programmers!
But I haven't seen too many well written Office applications. My speculation is that its not for lack of tools, but that its for lack of concepts. Other than the obvious reporting needs that any large organization has, are there any compelling reasons to spend an afternoon coding an office application?
I think it is this lack of compelling reasons, and not a lack of easy-to-use programming tools that causes the lack of good free open add-ins...
lossy compression includes lossless compression... basically, you throw out information and then use a lossless compression algorithm to do the actuall compression.
And you can't cross-compress data. Remember, according to information theory, a particular piece of data has a certain amount of information in it that cannot be conveyed in less than a certain number of bits. All lossy compression does is get rid of some of that information before compressing.
But you can't take two different compression algorithms and cross compress and expect the final result to be significantly smaller...
It always pisses me off when someone zips of a GIF or JPG or MP3 or something and sends it to me. I will say that the compression algorithms used in these formats (especially GIF) is far from ideal, so you get SOME utility out of cross compressing them (you can inch towards the theoretical maximum compression of the original data that way) but it really just isn't worth it...
Excuse me, after doing some research I have found you are correct... for instance a Google for "1.2 bits per english word" returns a reference to a theoretical analysis of password hashing cryptographic strength with reference to 1.2 bits per english character...
I distinctly remember reading the 1.2 bits per word statistic in some introductory text on information theory; I can only assume the author misquoted the real statistic... I believe the book was a graphics algorithm book, with a chapter on fractal compression that required a layman's introduction to the subject of information theory...
With a sufficiently complex model, we should have the ability to record an entire concert as little more than a MIDI-like file, containing the excitiation parameters for each instrument involved.
While that is an interesting (and frankly exciting) idea, I was specifically addressing current state of the art, which is focused on faithful reproduction of a given waveform, not necessarily reducing that waveform to a set of parameters in some MIDI-like encoding theme. That would certainly be several orders of magnitude more difficult than a speech recognition algorithm, which current processors are just now getting fast enough to run well...
FYI, I only encode into MP3 for the very reasons you mention.
As I said, my comments were based on the premise that I was forced to pick a 64-Mbit/s codec.
I am not currently being forced to do so.
And I could give a fuck your Ogg being supported on Winamp and MPlayer. If it's not part of the default OS install then its not good enough for me. Frankly, I know artists that distribute solely in Ogg. Almost all of them convert to transcoding to MP3 after a few months.
For information on why someone might want to benchmark at such a low quality setting, see other posts I've made in this thread.
Are we at the LIMITS of compression technology ? Is there anything new being worked on by anyone ?
Well we are certainly near the limit of lossless compression. In that there is a well-studied field of computer science (information theory), which provides a framework to determine the theoretically maximum amount of lossless compression possible given a particular data sample, and the best lossless compression algorithms we can come up with are within a small percentage of that figure. FYI, a fundamental tenant of information science is that everything can be reduced to a certain atomic level of representation, and that this atomic piece is the "information" contained within "data"... and that one cannot convey "information" in less space than this atomic piece.
For instance, I've heard that common every day american english conveys approximately 1.2 bits of information per word... meaning that the least redundant approximation of human speech would need that bit rate to represent it.
As far as lossy compression, there might or might not be more work to be done. The problem is that the human ear and the human auditory nervious response are far from being fully characterized, though we do have a good start on it.
The idea of a lossy compression algorithm is to remove pieces of information that the human ear and/or auditory nervous response is not sensitive too... therefore increasing the theoretically possible maximum compression without adversely affecting the signal representation. As we as a species come to characterize these human responses, we will certainly see better codecs coming out. I do however believe that we're rapidly approaching an asymptotic level of understanding where further levels of effort and research into codecs is not economical with regard to expected payoffs...
And seriously, does anyone listen to music encoded at 64 kbps? 128 is the bare minumum.
Some people use 64 k... internet radio sometimes does, for instance... but that's not why they used it...
I imagine that it was used because with today's lossy codecs, the bitrate has to be abysmal to have a measurably inferior sample. Bitrates of, say, 384 kbps, for these codecs are very very difficult to rate to the average listener.
I can only assume that this test was done with the assumption that, for a given codec, given a range of bitrates, the encoding quality / bitrate ratio stays more or less constant. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, I don't think that that is necessarily the case, and it certainly should be investigated.
But that would require finding some people with professional-level hearing (commonly referred to as "Golden Ears") and would probably not be viable except to people making money off of codecs... which is probably why such a study doesn't exist currently...
As an artist that releases mainly online, I found these results very interesting, and thought I'd share my feelings with the slashdot community.
While MP3Pro and Vorbis were good competitors overall, and have a fairly good footprint to boot, I'd have to say that if I'm forced to encode to 64MBit/s, I'd absolutely choose Ahead HE AAC, if I'm judging solely on this comparison (which I am at this point in time...)
Why? Because there was no sample that Ahead HE AAC did POORLY at. MP3Pro and Vorbis (and all the other codecs) each had one or two samples that they just totally choked on, quality-wise. So if I was forced to use a 64 MBit/s codec, it would absolutely be Ahead HE AAC, because while it didn't score highest on every test, and the three codec were virtually tied across the whole competition, I would feel far safer trusting my best digital work to a codec that, according to this test, would have the least chance of representing it particularly poorly.
I wonder how these results compare to higher encoding rates; I could easily imagine that most codecs have a sweet spot, where the encoding quality/bitrate maximizes... it would be interesting to do some research to find this sweet spot.
The other condition that most people fail to mention is that the flight occurred off a cliff. The first powered flight, while indeed powered, was more of a glide than a flight. IIRC, they stayed in the air for all of 30 seconds...
Of course data isn't available, but I'd be willing to bet that the only way it stayed in the air was that it was trading forward velocity for lift the whole trip...
Now Brazil had a powered flight the very next year, and based on these facts, are trying to gain recognition for the first "true" flight.
That argument won't "fly" however (excuse the pun), because the Wright brothers were able to improve their design and have a true powered flight within a few months, provably before the first Brazillian powered flight...
I've always thought that a good worm strategy would be to have an exponential decay counter... something that ramps up the damage gradually. Like send a couple copies out in the first infection, then wait for a while, then send a few more, then wait a little while more, then send out a ton... and maybe pick one dll to corrupt with each activation.
That way, the system seems to gradually degrade instead of just consuming a ton of bandwidth and then dying. Hell, with DLL-Hell, you would just assume that windows is behaving as usual until the whole system becomes unusable!
Oh wait. Well, I guess you'd always assume windows is behaving as usual...
Configure and Monitor stuff on a non NAT firewall? Like what?
Let's address both of those seperately:
1. Configuration of non-NAT firewalls. I have yet to see a real world situation that warranted a firewall where denying all inbound traffic was a viable solution. Web servers, FTP, SQL, E-mail, etc. Sure, NATting firewalls require the same configuration... but generally the rules are MUCH simpler, since you're only routing one inbound IP Address. You're living in a dream world if you think that denying all inbound traffic is a one-size-fit-all solution.
Which brings us to:
2. Monitoring of non-NAT firewalls. Now that you've opened up your internal network to the world, you're just going to sit there and assume it's working? Fuck no! You've got to have intrusion detection systems, bandwidth, port, and deny-log reports. You've got to stay on top of it. And that's not to mention potential patches/updates... sure NATs can have exploits just like firewalls, but since a NAT implementation is much less stateful than a firewall, it's less likely to have them... How is this different from a NAT firewall? Well, since a NAT firewall enforces a simpler network design, the chance of intrusion is far less. For instance, I know every port that's internally routable on my home network... and they are all routed to a single IP Address. So all I have to do is monitor for intrusion on that IP and I'm done...
Well I use the term NAT to refer to a piece of hardware that is actually a NATting Firewall... you are absolutely right that NAT by itself provides no security.
But I challenge you to find one single hardware product for sale today in a consumer electronics retailer that meets your definition of "NAT by itself"
You can have a good and secure firewall even without NAT, in case you didn't know..
Ahh, but NAT is the simplest. I like the fact that I can get a hardware NATting firewall, plug it in, and know that the default configuration is secure. There aren't any holes anywhere, no cracker is gonna scan my network through it, nothing like that...
Sure you can get that with a regular firewall, but you have to configure it and monitor it and all sorts of other stuff that I, as a consumer, just don't want to do.
And FYI, I work in the TCP/IP security business. It's not that I don't know how to build a firewall. It's that I don't WANT to when I'm off work...
Slashdot Mirror
Just to show that I'm not completely without humor, I for one welcome our new space-faring colleagues.
Sure you're humorous.
You took a common slashdot joke and reworded it to fit the current story. Badly. As a matter of fact you mangled it so badly that all humorous aspects have been completely beaten out of it, as surely as if you had a Humorless Staff +3 of Beating in your right hand and a Ring of Silent Laughter on your left.
Speaking of things you mangled in that post, how about the truth?
I can not condone the advanced fee fraud Nigeria is famous for
[...]
Maybe there will be a few less scammers as young Nigerians realize there are higher goals worth pursuing
While there is an international group of criminals that was originally housed in Nigeria that is well documented prepatrators of the advanced fee fraud (commonly called the 419 scam), I would certainly think that it is not charitable to attribute this scam to the Nigerian people as a whole.
Sounds like changes are infrequent... in which case a good caching strategy is your key.
.NET framework has built-in directives for kernel-level page caching and userspace-level page fragment caching.
My suggestion would be to build a proxy/caching server and specifically set the no-cache directive for dynamic content. If you have dynamic content within most pages that would take a slightly different approach; I would suggest hosting dynamic content on seperate pages on the server and have the proxy server stitch the two together. A proprietary HTML extension (similar to IFRAME) and slight modification of the proxy server is all that would be required...
Then you can run the proxy server on commodity hardware and when it's time to scale, go to a dynamic load-balanced environment, with your java app on the backend and the webcluster in front. Buy a ton of commodity servers and stack them to the roof in your data center.
If you want to get smarter about it, recode the proxy servers to replicate their caches to each other...
And I would have a cache invalidate command... so when you publish new content you just click a button and all the caches invalidate, guaranteeing that you're serving fresh content.
Of course if you want off the shelf, Microsoft's Content Management server can do all of this relatively cheaply.
And the
Perhaps we should start calling it the 6th planet at /. just to avoid tedious jokes..
Yeah, THAT'D be a good idea. There aren't enough factual inconsistencies on slashdot to start.
The planets are:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto
(though Neptune and Pluto switch sometimes)
Making Uranus the 7th planet
Sorry human rights and the right to fair treatment below to EVERYBODY, regardless of citizenship.
We have accepted standards of treatment for people we are actively at war with. People who have no apparent hostile intent should get treated at least as well.
While I agree with you that there needs to be an accepted standard of treatment for terrorist actions, similar to the Geneva Accord for wartime, the sad fact is that such a standard does not, at this time, exist.
And these people aren't being treated unfairly; we're not letting them come to the United States without explaining terrorist connections. The United States doesn't belong to the world, it belongs to us, and we can say who we do and do not want to let in.
While I do feel that there should be some oversight over who gets put on this list and how they are selected, that the list should be made publicly available, and that there should be an appeal process to be taken off the list if necessary, none of those is an inalienable right.
I don't have a right to come into your home at any time I like. I can knock on your door and ask if I can come into your home. But if we don't really know each other, and you've seen me in the neighborhood a couple times with some known violent criminals, you would certainly think twice about inviting me in.
I don't see how the United States implementing a similar policy is any different.
In many ways these people's rights are now forfeit.
Bullshit. These people are foreign citizens; what rights exactly do they have in the sovereignity of the United States that are now forfeit? All the rights guaranteed to them by national and international law are still in place; the only thing being denied them is entry into the United States, and if you're not a citizen of the US, you have no RIGHT to come here...
This got modded as a troll last time. I'm not trolling. Read the mod guidelines. I am seriously asking, what rights do these people have that are forfeit? I can't think of a single right that they had that being on this list denies them...
Modding down a post that you disagree with as a troll is an abuse of mod power. If you don't agree, then respond.
In many ways these people's rights are now forfeit.
Bullshit. These people are foreign citizens; what rights exactly do they have in the sovereignity of the United States that are now forfeit? All the rights guaranteed to them by national and international law are still in place; the only thing being denied them is entry into the United States, and if you're not a citizen of the US, you have no RIGHT to come here...
The trick is to start at the table which defines the initial ordering.
.NET framework, interoperates with the other developer's, and doesn't throw license errors every few minutes...
No, the trick is getting a dll that likes your particular version of the
Want to see something more amusing than boring business reports?
No offense, but who cares? Fulfilling business needs pays the bills. I post asking about compelling uses and you give me a clock? I mean really. The goal here is to meet the needs of people who pay for technology. If I want to buy a clock I go to Walmart, not my friendly neighborhood consulting firm...
Well I don't have any pictures of this particular board for comparison... but all Mini-ITX boards are the exact same size (170mmx170mm) so here are some pics I found real quick of other Mini-ITX boards:
8 60T0001 .jpg
o ry0026.jpg
i mages/humi dor0001.jpg
e s0009. jpg
o ject0020c.j pg
/ images /ps2pc0000.jpg
Here's one with a CD next to it...
http://mini-itx.com/reviews/b860t/images/B
Here's one with a coke can next to it (REALLY puts it into perspective):
http://mini-itx.com/news/images/st
Here's one inside a humidor:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/humidor64/
And inside an NES:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/images/n
And inside a breadbox:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/images/pr
And inside a PS2:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/playstation2pc
The only thing more evil than Crystal Reports is crystal meth
Funny you should mention that... I'm at work right now (10:00 PM local time; been here since 9:00 AM) for that very reason! And I'll give you a hint, I've never touched crystal meth
Well I don't know about Free/Open/Libre or XML development for Office... but I do know about the proprietary APIs Microsoft distributes for Office.
If you wanna give them a try sometime, assuming you got Windows, VB5+, and Office installed... just add Office to your references (try Microsoft Office in the Project References menu) and give it a whorl. It's fairly easy to program in if you've used Office... most of the concepts that make for a good Office user translate directly into programming concepts for the Office object model.
And yet Office Automation programmers are in scarce supply.
Microsoft even offers a cert specifically for Office Automation programmers!
But I haven't seen too many well written Office applications. My speculation is that its not for lack of tools, but that its for lack of concepts. Other than the obvious reporting needs that any large organization has, are there any compelling reasons to spend an afternoon coding an office application?
I think it is this lack of compelling reasons, and not a lack of easy-to-use programming tools that causes the lack of good free open add-ins...
lossy compression includes lossless compression... basically, you throw out information and then use a lossless compression algorithm to do the actuall compression.
And you can't cross-compress data. Remember, according to information theory, a particular piece of data has a certain amount of information in it that cannot be conveyed in less than a certain number of bits. All lossy compression does is get rid of some of that information before compressing.
But you can't take two different compression algorithms and cross compress and expect the final result to be significantly smaller...
It always pisses me off when someone zips of a GIF or JPG or MP3 or something and sends it to me. I will say that the compression algorithms used in these formats (especially GIF) is far from ideal, so you get SOME utility out of cross compressing them (you can inch towards the theoretical maximum compression of the original data that way) but it really just isn't worth it...
Excuse me, after doing some research I have found you are correct... for instance a Google for "1.2 bits per english word" returns a reference to a theoretical analysis of password hashing cryptographic strength with reference to 1.2 bits per english character...
I distinctly remember reading the 1.2 bits per word statistic in some introductory text on information theory; I can only assume the author misquoted the real statistic... I believe the book was a graphics algorithm book, with a chapter on fractal compression that required a layman's introduction to the subject of information theory...
With a sufficiently complex model, we should have the ability to record an entire concert as little more than a MIDI-like file, containing the excitiation parameters for each instrument involved.
While that is an interesting (and frankly exciting) idea, I was specifically addressing current state of the art, which is focused on faithful reproduction of a given waveform, not necessarily reducing that waveform to a set of parameters in some MIDI-like encoding theme. That would certainly be several orders of magnitude more difficult than a speech recognition algorithm, which current processors are just now getting fast enough to run well...
FYI, I only encode into MP3 for the very reasons you mention.
As I said, my comments were based on the premise that I was forced to pick a 64-Mbit/s codec.
I am not currently being forced to do so.
And I could give a fuck your Ogg being supported on Winamp and MPlayer. If it's not part of the default OS install then its not good enough for me. Frankly, I know artists that distribute solely in Ogg. Almost all of them convert to transcoding to MP3 after a few months.
For information on why someone might want to benchmark at such a low quality setting, see other posts I've made in this thread.
Are we at the LIMITS of compression technology ? Is there anything new being worked on by anyone ?
Well we are certainly near the limit of lossless compression. In that there is a well-studied field of computer science (information theory), which provides a framework to determine the theoretically maximum amount of lossless compression possible given a particular data sample, and the best lossless compression algorithms we can come up with are within a small percentage of that figure. FYI, a fundamental tenant of information science is that everything can be reduced to a certain atomic level of representation, and that this atomic piece is the "information" contained within "data"... and that one cannot convey "information" in less space than this atomic piece.
For instance, I've heard that common every day american english conveys approximately 1.2 bits of information per word... meaning that the least redundant approximation of human speech would need that bit rate to represent it.
As far as lossy compression, there might or might not be more work to be done. The problem is that the human ear and the human auditory nervious response are far from being fully characterized, though we do have a good start on it.
The idea of a lossy compression algorithm is to remove pieces of information that the human ear and/or auditory nervous response is not sensitive too... therefore increasing the theoretically possible maximum compression without adversely affecting the signal representation. As we as a species come to characterize these human responses, we will certainly see better codecs coming out. I do however believe that we're rapidly approaching an asymptotic level of understanding where further levels of effort and research into codecs is not economical with regard to expected payoffs...
And seriously, does anyone listen to music encoded at 64 kbps? 128 is the bare minumum.
Some people use 64 k... internet radio sometimes does, for instance... but that's not why they used it...
I imagine that it was used because with today's lossy codecs, the bitrate has to be abysmal to have a measurably inferior sample. Bitrates of, say, 384 kbps, for these codecs are very very difficult to rate to the average listener.
I can only assume that this test was done with the assumption that, for a given codec, given a range of bitrates, the encoding quality / bitrate ratio stays more or less constant. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, I don't think that that is necessarily the case, and it certainly should be investigated.
But that would require finding some people with professional-level hearing (commonly referred to as "Golden Ears") and would probably not be viable except to people making money off of codecs... which is probably why such a study doesn't exist currently...
As an artist that releases mainly online, I found these results very interesting, and thought I'd share my feelings with the slashdot community.
:D
While MP3Pro and Vorbis were good competitors overall, and have a fairly good footprint to boot, I'd have to say that if I'm forced to encode to 64MBit/s, I'd absolutely choose Ahead HE AAC, if I'm judging solely on this comparison (which I am at this point in time...)
Why? Because there was no sample that Ahead HE AAC did POORLY at. MP3Pro and Vorbis (and all the other codecs) each had one or two samples that they just totally choked on, quality-wise. So if I was forced to use a 64 MBit/s codec, it would absolutely be Ahead HE AAC, because while it didn't score highest on every test, and the three codec were virtually tied across the whole competition, I would feel far safer trusting my best digital work to a codec that, according to this test, would have the least chance of representing it particularly poorly.
I wonder how these results compare to higher encoding rates; I could easily imagine that most codecs have a sweet spot, where the encoding quality/bitrate maximizes... it would be interesting to do some research to find this sweet spot.
Anyone want a quick way to slashdot a server?
The other condition that most people fail to mention is that the flight occurred off a cliff. The first powered flight, while indeed powered, was more of a glide than a flight. IIRC, they stayed in the air for all of 30 seconds...
Of course data isn't available, but I'd be willing to bet that the only way it stayed in the air was that it was trading forward velocity for lift the whole trip...
Now Brazil had a powered flight the very next year, and based on these facts, are trying to gain recognition for the first "true" flight.
That argument won't "fly" however (excuse the pun), because the Wright brothers were able to improve their design and have a true powered flight within a few months, provably before the first Brazillian powered flight...
You sir are for more evil than I
*bows in recognition*
....because they're noticed too quickly.
I've always thought that a good worm strategy would be to have an exponential decay counter... something that ramps up the damage gradually. Like send a couple copies out in the first infection, then wait for a while, then send a few more, then wait a little while more, then send out a ton... and maybe pick one dll to corrupt with each activation.
That way, the system seems to gradually degrade instead of just consuming a ton of bandwidth and then dying. Hell, with DLL-Hell, you would just assume that windows is behaving as usual until the whole system becomes unusable!
Oh wait. Well, I guess you'd always assume windows is behaving as usual...
Configure and Monitor stuff on a non NAT firewall? Like what?
Let's address both of those seperately:
1. Configuration of non-NAT firewalls. I have yet to see a real world situation that warranted a firewall where denying all inbound traffic was a viable solution. Web servers, FTP, SQL, E-mail, etc. Sure, NATting firewalls require the same configuration... but generally the rules are MUCH simpler, since you're only routing one inbound IP Address. You're living in a dream world if you think that denying all inbound traffic is a one-size-fit-all solution.
Which brings us to:
2. Monitoring of non-NAT firewalls. Now that you've opened up your internal network to the world, you're just going to sit there and assume it's working? Fuck no! You've got to have intrusion detection systems, bandwidth, port, and deny-log reports. You've got to stay on top of it. And that's not to mention potential patches/updates... sure NATs can have exploits just like firewalls, but since a NAT implementation is much less stateful than a firewall, it's less likely to have them... How is this different from a NAT firewall? Well, since a NAT firewall enforces a simpler network design, the chance of intrusion is far less. For instance, I know every port that's internally routable on my home network... and they are all routed to a single IP Address. So all I have to do is monitor for intrusion on that IP and I'm done...
I have one in my cube at work...it's called a LocalDirector.
Who is the manufacturer? Where can one purchase this device?
Well I use the term NAT to refer to a piece of hardware that is actually a NATting Firewall... you are absolutely right that NAT by itself provides no security.
But I challenge you to find one single hardware product for sale today in a consumer electronics retailer that meets your definition of "NAT by itself"
You can have a good and secure firewall even without NAT, in case you didn't know..
Ahh, but NAT is the simplest. I like the fact that I can get a hardware NATting firewall, plug it in, and know that the default configuration is secure. There aren't any holes anywhere, no cracker is gonna scan my network through it, nothing like that...
Sure you can get that with a regular firewall, but you have to configure it and monitor it and all sorts of other stuff that I, as a consumer, just don't want to do.
And FYI, I work in the TCP/IP security business. It's not that I don't know how to build a firewall. It's that I don't WANT to when I'm off work...