The sad part is that most of the great advancements in computing, be it software or hardware, were not the result of a bureaucratic process such as this.
not only of a looming Helium shortage - just google for "Aluminum Shortage" and take a look at the results... many resources on earth are becoming more and more scarce while everybody seems to only concentrate on energy resources.
I'm not sure why this was moderated insightful. Aluminum is the most abundant metal on the planet, and is the 3rd most abundant element after Oxygen and Silicon. It comprises 8% of the entire mass of our planet. The "shortage" you're talking about is with aluminum production, which was predicted to occur in 2004-2005 because China was needing more aluminum than the global industry was producing. Aluminum is more difficult to extract to a usable form than other metals, like Iron, so larger, more complex infrastructure has to be built, which can take years.
There's really no comparison between a helium and aluminum "shortage" on our planet.
A pack of thieves attempted to steal scrap metal from an abandoned factory in Kladno. Unfortunately for them, they selected the steel girders that supported the factory roof. When the roof supports were dismantled, the roof fell, fatally crushing two thieves and injuring three others.
Stuff like this must happen pretty often. Two guys broke into a shut-down foundry near here with the intent of stealing copper wire. Unfortunately for them, they cut into a 12 kilovolt line that was still energized. One of them died from suffering burns to 60% of his body.
I see a number of potential issues with this. There's a very good reason inboxes are normally chronologically sorted - because you are most interested in what is new. I get a daily weather email. I never send email to that address, and it is not part of any social websites. Going by the description of how this new Yahoo system would work, this email would be low priority. With the exception of spam, I really cannot think of any email that I would not want sorted at the top when it first arrives.
The amount of false positives would be extremely high. Potentially important one-of emails would be ranked of less importance than the typically pointless continuous back and forth banter with people at social networking sites. Unrelated emails would be sorted into threads they don't belong unless the system can contextually link emails with unprecedented accuracy.
The article goes into a rather contrived example of how Yahoo figures out that a bunch of emails are all related to choosing a restaurant. It automatically groups all the emails together into a thread by context (By what criteria? Because they were all received in the last week and contain the names of restaurants?), then displays the restaurant on a map (why do I need to see a map to choose what type of food I want to eat?), and finally tries to make the decision for you by looking at your previous reviews of various restaurants. This whole scenario is ludicrous. Just because I liked a restaurant, does that mean it is an appropriate place for some sort of business meeting? What if it is too casual? How can they infer that because a restaurant is my highest ranked, that is the only place I would want to eat in the future?
In the end, I bet this system will amount to nothing more than harvesting your contacts from multiple social sites.
What happened to firewire? All signs point to it going extinct in the very near future....
Really? The last several computers I've purchased all had integrated Firewire ports. We're purchasing a couple new digital video cameras (at a few thousand dollars each), and it is Firewire all the way. I think Firewire is doing just fine in the arena it was designed for. To me USB is a bloated mess (ever try to do any low-level USB programming? It's a joke!) that ended up pretty much being mediocre all around.
I checked an obscure domain name through them in the last several days and it was available. Lo and behold, it is now registered. I will be calling their support line at 1.888.642.9675, and / or their technical support line at 1.866.391.HELP to figure out what is going on.
I sure hope I don't take up too much of their time, because 1-800 minutes aren't cheap for them, neither is tying up their support personnel. However, if you're curious about these practices, you might want to speak with them yourself - it's your right after all.
Sony is trying to prop up the existing music distribution chain. Instead of going into Wal-Mart to buy a CD, you instead go there to buy a card. Either way, you still had to go to Wal-Mart to get your music. Obviously Wal-Mart will receive some sort of profit off of that sale, in lieu of profit off of an actual CD.
I don't know if this is good or bad. On one hand, it may keep a music section in retailers a bit longer, providing a place to walk in and lay hands on a physical album set. On the other hand, that extra middle-man keeps the cost of music slightly higher. I think this is a fairly responsible thing for Sony to do, because it will help prevent a drastic change which could be detrimental in the short term.
Peeking in on them from time to time simply won't work - long-term monitoring is usually required, as their movement can be so subtle. Stop-motion cameras work well for this. One of the best techniques is to detect their movement indirectly, by periodically checking the amount of junk food packaging in their trash cans throughout a workday.
How many router models and hardware revisions would the worm need to support to make this effective? It would take a great deal of resources to produce custom firmware for that many devices and hardware revisions, especially considering that people have been trying to produce custom firmware for specific devices for a long time without any success at all.
On another note, configuring the router for administrative access only via ethernet would completely stop the problem.
You got that right. FTA: "I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit," Jepsen wrote in an e-mail.
She was responsible for designing the display, which, depending on who you ask, is either really novel and cutting edge, or a substandard compromise to modern display design. Personally, the display is not anything I would want for standard laptop-like use.
The OLPC has their low-power display, and now she can go off and make the technology available to other markets instead of keeping it exclusive to the OLPC. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
To help facilitate a baseline for obvious, allow the general public to submit their obvious ideas at no charge (no need to check this overwhelming amount of info - but keep it handy for posterity).
I'd like to submit a device that utilizes the state of Elementary Particles, the Strong Force, the Weak Force, the Electromagnetic Force, and / or the Force of Gravity to perform tasks related to modifying the quality of life of, or providing entertainment to, human-kind.
Yes, there is a better way, and your concern about damaging expensive objects - particularly jewelry - is quite justified. Simply send the object to one of my two testing centers (conveniently covering both hemispheres - one is located in Russia, the other in Africa) and we will send you a full report of the object's composition.
True. The fact of the matter is it is still easier to attack the successor to this system - wired telegraph. You can insert your signal at any point that you can pigtail off of the wire, and it is basically impossible (using technology of the era) to determine whether a signal is legitimate or from some 3rd party source. With hundreds of miles of wire, held up by thousands of poles, it would be easy to pigtail off the line in a very covert way.
No, because one of the towers on either side of that tower (depending on which direction the message was being transmitted) would see that data is being sent that was not being relayed from their tower. They could then invalidate the message by using some other method of messaging - physically bypassing the compromised tower by courier probably being the easiest and fastest.
No they weren't, and the article doesn't say that they were. Man-in-the-middle attack means that transmitted data can be modified, or entirely new data can be introduced. Think about it. You have a telescope permanently aimed at the next station in line, viewed by a person who has spent thousands of hours staring at that station. Now don't you think if someone, somehow, got in that exact line of sight with their own semaphore in attempt to transmit their own data, that it would be extremely obvious to the operator that something was very wrong?
What the article does say is that the system is vulnerable to eavesdropping. However, a number of solutions would be available. Shutters could be used to restrict visibility of the semaphores to the line of sight of the next tower. Since they were elevated, it would be difficult to get into that line of sight in most terrain. Obviously, the messages themselves could be encrypted as well. The semaphore operators did not have to understand their message. They simply moved the position of their signaling arms to match the position of the sending tower. The sending tower would visually verify that the receiving tower had properly copied the data. The operators did not need to know what the data meant to relay the information - only the initiator and consumer of the information needed the ability to encrypt / decrypt, which is still where we stand today.
Telegraph was very much open to eavesdropping - in fact, I believe it was much easier. Simply pigtail off of any of the thousands of miles of wire, and run a line to a comfortable listening post out of sight of the railway or road. With radio it became even easier!
Slashdot Mirror
The sad part is that most of the great advancements in computing, be it software or hardware, were not the result of a bureaucratic process such as this.
Dan East
not only of a looming Helium shortage - just google for "Aluminum Shortage" and take a look at the results... many resources on earth are becoming more and more scarce while everybody seems to only concentrate on energy resources.
I'm not sure why this was moderated insightful. Aluminum is the most abundant metal on the planet, and is the 3rd most abundant element after Oxygen and Silicon. It comprises 8% of the entire mass of our planet. The "shortage" you're talking about is with aluminum production, which was predicted to occur in 2004-2005 because China was needing more aluminum than the global industry was producing. Aluminum is more difficult to extract to a usable form than other metals, like Iron, so larger, more complex infrastructure has to be built, which can take years.
There's really no comparison between a helium and aluminum "shortage" on our planet.
Dan East
Obviously you've never watched Bugs Bunny cartoons. When you run out of gas you either come to a complete stop, or you simply use the air brakes.
Dan East
A pack of thieves attempted to steal scrap metal from an abandoned factory in Kladno. Unfortunately for them, they selected the steel girders that supported the factory roof. When the roof supports were dismantled, the roof fell, fatally crushing two thieves and injuring three others.
Stuff like this must happen pretty often. Two guys broke into a shut-down foundry near here with the intent of stealing copper wire. Unfortunately for them, they cut into a 12 kilovolt line that was still energized. One of them died from suffering burns to 60% of his body.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/124519
enable a high-quality Windows experience
Let's see what Elvis has to say about that:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YikMhfKmBrY
Dan East
I see a number of potential issues with this. There's a very good reason inboxes are normally chronologically sorted - because you are most interested in what is new. I get a daily weather email. I never send email to that address, and it is not part of any social websites. Going by the description of how this new Yahoo system would work, this email would be low priority. With the exception of spam, I really cannot think of any email that I would not want sorted at the top when it first arrives.
The amount of false positives would be extremely high. Potentially important one-of emails would be ranked of less importance than the typically pointless continuous back and forth banter with people at social networking sites. Unrelated emails would be sorted into threads they don't belong unless the system can contextually link emails with unprecedented accuracy.
The article goes into a rather contrived example of how Yahoo figures out that a bunch of emails are all related to choosing a restaurant. It automatically groups all the emails together into a thread by context (By what criteria? Because they were all received in the last week and contain the names of restaurants?), then displays the restaurant on a map (why do I need to see a map to choose what type of food I want to eat?), and finally tries to make the decision for you by looking at your previous reviews of various restaurants. This whole scenario is ludicrous. Just because I liked a restaurant, does that mean it is an appropriate place for some sort of business meeting? What if it is too casual? How can they infer that because a restaurant is my highest ranked, that is the only place I would want to eat in the future?
In the end, I bet this system will amount to nothing more than harvesting your contacts from multiple social sites.
Dan East
What happened to firewire? All signs point to it going extinct in the very near future....
Really? The last several computers I've purchased all had integrated Firewire ports. We're purchasing a couple new digital video cameras (at a few thousand dollars each), and it is Firewire all the way. I think Firewire is doing just fine in the arena it was designed for. To me USB is a bloated mess (ever try to do any low-level USB programming? It's a joke!) that ended up pretty much being mediocre all around.
Dan East
Not after the RIAA enlists the Coast Guard.
Dan East
Sorry! D5 was just a Tor exit node!
Dan East
Startup Building Floating Data Centers
That's nice, but is there a demand for data centers that store only one type of number? What if we need to store integers?
Dan East
I checked an obscure domain name through them in the last several days and it was available. Lo and behold, it is now registered. I will be calling their support line at 1.888.642.9675, and / or their technical support line at 1.866.391.HELP to figure out what is going on.
I sure hope I don't take up too much of their time, because 1-800 minutes aren't cheap for them, neither is tying up their support personnel. However, if you're curious about these practices, you might want to speak with them yourself - it's your right after all.
thumb drive
encryption
orifice
Sony is trying to prop up the existing music distribution chain. Instead of going into Wal-Mart to buy a CD, you instead go there to buy a card. Either way, you still had to go to Wal-Mart to get your music. Obviously Wal-Mart will receive some sort of profit off of that sale, in lieu of profit off of an actual CD.
I don't know if this is good or bad. On one hand, it may keep a music section in retailers a bit longer, providing a place to walk in and lay hands on a physical album set. On the other hand, that extra middle-man keeps the cost of music slightly higher. I think this is a fairly responsible thing for Sony to do, because it will help prevent a drastic change which could be detrimental in the short term.
Dan East
Nobody's moved down there for weeks
Peeking in on them from time to time simply won't work - long-term monitoring is usually required, as their movement can be so subtle. Stop-motion cameras work well for this. One of the best techniques is to detect their movement indirectly, by periodically checking the amount of junk food packaging in their trash cans throughout a workday.
Dan East
How many router models and hardware revisions would the worm need to support to make this effective? It would take a great deal of resources to produce custom firmware for that many devices and hardware revisions, especially considering that people have been trying to produce custom firmware for specific devices for a long time without any success at all.
On another note, configuring the router for administrative access only via ethernet would completely stop the problem.
Dan East
If any of that water were to freeze it would turn the roadway into a cratered, cracked and potholed disaster.
Dan East
Not that I RTFA or anything.
You got that right. FTA: "I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit," Jepsen wrote in an e-mail.
She was responsible for designing the display, which, depending on who you ask, is either really novel and cutting edge, or a substandard compromise to modern display design. Personally, the display is not anything I would want for standard laptop-like use.
The OLPC has their low-power display, and now she can go off and make the technology available to other markets instead of keeping it exclusive to the OLPC. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
Dan East
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
"It's endless world of hardware modifications that smart people worldwide have embraced" Um.. what the hell is that supposed to mean?
That the author failed their English grammar classes.
Dan East
Can anyone give one legitimate reason why anyone would need to "trial" a domain? Is that to see how it looks in the browser's address bar?
Wouldn't doing away with that stupidity make things a lot harder for these losers that park / squat domains?
Dan East
To help facilitate a baseline for obvious, allow the general public to submit their obvious ideas at no charge (no need to check this overwhelming amount of info - but keep it handy for posterity).
I'd like to submit a device that utilizes the state of Elementary Particles, the Strong Force, the Weak Force, the Electromagnetic Force, and / or the Force of Gravity to perform tasks related to modifying the quality of life of, or providing entertainment to, human-kind.
Dan East
Yes, there is a better way, and your concern about damaging expensive objects - particularly jewelry - is quite justified. Simply send the object to one of my two testing centers (conveniently covering both hemispheres - one is located in Russia, the other in Africa) and we will send you a full report of the object's composition.
Dan East
True. The fact of the matter is it is still easier to attack the successor to this system - wired telegraph. You can insert your signal at any point that you can pigtail off of the wire, and it is basically impossible (using technology of the era) to determine whether a signal is legitimate or from some 3rd party source. With hundreds of miles of wire, held up by thousands of poles, it would be easy to pigtail off the line in a very covert way.
Dan East
No, because one of the towers on either side of that tower (depending on which direction the message was being transmitted) would see that data is being sent that was not being relayed from their tower. They could then invalidate the message by using some other method of messaging - physically bypassing the compromised tower by courier probably being the easiest and fastest.
Dan East
Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy.
No they weren't, and the article doesn't say that they were. Man-in-the-middle attack means that transmitted data can be modified, or entirely new data can be introduced. Think about it. You have a telescope permanently aimed at the next station in line, viewed by a person who has spent thousands of hours staring at that station. Now don't you think if someone, somehow, got in that exact line of sight with their own semaphore in attempt to transmit their own data, that it would be extremely obvious to the operator that something was very wrong?
What the article does say is that the system is vulnerable to eavesdropping. However, a number of solutions would be available. Shutters could be used to restrict visibility of the semaphores to the line of sight of the next tower. Since they were elevated, it would be difficult to get into that line of sight in most terrain. Obviously, the messages themselves could be encrypted as well. The semaphore operators did not have to understand their message. They simply moved the position of their signaling arms to match the position of the sending tower. The sending tower would visually verify that the receiving tower had properly copied the data. The operators did not need to know what the data meant to relay the information - only the initiator and consumer of the information needed the ability to encrypt / decrypt, which is still where we stand today.
Telegraph was very much open to eavesdropping - in fact, I believe it was much easier. Simply pigtail off of any of the thousands of miles of wire, and run a line to a comfortable listening post out of sight of the railway or road. With radio it became even easier!
Dan East