A professor friend of mine got his PhD at Berkeley and did several years of postdoc work there. I constantly had to help him with network and IT issues in his lab, because the state of IT at the university was utterly appalling. The network was a complete clusterfuck, because there was no security to speak of anywhere and machines were getting hacked left and right. I wanted to help my friend at least get a local hardware firewall in his lab, but the IT department wouldn't allow it for some reason. So he had to individually secure each machine on his network, since as a result they each had routable IP addresses. And that wasn't easy.
There was also the problem of stupid people needing IP addresses for new machines and just using whatever IP address from their subnet that they felt like using. Invariably the IP address was one that was already in use by someone else (often one of my friend's machines), so connectivity could go away at a moment's notice. And tracking down the perpetrator was usually a futile task, given the large expanse of campus covered by a subnet.
The IT staff was also pretty much incapable of running the mail servers correctly as well. Authenticated SMTP? Ha! Mailbox quota size too small? Tough! Completely useless people. The sad thing was that the head of IT at the time openly admitted that he and his group were essentially not competent to solve the problems facing the campus network. Oy.
This was all about 8 years ago, so perhaps things are better, I can't say. But it is appalling that a campus like Berkeley, where much of the Internet itself began, was ever in such a sorry state.
The failure here was not that the Windows boxes weren't patched. It's stupid to be patching thousands of systems that are in use w/o serious testing first. Full testing of patches in a world where new viruses/security holes appear every day is effectively impossible. Untested patches may cause new problems for the systems that could actually be worse than a problem caused by a virus.
No, the problem here is that these systems are even on the Internet to begin with. Shouldn't such a network exist in an airspace as a totally private net, with no outside access? Of course, at the core of the private network must be some sort of control mechanism/database with some connectivity to an outside network. But that should be a chokepoint, the only source of ingress/egress to the private network, with no other access than what's needed to serve the system from the local DHS network. That limited access should not include web/email/instant messaging, etc. Just whatever custom/specialized protocol is needed to serve the system.
I'm constantly amazed at the high profile companies/government offices that get nailed by viruses. It's inexcusable.
I wonder if this thing ever accidentally misses and damages surrounding objects/beings?
If it misses, won't the RPG/missile do a lot of damage to surrounding objects anyway, when it hits the tank and explodes? The only difference is that the explosion would be 10-30 meters further along the missile's path. Well, that and the additional explosion of the tank's fuel and ammunition.
The guy says dlink has to stop this or he'll get shut down, because of the costs he'll be facing if they don't. Get real, that won't help. Even if d-link updates all of their firmware today, it will take years for the bandwidth usage to stop. He's facing the costs no matter what d-link does, short of them paying his bills.
At this point he has only one choice. He has to change gps.dix.dk to gps2.dix.dk, or some other name. Yes, this will inconvenience Danish servers that use his NTP service. They'll have to switch over to the new name, and it might take a while for him to get the word out. He can run both names in parallel for long enough to give legitimate users time to make the change.
This may inconvenience Danish server admins, but my guess is it will inconvenience them a whole lot less than if he has to shut down, as he says he will if the traffic from d-link devices continues. Given that it will continue for quite some time, what other choice is there? He should just bite the bullet and do what he has to do.
Light sabers work at the subatomic level, disintegrating matter. However, heat is generated within resistant materials, giving the impression that the sabers themselves are actually hot. Don't the slashdot guys know this?
The article says nothing about seek time... Obviously, there is no seek time with a flash drive. Accessing memory is the same cost, regardless of the address being accessed. This presents a potentially massive performance improvement over traditional drives, transfer rate notwithstanding. To me, this is the big win.
If flash drives were more commonplace, it would revolutionize filesystem and database development. No longer would you have to care about sequential access, keeping blocks contiguous, etc. This would change everything. I'm amazed that you don't hear more about this.
The "Encyclopedia Tuxlovica", my own personal encyclopedia, has ZERO errors. It's clearly superior to both Wikipedia and Britannica. Never mind that it has no content yet, what's there is error-free!
The owner of GoDaddy, Bob Parsons, is a freak anyway, so maybe it's time for Opera/Safari users to get a new registrar. And everyone else too. I kept getting US military propaganda spam from GoDaddy to my hostmaster account (Parsons is an ex-marine), and complained. Parsons replied personally, defending his propaganda spamming, and refusing to stop. I get enough spam without my registrar getting into the act too. Goodbye Godaddy.
And how hard can it be for them to fix their damn pages so they work with every browser? Just about every other site in the world manages... They should stop trying to sell us the war and spend their time fixing their site.
Don't assume Microsoft is trying to enact a law that *protects* your privacy. Perhaps they just want privacy laws to be predictable w/o too much concern for whether they actually protect or not.
Farscape should have been in the top 10, but it wasn't even in the top 50. What idiot made this list? DS9 has no place in the list whatsoever, so they at least got that right. It was a total ripoff of B5, and a pale shadow of B5 at that. (In fact, JMS pitched B5 to Paramount originally. They said "not interested", then put out DS9 on their own.) Voyager barely belongs on the list. A lot of the crap on the list is pure camp or not even sci-fi. Given some of the garbage they've included, I have to wonder why they skipped Mork From Ork?
Spending years debugging in data centers with lots of hard disks and fans has screwed up my hearing. A silly little iPod can't hold a candle to that. Don't let them tell you white noise is soothing - it's a hearing killer. Your ears need a chance to rest, and the constance of such noise doesn't give your ears a break.
Patrick McGovern defined the mix as "grog", an archaic drink that in the United States is sold as the Midas Touch
Trader Vic's restaurant chain sells it as Grog. More specifically, Navy Grog, so it's not confused with the Mesopotamian version of the drink.:) I think theirs is largely rum.
I didn't realize Microsoft was in the habit of hiring openly racist people. ESR's ego about his hyperintelligence seems unjustified given the fact that he subscribes so wholeheartedly to the failed theories of "The Bell Curve". It's kind of sad that someone supposedly so smart lets his personal desire to be more uber than other races shine through, rather than to try and conquer his prejudice. I've never been a fan of Microsoft, but I did at least expect them to have more integrity in their hiring practices.
80 MPG for the first 20 miles, until the battery assist runs down? This is crap, the car doesn't really get 80 MPG at all. The guy has to charge it up from wall power, necessitating the consumption of fossil fuels elsewhere to send him the electricity (OK not all electric power is fossil, but the point is still valid).
If you add up the energy created elsewhere to charge his batteries, as you should, you'll see that it requires *more* energy than if he had just burned gas in his engine instead. Perhaps that's why the article states it's not yet cost efficient. As soon as we have an extremely low-cost and ubiquitous source of electric power, then this "invention" will be meaningful. But then you can just rip out the gas engine and tank run on electricity and make this whole bunch of BS moot.
Microsoft files thousands of patents every year. They have their own patent examiners (!). Every patent is designed to be a land mine for anyone else
trying to get in their face. This is probably not even close to the worst of all their patents, even if you only look at recent ones. So why pick on this particular one?
I was involved in a lawsuit over contents of a web page, and we used the Wayback machine to gather evidence of a web page over time. The only problem was that the dates the page was archived in the Wayback database were inconsistent and sometimes too far apart. Some significant contents of the site were missed because they were only available for a few weeks, and were skipped over by their spider. In the end, it didn't help much, it only hurt our case.
How is this even competition? Somehow because the BBC releases free music they own means that I won't be interested in *other* music? I'm not sure how listening to particular free recordings is going to make me not want other recordings too. I mean, if someone handed me all of my David Bowie CDs for free, how would that somehow make me not want to have my Pink Floyd CDs even if I had to buy them? This is a really strange argument.
It means cheaper prints for consumers (about 24 cents per photo print)
Don't worry, this is HP. They'll make up for it somehow, probably by raising the price of ink even higher. And as an added bonus, they'll make their printer drivers even more unstable and difficult to install.
... people who write perpetually vulnerable software, like Microsoft? How about the death penalty for stupid pointy-haired bosses and businesses that continue to use perpetually vulnerable software? How about the death penalty for stupid sysadmins who don't patch their perpetually vulnerable software and make the fast spread of viruses possible in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
A professor friend of mine got his PhD at Berkeley and did several years of postdoc work there. I constantly had to help him with network and IT issues in his lab, because the state of IT at the university was utterly appalling. The network was a complete clusterfuck, because there was no security to speak of anywhere and machines were getting hacked left and right. I wanted to help my friend at least get a local hardware firewall in his lab, but the IT department wouldn't allow it for some reason. So he had to individually secure each machine on his network, since as a result they each had routable IP addresses. And that wasn't easy.
There was also the problem of stupid people needing IP addresses for new machines and just using whatever IP address from their subnet that they felt like using. Invariably the IP address was one that was already in use by someone else (often one of my friend's machines), so connectivity could go away at a moment's notice. And tracking down the perpetrator was usually a futile task, given the large expanse of campus covered by a subnet.
The IT staff was also pretty much incapable of running the mail servers correctly as well. Authenticated SMTP? Ha! Mailbox quota size too small? Tough! Completely useless people. The sad thing was that the head of IT at the time openly admitted that he and his group were essentially not competent to solve the problems facing the campus network. Oy.
This was all about 8 years ago, so perhaps things are better, I can't say. But it is appalling that a campus like Berkeley, where much of the Internet itself began, was ever in such a sorry state.
The failure here was not that the Windows boxes weren't patched. It's stupid to be patching thousands of systems that are in use w/o serious testing first. Full testing of patches in a world where new viruses/security holes appear every day is effectively impossible. Untested patches may cause new problems for the systems that could actually be worse than a problem caused by a virus.
No, the problem here is that these systems are even on the Internet to begin with. Shouldn't such a network exist in an airspace as a totally private net, with no outside access? Of course, at the core of the private network must be some sort of control mechanism/database with some connectivity to an outside network. But that should be a chokepoint, the only source of ingress/egress to the private network, with no other access than what's needed to serve the system from the local DHS network. That limited access should not include web/email/instant messaging, etc. Just whatever custom/specialized protocol is needed to serve the system.
I'm constantly amazed at the high profile companies/government offices that get nailed by viruses. It's inexcusable.
I wonder if this thing ever accidentally misses and damages surrounding objects/beings?
If it misses, won't the RPG/missile do a lot of damage to surrounding objects anyway, when it hits the tank and explodes? The only difference is that the explosion would be 10-30 meters further along the missile's path. Well, that and the additional explosion of the tank's fuel and ammunition.
Shouldn't that be, "CAUTION: Do not look into laser with remaining eye!"
The guy says dlink has to stop this or he'll get shut down, because of the costs he'll be facing if they don't. Get real, that won't help. Even if d-link updates all of their firmware today, it will take years for the bandwidth usage to stop. He's facing the costs no matter what d-link does, short of them paying his bills.
At this point he has only one choice. He has to change gps.dix.dk to gps2.dix.dk, or some other name. Yes, this will inconvenience Danish servers that use his NTP service. They'll have to switch over to the new name, and it might take a while for him to get the word out. He can run both names in parallel for long enough to give legitimate users time to make the change.
This may inconvenience Danish server admins, but my guess is it will inconvenience them a whole lot less than if he has to shut down, as he says he will if the traffic from d-link devices continues. Given that it will continue for quite some time, what other choice is there? He should just bite the bullet and do what he has to do.
Light sabers work at the subatomic level, disintegrating matter. However, heat is generated within resistant materials, giving the impression that the sabers themselves are actually hot. Don't the slashdot guys know this?
The article says nothing about seek time... Obviously, there is no seek time with a flash drive. Accessing memory is the same cost, regardless of the address being accessed. This presents a potentially massive performance improvement over traditional drives, transfer rate notwithstanding. To me, this is the big win.
If flash drives were more commonplace, it would revolutionize filesystem and database development. No longer would you have to care about sequential access, keeping blocks contiguous, etc. This would change everything. I'm amazed that you don't hear more about this.
the hoax was designed "to give foreign media a lesson that Chinese affairs are not always the way you think."
I.e. don't criticize our government, western dogs. We here in China have a right to free oppression!
The "Encyclopedia Tuxlovica", my own personal encyclopedia, has ZERO errors. It's clearly superior to both Wikipedia and Britannica. Never mind that it has no content yet, what's there is error-free!
The owner of GoDaddy, Bob Parsons, is a freak anyway, so maybe it's time for Opera/Safari users to get a new registrar. And everyone else too. I kept getting US military propaganda spam from GoDaddy to my hostmaster account (Parsons is an ex-marine), and complained. Parsons replied personally, defending his propaganda spamming, and refusing to stop. I get enough spam without my registrar getting into the act too. Goodbye Godaddy.
And how hard can it be for them to fix their damn pages so they work with every browser? Just about every other site in the world manages... They should stop trying to sell us the war and spend their time fixing their site.
Don't assume Microsoft is trying to enact a law that *protects* your privacy. Perhaps they just want privacy laws to be predictable w/o too much concern for whether they actually protect or not.
but do the lack of criminal accountability and the burden of action on the victim hinder the effectiveness of this bill?
Phishing is already illegal across the US, if not the world. It's called "fraud". This bill merely adds more ammunition to the public's arsenal.
Farscape should have been in the top 10, but it wasn't even in the top 50. What idiot made this list? DS9 has no place in the list whatsoever, so they at least got that right. It was a total ripoff of B5, and a pale shadow of B5 at that. (In fact, JMS pitched B5 to Paramount originally. They said "not interested", then put out DS9 on their own.) Voyager barely belongs on the list. A lot of the crap on the list is pure camp or not even sci-fi. Given some of the garbage they've included, I have to wonder why they skipped Mork From Ork?
Oh yeah, where's Blakes 7?
Spending years debugging in data centers with lots of hard disks and fans has screwed up my hearing. A silly little iPod can't hold a candle to that. Don't let them tell you white noise is soothing - it's a hearing killer. Your ears need a chance to rest, and the constance of such noise doesn't give your ears a break.
Apparently their website can't guarantee 9us response time... Hope it's not running their product. ;)
Patrick McGovern defined the mix as "grog", an archaic drink that in the United States is sold as the Midas Touch
:) I think theirs is largely rum.
Trader Vic's restaurant chain sells it as Grog. More specifically, Navy Grog, so it's not confused with the Mesopotamian version of the drink.
I didn't realize Microsoft was in the habit of hiring openly racist people. ESR's ego about his hyperintelligence seems unjustified given the fact that he subscribes so wholeheartedly to the failed theories of "The Bell Curve". It's kind of sad that someone supposedly so smart lets his personal desire to be more uber than other races shine through, rather than to try and conquer his prejudice. I've never been a fan of Microsoft, but I did at least expect them to have more integrity in their hiring practices.
80 MPG for the first 20 miles, until the battery assist runs down? This is crap, the car doesn't really get 80 MPG at all. The guy has to charge it up from wall power, necessitating the consumption of fossil fuels elsewhere to send him the electricity (OK not all electric power is fossil, but the point is still valid). If you add up the energy created elsewhere to charge his batteries, as you should, you'll see that it requires *more* energy than if he had just burned gas in his engine instead. Perhaps that's why the article states it's not yet cost efficient. As soon as we have an extremely low-cost and ubiquitous source of electric power, then this "invention" will be meaningful. But then you can just rip out the gas engine and tank run on electricity and make this whole bunch of BS moot.
What a stupid article.
Microsoft files thousands of patents every year. They have their own patent examiners (!). Every patent is designed to be a land mine for anyone else trying to get in their face. This is probably not even close to the worst of all their patents, even if you only look at recent ones. So why pick on this particular one?
I was involved in a lawsuit over contents of a web page, and we used the Wayback machine to gather evidence of a web page over time. The only problem was that the dates the page was archived in the Wayback database were inconsistent and sometimes too far apart. Some significant contents of the site were missed because they were only available for a few weeks, and were skipped over by their spider. In the end, it didn't help much, it only hurt our case.
Did you count the number of fans on that puppy?
I wouldn't want to be within 100 yards of this vacuum cleaner.
How is this even competition? Somehow because the BBC releases free music they own means that I won't be interested in *other* music? I'm not sure how listening to particular free recordings is going to make me not want other recordings too. I mean, if someone handed me all of my David Bowie CDs for free, how would that somehow make me not want to have my Pink Floyd CDs even if I had to buy them? This is a really strange argument.
It means cheaper prints for consumers (about 24 cents per photo print)
Don't worry, this is HP. They'll make up for it somehow, probably by raising the price of ink even higher. And as an added bonus, they'll make their printer drivers even more unstable and difficult to install.
... people who write perpetually vulnerable software, like Microsoft? How about the death penalty for stupid pointy-haired bosses and businesses that continue to use perpetually vulnerable software? How about the death penalty for stupid sysadmins who don't patch their perpetually vulnerable software and make the fast spread of viruses possible in the first place?