I attended Bill Gates' keynote address at the CES convention this week. I (admittedly naively) expected something a little less partisan than what I saw, being that keynote speeches tend not to be so proprietary in nature. Okay, stupid me. But even in my wildest nightmares I never would have expected such blatant advertisement for Microsoft.
I went just because I wanted to see Bill himself for some odd reason (I guess just to say that I did), and I paid the price.
It was 1.5 hours of overproduced propaganda for M$ home electronics, ranging from the X Box to home automation to PDAs to music players to just about anything that could possibly have a single byte of M$ software grafted into it. Billy made it clear that they will dominate the world in all arenas, and I almost literally came away shaking.
Central to many of the things he and his buddies demonstrated there seems to be.NET. Pretty much all of the devices are networked, either through hard lines or wireless, and are Internet ready. After seeing how the M$ television set notifies you of (and lets you view) instant messages, for example, I had to wonder if some day hackers will occupy their time busting into your home appliances with VB script.
It's definitely time to be scared. The day may soon arrive when you pay M$ licensing fees with every toaster oven purchased, and even your freaking toilet can be hacked.
As soon as we see a.net virus that modifies the IL itself to gain unprivedledged access, is when you need to start worrying.
I think the proof of concept virus alone is enough to wake us up to the continual Micro$oft failure to make secure software. Just like IIS, IE, Outlook, Outlook Express, MS Word macros, ad nauseum,.NET is and will probably always be flawed. It's not a question of *if* someone figures out how to exploit.NET in a serious way, but rather *when*, or, more correctly *how often*?
My guess would be "very soon" and "just as often as every other MS product".
I understand the fears of others here as they wonder if they'll be able to do the kinds of things they want to do on the Internet, and still be able to avoid using.NET and Passport services. My guess would be no. You'll probably have to make sacrifices to avoid using these technologies, and over time those sacrifices may become too great for all but the most fanatical, devoted protester.
It's too bad the DOJ didn't do its job. I think we're all going to suffer as a result.
Copy protecting CDs seems illegal, in light of the Home Audio Recording Act. Does that mean the RIAA won't do it? Of course not. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is permission. Especially if you have highly paid and influential lobbyists helping you to ask for forgiveness.
I have seen the face of evil, and it is the RIAA. As far as I'm concerned, they can go **** themselves. I've bought hundreds of CDs legitimately, and ripped them all for personal use only. I'm allowed to do this, by law. I only listen to MP3s now, because I've discovered that I hate dealing with CDs in great stacks on my stereo cabinet. I have no interest in going back to that. However, I will not buy music in any form other than CD (or other digital physical media, when it's available in the future), because I don't want to lose my MP3s forever when my hard disk crashes and my backups fail. Should the RIAA ever implement a form of copy protection that removes my ability to lawfully convert my CDs to the audio format of my choosing, for personal use, then I will stop buying CDs.
I have to believe that copy protecting CDs will only increase piracy, because those who lack the technical savvy to rip their CDs will simply acquire them from those who do (via Morpheus or other download service du jour). Until recently, for ethical reasons I've never really 'stolen' music using an online service like Morpheus. Due to the RIAA's practices, though, I've started using those services. Should copy protected CDs become ubiquitous, I, and probably droves of others, will no longer buy music, but will just go steal it instead.
I've never run across a good IDE for Unix yet. So far they all have not even come close to doing the job. Feature-lacking and buggy across the board. My latest try was with Sun Workshop, and it was as bad as the rest. It was riddled with showstopping bugs that make it useless for me.
That's not to say that there aren't any good IDEs for Unix, but I haven't found one yet. Should anyone know of any that have good source code-level debugging capability, can properly handle threaded programs, and can interoperate with GNU autotools, all without crashing or exhibiting other crippling, weird behavior, I would be ecstatic.
If Eclipse IDE can do this, wonderful. I don't care if it uses plugins or not. All I care is if it supports all of the above for C development on Linux/Solaris, and in the end simplifies my development efforts rather than complicating them. I guess that should be the ultimate goal of any IDE.
It will be interesting to see whether the consumer will be the final winner or loser. I think it's our right to benefit from the more efficient distribution medium
that is the internet. We shall see...
Against the deep-pockets RIAA, I doubt the consumer will ever actually win. The RIAA will never rest, and they have lots of money. It doesn't matter how many battles they lose, they can fight on tirelessly to ensure that they ultimately stay on top. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose if they give up the quest to maximize profits, so they won't. As Aragorn said in the LOTR movie, "there is evil there that does not sleep.":)
In any legal situation of this complexity, there is never any clearcut winner or loser anyway.
Mega/gigabyte stand for powers of 2, not ten, because of *convention*. These terms have been in popular use as such, and attempting to change them now will only lead to confusion. It's human nature to not leave well enough alone, but hows about we pick something broken to not leave alone?
Windows is so easy to write worms for that we see a constant influx of simple stuff. Simple VB scripts, etc., can do a great deal of damage, and worm authors don't seem motivated to try a harder because they don't have to. This new worm seems like a step in a scary direction, towards real sophistication. Depending on system services to propagate will not be easy forever, and I expect to see more worms with their own protocols (like SMTP) built-in.
The "optimal" worm is one in which all it needs is a thread of execution and access to basic OS APIs like sockets and elementary file access. You're not going to stop a worm from calling the most basic APIs, so the key to stopping worms (once all the fundamental holes are patched in Windows, if ever) seems to be not letting them have that thread of execution in the first place. Of course, there will always be lots of users willing to run unknown executables, but the less automatic, the better. Patching buffer overflows in IIS, etc., will only go so far because there will always be users ready and willing to execute email attachments. Until focus comes to bear on ways to keep unsophisticated users from doing this sort of thing, there will always be a cornucopia of devastating worms.
The only English speaking country in North America (No I am not forgetting our french speaking brothers in Quebec & New Brunswick) that still knows
how to spell.
Apparently you don't know much about grammar or capitalization, though. I'll leave the corrections as an exercise for the reader.
I knew this was coming... the onset of true evil. So, I just went out and bought the 40+ CDs that have been on my "most wanted" list but never got around to buying, before the copy protection sets in. Once they start selling protected CDs exclusively, I doubt I'll ever buy one again, at least not from an actual store.
I've seen a lot of comments regarding protesting by returning protected CDs to the store, forcing the store to restock them. For those of you who think this won't have any effect, think again. I'm not sure about physical stores, but online sellers like Amazon are forced to send returns back to the fulfillment house. This has a devastating effect on the fulfillment companies. It costs them more to accept returns than it does to buy the discs from the record labels in the first place, because they can't return them. They get stuck with the returned stock. If enough people do this, I guarantee you that protected CDs will go away. The only question is, how many people will actually do it?
I have a friend who used to work for Valley, the biggest CD fulfillment company. According to him, when you buy a disc online, this is most likely where it actually comes from. The same probably holds true for physical CD stores. He says that returns are very painful for the aforementioned reason, and he believes an effective protest will probably cause them to complain loudly to the labels.
Regardless, I plan to buy very few discs when this all begins. But when I do, it will be from Amazon, and I'll promptly return them if they're copy-protected. Not before burning a playable copy and converting to MP3, however.
Despite what the labels say about copy protection, all of the various forms of protection can be gotten around. I have evaluated four of the different copy protection schemes that are being/will be used by the labels, and with the right software/CD ROM drive, they can all be defeated without too much trouble. They will only thwart your average, less technical user from copying them. Even if they do come up with a truly effective protection scheme some day, you can always plug a CD player into your sound card and copy analog. Not optimal, but if you're returning the disc anyway, at least you have something to listen to.:)
Hasn't the US had a stealth warship for some time now? I don't know if they ever deployed it, but there was an experimental Navy craft housed in Alameda CA that only came out at night until the project was no longer secret. It looked like a cubist Batboat, or an F117 strapped to a catamaran.
Pick unlikely object. Take non-functional motherboard and hang it from said object. Take photos of motherboard hanging from object. Put photos on website. Submit story to/. that you've created the first website-on-an-[object].
Maybe now we can all get rid of programs like PGP that leave us
vulnerable to government backdoors and move to some real encryption.
Quantum encryption will not replace PGP or any other form of encryption, so far as I see. It's only good for point-to-point encryption of data, protecting someone from eavesdropping on the data stream between those two points. You can still spy on the data beyond either end of the point-to-point link. This technology will be useful for, say, banks who have geographically distant computers passing financial data back and forth, connected by a dedicated link which is physically secure on either end.
This won't be too useful for Joe Internet User, because he doesn't have a direct optical link to all the sites on the Internet he wants to connect to. He connects to an ISP, who connects to another upstream provider, etc., up to the network backbone. Even if each hop was connected via a quantum-encrypted link, the routers themselves are still vulnerable to "tapping", as are Joe User's computer itself and the sites he connects to.
Even if Joe User had a secure direct link between all sites he connects to, he'd be SOL if someone broke into his computer and took his personal documents or the like. So, Joe still has to encrypt personal information above and beyond the encryption provided as part of the data transport.
That way, if he's hacked, they can't be discovered, and if he sends them across the net they can't be spied by taps on the various routers between him and the data's destination. Joe can't use quantum encryption for local data, because it's not usable that way. Quantum encryption is only useful as a method of transmitting a one-time pad key between two points, not for encrypting data on a permanent basis on one's hard disk. Read up on one-time pads to see why (the key is as large as the data- not too useful in most cases).
So Joe still has to use conventional encryption to truly protect himself.
What makes you think not? I have listened to experts on the subject who tell me that electric cars are less efficient than internal combustion cars. Power plants might be more efficient in raw numbers, perhaps (I don't know), but that efficiency is greatly lessened by the fact that you have to transmit that power to where the end user is recharging his car. Sometimes over very great distances. The greater the distance, the more energy is lost along the way. Then you've got the loss of efficiency due to the storage technology, be it the currently used battery technology, or some type of fuel cell technology like that being discussed here. Batteries etc. are not 100% efficient, though people seem to want to believe that. For every watt of energy you pump into a battery when charging, you get back less than what you put into it. Batteries are very inefficient because of that. Also the longer a battery stores a charge, the less energy you get back, but that's digression from the point. You then have to account for the efficiency of the electric motors in pushing the car along. You lose energy there too, though efficiency is sometimes increased by recovering energy through regenerative braking, etc.
The net result of transmission, storage and electric motor inefficiency bring down the total efficiency of electric cars below that of an internal combustion automobile. You don't believe it? Why not read some actual facts? If you can't find it there, you can always call in and talk to Bill Wattenburg. He's a nuclear physicist who specializes in debunking scientific myths, and this particular issue seems to be one of his hot buttons.
I read the blurbs on the Millenium website, but they don't answer two questions which seem important. Okay, this borax solution produces "hydrogen on demand" (TM), great. It leaves behind a safe, non-polluting, "recyclable" compound and emits no hydrocarbon exhaust. Sounds all hunky-dory.
Except a couple of nagging questions. Like, how do you recycle the waste product (sludge?) to make it usable again? You have to reintroduce hydrogen back into the waste product to make it usable again, but that hydrogen has to come from somewhere. They mention seawater as the potential source of hydrogen in this process. Okay, true, water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. But you have to expend energy to extract the hydrogen. Lots of it. Where does that energy come from? Power plants, most likely. Power plants that burn fossil fuels, for the most part.
From what I understand, it's more efficient to burn the fossil fuels directly in your car's engine than to burn it in a power plant, transmit the energy somewhere, store it in some sort of battery or fuel cell, and use that to power your car. Even if that's not the case, you still have to burn fossil fuels, nullifying the supposed benefit of this new "clean" technology. Plus, we're still beholden to "big oil".
The other question is, what happens to the waste product? I guess it would go into some sort of holding tank in your vehicle or something Does that mean you would have to not only fill your tank when you go to the borax station to refuel, you would also have to empty the waste tank?
Oh well, at least this seems more useful than cold fusion.
The decision made by the court seems like a no-brainer to me. If they had come to a different conclusion, it would have indicated a serious lack of integrity in the courts. Of course, the courts fail in many other ways, but this one would have been fundamental.
What's all this griping about? Why does everyone seem so seriously angry that a bigtime pirate organization got nailed for stealing software & movies in gross quantities? If it was your software they were ripping off, you'd probably be singing a different tune (and no, I'm not referring to free software).
These weren't Joe Home User making copies of a buddy's software for personal use. These were dudes copying thousands of software and movie titles and distributing them. And it's not all Big Corporations that get nailed by these guys. I know a guy who writes shareware for a living, and mostly does okay. But fully 80% of the customer support requests he gets are from users with cracked copies of his software. What, should he just give away his work and live in an alley, all in the name of free beer? Or should he give it away and support himself by working for M$ or some other company? He almost has to anyway to support himself as it is.
I have another friend that makes a fairly popular shareware app. The only difference between the "registered" and "unregistered" versions of his software is that the registered version says "registered" in the "about" window. That's it. It's essentially freeware with a request for money to support his efforts. And still the crackers produce cracked versions of his software within hours of a new release. That, in my mind, perfectly well illustrates the mentality of the typical cracker. There's no great social or political statement being made by them. It's all a matter of machismo, pumping up their ego by breaking software and showing the world how big their penises are.
In any case, the assertion that the Feds are doing this to protect M$ is asinine. Sure, M$ was one of the victims here, but I'd hazard a guess that all those ripped off movies were not produced by M$. Nor were the majority of the software titles either.
Maybe we need a new business paradigm for software or other digital wares, I agree. I don't think wholesale piracy is the way to go about making it happen, however. Besides the faulty ethics, it hurts the little guy more than the big evil guy.
Don't rely on MTBF scores, they're not too reliable.
That's actually pretty funny - the reliability metric isn't reliable.
I agree, don't trust hard drives. They're a bad solution for backups, as they don't store as well as real backup media. However, RAID systems are also not suitable because you can't archive data in case your system burns, and it doesn't protect you from filesystem corruption or inadvertent "rm -rf" commands.
They're steep in price, but DLT or AIT are optimal. The newer models are capable of 100GB, except you can't get that much on there if the data is uncompressible (like MP3s are). If you wanted to be able to back up less than 100GB, you could probably get an older DLT/AIT for a grand or less. I've seen 8 or 10-slot AIT changers for less than $3kUS, a config which can store almost a terabyte. If you can afford that kind of cash, you probably won't have to worry about backups for a long time to come.
Audiotron is probably the way to go
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 1
The SliMP3 seems like a cool gadget, and obviously way more hackable than the Audiotron (which doesn't actually seem hackable). But unless you really want to hack on the thing, the Audiotron seems the way to go. The price difference is fairly small (~$40US), and you get a case, optical digital output, actual front-panel controls (more on the remote, but not required), Ethernet & HPNA (okay, HPNA is ugly, but it's there), DHCP, and no proprietary server required.
I just got an Audiotron, and it's awesome. I have it set up to run over 802.11b off my Linux box using Samba. Lots of buffering in the unit, so heavy concurrent use of the network doesn't faze it at all. As a test I pulled the enet cable and it just kept running. The menu organization is powerful and close to how I would have done it. The web interface is all you need to configure the unit, so the Windoze config utility they give you is unnecessary. And you can control the unit from the web interface too, in addition to the front panel controls or the remote.
All in all, it's a very nice unit, and doesn't have that "science project" feel I get from looking at the SliMP3 pictures.
Although, if I wanted to do a science project, I'd go for the SliMP3.
There's crap in there I posted more than a decade ago. Those were the days... to forget.:) It seems like only yesterday I breathed a sigh of relief when that old stuff disappeared from the archives.
you ARE a troll, because you don't stop telling your lies. There is NO law forbidding red LEDs. Maybe the customers of your company asked to avoid red
LEDs, but it is absolutely no rule or law! I work for an ISP an all of our rackmount PCs, backup devices, telco devices etc. HAVE red LEDs on the FRONT.
Gee, so I guess those mechanicals guys at TWO DIFFERENT companies were all conspiring to trick me into thinking that red lights on the front of computer equipment was not allowed in Germany. Yeah, that's the ticket. I've never been to a German telco, but by the sound of it neither have you. An ISP is a different thing than a telco, and they have very different rules. You may have "telco equipment" at your ISP, but that doesn't make it a telco. I know for a fact that we were not allowed to put red lights on our computers so they could be sold in Germany. We adhered to these rules in two different companies, with two very different sets of customers. There is, or was, clearly some reason that we were barred from putting red lights on the front of the systems we built, all for the sake of German sales. I was told by independent sources that it was because of the rules we had to adhere to. I didn't read the German telco system requirements documents myself, because that was not my job. I trusted that those whose job it was were competent. The fact that two different sets of people told me the same thing, something important that dictated significant features of our mechanicals, leads me to believe they knew what they're talking about and you don't. I have to assume that YOU are the troll, or
perhaps just an idiot. Or both.
Slashdot Mirror
I attended Bill Gates' keynote address at the CES convention this week. I (admittedly naively) expected something a little less partisan than what I saw, being that keynote speeches tend not to be so proprietary in nature. Okay, stupid me. But even in my wildest nightmares I never would have expected such blatant advertisement for Microsoft.
.NET. Pretty much all of the devices are networked, either through hard lines or wireless, and are Internet ready. After seeing how the M$ television set notifies you of (and lets you view) instant messages, for example, I had to wonder if some day hackers will occupy their time busting into your home appliances with VB script.
I went just because I wanted to see Bill himself for some odd reason (I guess just to say that I did), and I paid the price. It was 1.5 hours of overproduced propaganda for M$ home electronics, ranging from the X Box to home automation to PDAs to music players to just about anything that could possibly have a single byte of M$ software grafted into it. Billy made it clear that they will dominate the world in all arenas, and I almost literally came away shaking.
Central to many of the things he and his buddies demonstrated there seems to be
It's definitely time to be scared. The day may soon arrive when you pay M$ licensing fees with every toaster oven purchased, and even your freaking toilet can be hacked.
As soon as we see a .net virus that modifies the IL itself to gain unprivedledged access, is when you need to start worrying.
.NET is and will probably always be flawed. It's not a question of *if* someone figures out how to exploit .NET in a serious way, but rather *when*, or, more correctly *how often*?
My guess would be "very soon" and "just as often as every other MS product".
.NET and Passport services. My guess would be no. You'll probably have to make sacrifices to avoid using these technologies, and over time those sacrifices may become too great for all but the most fanatical, devoted protester.
I think the proof of concept virus alone is enough to wake us up to the continual Micro$oft failure to make secure software. Just like IIS, IE, Outlook, Outlook Express, MS Word macros, ad nauseum,
I understand the fears of others here as they wonder if they'll be able to do the kinds of things they want to do on the Internet, and still be able to avoid using
It's too bad the DOJ didn't do its job. I think we're all going to suffer as a result.
Copy protecting CDs seems illegal, in light of the Home Audio Recording Act. Does that mean the RIAA won't do it? Of course not. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is permission. Especially if you have highly paid and influential lobbyists helping you to ask for forgiveness.
I have seen the face of evil, and it is the RIAA. As far as I'm concerned, they can go **** themselves. I've bought hundreds of CDs legitimately, and ripped them all for personal use only. I'm allowed to do this, by law. I only listen to MP3s now, because I've discovered that I hate dealing with CDs in great stacks on my stereo cabinet. I have no interest in going back to that. However, I will not buy music in any form other than CD (or other digital physical media, when it's available in the future), because I don't want to lose my MP3s forever when my hard disk crashes and my backups fail. Should the RIAA ever implement a form of copy protection that removes my ability to lawfully convert my CDs to the audio format of my choosing, for personal use, then I will stop buying CDs.
I have to believe that copy protecting CDs will only increase piracy, because those who lack the technical savvy to rip their CDs will simply acquire them from those who do (via Morpheus or other download service du jour). Until recently, for ethical reasons I've never really 'stolen' music using an online service like Morpheus. Due to the RIAA's practices, though, I've started using those services. Should copy protected CDs become ubiquitous, I, and probably droves of others, will no longer buy music, but will just go steal it instead.
I've never run across a good IDE for Unix yet. So far they all have not even come close to doing the job. Feature-lacking and buggy across the board. My latest try was with Sun Workshop, and it was as bad as the rest. It was riddled with showstopping bugs that make it useless for me.
That's not to say that there aren't any good IDEs for Unix, but I haven't found one yet. Should anyone know of any that have good source code-level debugging capability, can properly handle threaded programs, and can interoperate with GNU autotools, all without crashing or exhibiting other crippling, weird behavior, I would be ecstatic.
If Eclipse IDE can do this, wonderful. I don't care if it uses plugins or not. All I care is if it supports all of the above for C development on Linux/Solaris, and in the end simplifies my development efforts rather than complicating them. I guess that should be the ultimate goal of any IDE.
It's on my wrist, and it tells me that it's now 1:57 PM. :)
Totally OT, but that was Boromir.
:)
Indeed, you are correct. That's what I meant.
It will be interesting to see whether the consumer will be the final winner or loser. I think it's our right to benefit from the more efficient distribution medium that is the internet. We shall see...
:)
Against the deep-pockets RIAA, I doubt the consumer will ever actually win. The RIAA will never rest, and they have lots of money. It doesn't matter how many battles they lose, they can fight on tirelessly to ensure that they ultimately stay on top. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose if they give up the quest to maximize profits, so they won't. As Aragorn said in the LOTR movie, "there is evil there that does not sleep."
In any legal situation of this complexity, there is never any clearcut winner or loser anyway.
Mega/gigabyte stand for powers of 2, not ten, because of *convention*. These terms have been in popular use as such, and attempting to change them now will only lead to confusion. It's human nature to not leave well enough alone, but hows about we pick something broken to not leave alone?
Windows is so easy to write worms for that we see a constant influx of simple stuff. Simple VB scripts, etc., can do a great deal of damage, and worm authors don't seem motivated to try a harder because they don't have to. This new worm seems like a step in a scary direction, towards real sophistication. Depending on system services to propagate will not be easy forever, and I expect to see more worms with their own protocols (like SMTP) built-in.
The "optimal" worm is one in which all it needs is a thread of execution and access to basic OS APIs like sockets and elementary file access. You're not going to stop a worm from calling the most basic APIs, so the key to stopping worms (once all the fundamental holes are patched in Windows, if ever) seems to be not letting them have that thread of execution in the first place. Of course, there will always be lots of users willing to run unknown executables, but the less automatic, the better. Patching buffer overflows in IIS, etc., will only go so far because there will always be users ready and willing to execute email attachments. Until focus comes to bear on ways to keep unsophisticated users from doing this sort of thing, there will always be a cornucopia of devastating worms.
The only English speaking country in North America (No I am not forgetting our french speaking brothers in Quebec & New Brunswick) that still knows how to spell.
Apparently you don't know much about grammar or capitalization, though. I'll leave the corrections as an exercise for the reader.
I knew this was coming... the onset of true evil. So, I just went out and bought the 40+ CDs that have been on my "most wanted" list but never got around to buying, before the copy protection sets in. Once they start selling protected CDs exclusively, I doubt I'll ever buy one again, at least not from an actual store.
:)
I've seen a lot of comments regarding protesting by returning protected CDs to the store, forcing the store to restock them. For those of you who think this won't have any effect, think again. I'm not sure about physical stores, but online sellers like Amazon are forced to send returns back to the fulfillment house. This has a devastating effect on the fulfillment companies. It costs them more to accept returns than it does to buy the discs from the record labels in the first place, because they can't return them. They get stuck with the returned stock. If enough people do this, I guarantee you that protected CDs will go away. The only question is, how many people will actually do it?
I have a friend who used to work for Valley, the biggest CD fulfillment company. According to him, when you buy a disc online, this is most likely where it actually comes from. The same probably holds true for physical CD stores. He says that returns are very painful for the aforementioned reason, and he believes an effective protest will probably cause them to complain loudly to the labels.
Regardless, I plan to buy very few discs when this all begins. But when I do, it will be from Amazon, and I'll promptly return them if they're copy-protected. Not before burning a playable copy and converting to MP3, however.
Despite what the labels say about copy protection, all of the various forms of protection can be gotten around. I have evaluated four of the different copy protection schemes that are being/will be used by the labels, and with the right software/CD ROM drive, they can all be defeated without too much trouble. They will only thwart your average, less technical user from copying them. Even if they do come up with a truly effective protection scheme some day, you can always plug a CD player into your sound card and copy analog. Not optimal, but if you're returning the disc anyway, at least you have something to listen to.
Hasn't the US had a stealth warship for some time now? I don't know if they ever deployed it, but there was an experimental Navy craft housed in Alameda CA that only came out at night until the project was no longer secret. It looked like a cubist Batboat, or an F117 strapped to a catamaran.
What ever happened to that project?
Pick unlikely object. Take non-functional motherboard and hang it from said object. Take photos of motherboard hanging from object. Put photos on website. Submit story to /. that you've created the first website-on-an-[object].
:)
How long do you think it will take them to unplug the speakers?
How do you know they're actually plugged in?
Maybe now we can all get rid of programs like PGP that leave us vulnerable to government backdoors and move to some real encryption.
Quantum encryption will not replace PGP or any other form of encryption, so far as I see. It's only good for point-to-point encryption of data, protecting someone from eavesdropping on the data stream between those two points. You can still spy on the data beyond either end of the point-to-point link. This technology will be useful for, say, banks who have geographically distant computers passing financial data back and forth, connected by a dedicated link which is physically secure on either end.
This won't be too useful for Joe Internet User, because he doesn't have a direct optical link to all the sites on the Internet he wants to connect to. He connects to an ISP, who connects to another upstream provider, etc., up to the network backbone. Even if each hop was connected via a quantum-encrypted link, the routers themselves are still vulnerable to "tapping", as are Joe User's computer itself and the sites he connects to.
Even if Joe User had a secure direct link between all sites he connects to, he'd be SOL if someone broke into his computer and took his personal documents or the like. So, Joe still has to encrypt personal information above and beyond the encryption provided as part of the data transport. That way, if he's hacked, they can't be discovered, and if he sends them across the net they can't be spied by taps on the various routers between him and the data's destination. Joe can't use quantum encryption for local data, because it's not usable that way. Quantum encryption is only useful as a method of transmitting a one-time pad key between two points, not for encrypting data on a permanent basis on one's hard disk. Read up on one-time pads to see why (the key is as large as the data- not too useful in most cases). So Joe still has to use conventional encryption to truly protect himself.
What the hell makes you think that?!?!
What makes you think not? I have listened to experts on the subject who tell me that electric cars are less efficient than internal combustion cars. Power plants might be more efficient in raw numbers, perhaps (I don't know), but that efficiency is greatly lessened by the fact that you have to transmit that power to where the end user is recharging his car. Sometimes over very great distances. The greater the distance, the more energy is lost along the way. Then you've got the loss of efficiency due to the storage technology, be it the currently used battery technology, or some type of fuel cell technology like that being discussed here. Batteries etc. are not 100% efficient, though people seem to want to believe that. For every watt of energy you pump into a battery when charging, you get back less than what you put into it. Batteries are very inefficient because of that. Also the longer a battery stores a charge, the less energy you get back, but that's digression from the point. You then have to account for the efficiency of the electric motors in pushing the car along. You lose energy there too, though efficiency is sometimes increased by recovering energy through regenerative braking, etc.
The net result of transmission, storage and electric motor inefficiency bring down the total efficiency of electric cars below that of an internal combustion automobile. You don't believe it? Why not read some actual facts? If you can't find it there, you can always call in and talk to Bill Wattenburg. He's a nuclear physicist who specializes in debunking scientific myths, and this particular issue seems to be one of his hot buttons.
I read the blurbs on the Millenium website, but they don't answer two questions which seem important. Okay, this borax solution produces "hydrogen on demand" (TM), great. It leaves behind a safe, non-polluting, "recyclable" compound and emits no hydrocarbon exhaust. Sounds all hunky-dory.
Except a couple of nagging questions. Like, how do you recycle the waste product (sludge?) to make it usable again? You have to reintroduce hydrogen back into the waste product to make it usable again, but that hydrogen has to come from somewhere. They mention seawater as the potential source of hydrogen in this process. Okay, true, water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. But you have to expend energy to extract the hydrogen. Lots of it. Where does that energy come from? Power plants, most likely. Power plants that burn fossil fuels, for the most part.
From what I understand, it's more efficient to burn the fossil fuels directly in your car's engine than to burn it in a power plant, transmit the energy somewhere, store it in some sort of battery or fuel cell, and use that to power your car. Even if that's not the case, you still have to burn fossil fuels, nullifying the supposed benefit of this new "clean" technology. Plus, we're still beholden to "big oil".
The other question is, what happens to the waste product? I guess it would go into some sort of holding tank in your vehicle or something Does that mean you would have to not only fill your tank when you go to the borax station to refuel, you would also have to empty the waste tank?
Oh well, at least this seems more useful than cold fusion.
If I put up a webpage, do I have the same freedoms as outlined by the press?
No, you only have the same rights if you have the money to defend yourself in court when someone sues you for exercising free speech.
The decision made by the court seems like a no-brainer to me. If they had come to a different conclusion, it would have indicated a serious lack of integrity in the courts. Of course, the courts fail in many other ways, but this one would have been fundamental.
What's all this griping about? Why does everyone seem so seriously angry that a bigtime pirate organization got nailed for stealing software & movies in gross quantities? If it was your software they were ripping off, you'd probably be singing a different tune (and no, I'm not referring to free software).
These weren't Joe Home User making copies of a buddy's software for personal use. These were dudes copying thousands of software and movie titles and distributing them. And it's not all Big Corporations that get nailed by these guys. I know a guy who writes shareware for a living, and mostly does okay. But fully 80% of the customer support requests he gets are from users with cracked copies of his software. What, should he just give away his work and live in an alley, all in the name of free beer? Or should he give it away and support himself by working for M$ or some other company? He almost has to anyway to support himself as it is.
I have another friend that makes a fairly popular shareware app. The only difference between the "registered" and "unregistered" versions of his software is that the registered version says "registered" in the "about" window. That's it. It's essentially freeware with a request for money to support his efforts. And still the crackers produce cracked versions of his software within hours of a new release. That, in my mind, perfectly well illustrates the mentality of the typical cracker. There's no great social or political statement being made by them. It's all a matter of machismo, pumping up their ego by breaking software and showing the world how big their penises are.
In any case, the assertion that the Feds are doing this to protect M$ is asinine. Sure, M$ was one of the victims here, but I'd hazard a guess that all those ripped off movies were not produced by M$. Nor were the majority of the software titles either.
Maybe we need a new business paradigm for software or other digital wares, I agree. I don't think wholesale piracy is the way to go about making it happen, however. Besides the faulty ethics, it hurts the little guy more than the big evil guy.
I always thought it was spelled "37337."
Shouldn't that be "31337"?
Don't rely on MTBF scores, they're not too reliable.
That's actually pretty funny - the reliability metric isn't reliable.
I agree, don't trust hard drives. They're a bad solution for backups, as they don't store as well as real backup media. However, RAID systems are also not suitable because you can't archive data in case your system burns, and it doesn't protect you from filesystem corruption or inadvertent "rm -rf" commands.
They're steep in price, but DLT or AIT are optimal. The newer models are capable of 100GB, except you can't get that much on there if the data is uncompressible (like MP3s are). If you wanted to be able to back up less than 100GB, you could probably get an older DLT/AIT for a grand or less. I've seen 8 or 10-slot AIT changers for less than $3kUS, a config which can store almost a terabyte. If you can afford that kind of cash, you probably won't have to worry about backups for a long time to come.
The SliMP3 seems like a cool gadget, and obviously way more hackable than the Audiotron (which doesn't actually seem hackable). But unless you really want to hack on the thing, the Audiotron seems the way to go. The price difference is fairly small (~$40US), and you get a case, optical digital output, actual front-panel controls (more on the remote, but not required), Ethernet & HPNA (okay, HPNA is ugly, but it's there), DHCP, and no proprietary server required.
I just got an Audiotron, and it's awesome. I have it set up to run over 802.11b off my Linux box using Samba. Lots of buffering in the unit, so heavy concurrent use of the network doesn't faze it at all. As a test I pulled the enet cable and it just kept running. The menu organization is powerful and close to how I would have done it. The web interface is all you need to configure the unit, so the Windoze config utility they give you is unnecessary. And you can control the unit from the web interface too, in addition to the front panel controls or the remote. All in all, it's a very nice unit, and doesn't have that "science project" feel I get from looking at the SliMP3 pictures.
Although, if I wanted to do a science project, I'd go for the SliMP3.
There's crap in there I posted more than a decade ago. Those were the days... to forget. :) It seems like only yesterday I breathed a sigh of relief when that old stuff disappeared from the archives.
Just when you thought it was safe.
you ARE a troll, because you don't stop telling your lies. There is NO law forbidding red LEDs. Maybe the customers of your company asked to avoid red LEDs, but it is absolutely no rule or law! I work for an ISP an all of our rackmount PCs, backup devices, telco devices etc. HAVE red LEDs on the FRONT.
Gee, so I guess those mechanicals guys at TWO DIFFERENT companies were all conspiring to trick me into thinking that red lights on the front of computer equipment was not allowed in Germany. Yeah, that's the ticket. I've never been to a German telco, but by the sound of it neither have you. An ISP is a different thing than a telco, and they have very different rules. You may have "telco equipment" at your ISP, but that doesn't make it a telco. I know for a fact that we were not allowed to put red lights on our computers so they could be sold in Germany. We adhered to these rules in two different companies, with two very different sets of customers. There is, or was, clearly some reason that we were barred from putting red lights on the front of the systems we built, all for the sake of German sales. I was told by independent sources that it was because of the rules we had to adhere to. I didn't read the German telco system requirements documents myself, because that was not my job. I trusted that those whose job it was were competent. The fact that two different sets of people told me the same thing, something important that dictated significant features of our mechanicals, leads me to believe they knew what they're talking about and you don't. I have to assume that YOU are the troll, or perhaps just an idiot. Or both.