While I found the submission entertaining, I still have to give props to Intel. OK, yes, they are making a chip that's compatible with AMD's instruction set, but this can only be a good thing. Instead of running out and introducing a new 64 bit instruction set to the market to directly compete with AMD, and thus create market confusion and compatibility problems, they've decided to do the best thing for us, the consumers and programmers - embrace an existing standard to avoid market fragmentation.
Yes, it might have pissed Linus off that they weren't very forthcoming about it, but just think how ticked he'd be if they introduced something completely different and he had support two competing 64-bit architectures.
Maybe Intel is taking a lesson from IBM. Just because you are the big boy on the block doesn't mean you can make your own rules. Anyone remember Microchannel Architecture?
Well, I had tried it on and off before that without the Slashdot effect. Besides, with a distributed network like Freenet is supposed to be, you'd think that with all the nodes popping online it would be way faster, if anything.
During the.com boom I invested heavily in NASDAQ and watched my stock go up significantly. However, I only invested in viable companies with an actual product (primarily Cisco), and I COULD smell the trouble with the insane IPO's of the.COM's. I knew they would crash. How could they not? They had lots of VC, fancy buildings, scooters, arcade rooms, and free soda...but no business plan.
What I DIDN'T count on what that they'd take the rest of the NASDAQ with them. I lost quite a bit of money, but that's the way it goes in investments. And also with investments, if you are in it for the long haul you have nothing to worry about unless you made a stupid investment decision. In my case, I invested more in Cisco after it bottomed out at $10 or so, now it's back up to $25, and I've pretty much made all my money back that I lost in the crash.
IMHO, the only people who lost their ass in the crash are the day traders, the people who pulled out of the market early hoping to cut their losses, and the people who smelled quick money and made a sucker bet on a.com without a business plan. There is a difference between investment and gambling, and when gambling, remember that the house always wins.
I downloaded it and installed it (again), and it's still incredibly slow. If there's any speed improvement, it went from 20 minutes to load each page to 15. I had an easier time getting pr0n out of the 'Net in 1992 than I do getting text in Freenet.
I respect the goals that Freenet is trying to accomplish. And contrary to what some people say in here, it's not the spread of child porn. The ability to say things without fear of reprisal is important. Not just from the government, but from corporations, too. How many times have we heard about a big corp coming down on a whistleblower?
That said, I believe anonymous systems are important to the future of communication, especially with the orgy of civil surveillance that's going on in the US right now. But regarding Freenet specifically, I have to wonder what the point of anonymous system is if it's completely unusable.
What the submission missed, but is worth noting, is that port 3127 is one of the ports that MyDoom.A opens when it infects a machine. In other words, MyDoom.C is exploiting the hole that MyDoom.A opened.
The article says that they want to impose stiffer sentences for people if the domain has false contact information and IS USED TO COMMIT A CRIME.
The article does seem to hint that the gubermint is going after everyone, though, so I looked up the bill myself. It's true that they will only go after someone for this if a crime has been committed. The problem with it IMHO is that it's pretty broad...It goes after not only the owners of the domain but also "person[s] acting in concert with the violator". And it tacks on 7 years in prison who what one would otherwise get already. And from the text it looks like it's geared strictly towards copyright infringement, never mind ripping off credit card numbers or running a fake shop, or simulating the identity of a reputable company. Of course, coming from Rep. Berman, this is no surprise.
Yes, Tivo might be all nice and fluffy now, and sure they may say that gather data anonymously. They may even have some privacy policy where they say they won't give up any of your personal information. However, IMHO, the best privacy policy is not to collect or store the information to begin with. Privacy policys can be changed overnight. I do recall having an email address on Yahoo and one day they swtiched all my preferences to accept their spam, and not only did the Yahoo affiliates start spamming me, but my name got out to the Viagra peddlers shortly afterwards. The only thing I used that account for was instant messaging. I KNOW Yahoo or one of their affiliates sold my name to the spammers.
Even if you trust the company, your information is a phone call away for the Feds. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, not only do they not need a court order to get it, but it'll get handed over without you even knowing about it. Maybe they'd like to use that information to plug into MATRIX to see who is watching Arabic channels, hm? And your "trusted" company could not tell you this was happening, and leave you obliviously thinking you are protected by a privacy policy.
Where oh where do they get these figures? At my company we have two lines of defense...One is TrendMicro for Exchange and the other is NAV Corporate Edition. Anything that doesn't get stopped at the SMTP server will get picked up by Norton. I figure the two of them combined cost somewhere around $1000-$1500 to cover all of our workstations. Besides that, the only cost the virus is incurring is my time looking over the logs, which basically have been saying the same thing over and over for the last three days. This is a far cry from the $48,000 - $58,000 they say it takes to secure yourself from one teeny little worm virus.
If the virus got in, the cost of fixing it would be based on the method of removal, how many computers got infected, and what the downtime costs our business. These are three variables that certainly can't be guessed. Something tells me they just pick out numbers that are big enough to impress the media and small enough to avoid losing whatever credibility they have left.
I think the idea is so you don't have to pay the "Microsoft Tax". They're not putting Linux on because they're not prepared to support it.
So you can put on whatever OS you want and Dell doesn't owe you software support. Obviously, this deal is designed to appeal to geeks who want cheap systems.
Silicon dioxide is actually very common. Actually it's a form of quartz. Unless I am mistaken it's the same stuff they put in the little white packet that comes with your hard disk to keep condensation from forming in the antistatic bag...
Regardless, the cost of Aerogel is in its manufacture, not its ingredients. Aerogel is actually just a crystalline structure that forms when SiO2 molecules are suspended in ethanol. The trick is figuring out how to get the ethanol out and replace it with air after the lattices form. This process is called supercritical drying and involves pushing liquid CO2 though the structure at very high pressures. Actually the entire process of how to make the stuff can be found here. It's suprisingly simple. Besides the supercritical drying bit, it seems almost like something you could make yourself.
I was a huge, huge Lego fan. I have most of the space sets from 1980 on to whenever it was I stopped playing with Legos, '87, or '88 I think. Still have all the catalogs, sets, and instructions.
Occasionally in a fit of nostalgia I wander into the toy section to check out the new sets, and boy have they been dumbed down. When I played with Legos, I'd have sets that had 300 pieces. The bricks were bricks...You could put them together in just about any way you wanted, regardless of what the instructions said. Now the pieces are so specialized and few there's only one way to put them together, and you can do it in 5 minutes. It's not "space" and "town" and "castle" sets anymore. I don't think those even exist, and it looks like the offerings are mostly vehicles and micro-sets, so forget building your own town or space base. I think one of the reasons that Lego is doing so badly is that most people who played with Legos when they were kids are parents now, and see the same thing I'm seeing. I bet they have started looking elsewhere for stimulating toys.
I work at a CNC machine shop and the app that sends programs to the machine broke today because of that. I would have never heard about it if it wasn't for my brother in law, who works for a company running the same application.
The fix was as follows: Open Internet Options, click Advanced tab. Under Security turn off both Check for Server Certificate Revocation and Check for Publisher Certificate Revocation. I think this fix should work for other apps that are affected by the same problem...Thought I'd pass it along.
On a side note, it's pretty scary that this has happened to begin with. What I had to go though was pretty minor since the problem was on one machine, but what about an entire enterprise with an app installed on 1000's of computers that were broken because of this? Because of all this ridiculous "signed app" nonsense, not only are you down, but through proxy Microsoft made you dependant on one of the biggest bastardized companies I know...Verisign. Don't expect this problem to fix itself in a timely manner.
If this is a sign of things to come, Palladium will bring Hell on earth.
Ever since RealOne came out, I flat out refuse...buffering...buffering...buffering...to install anything from Real on my system. I don't care how good the codec is, when I install player software I don't want to deal with a...buffering...buffering...buffering...zillion popups and filetype takeovers. Evil software, I want you to play.rm files and that's it, not replace WinAmp and throw popups in my face at rand...Server Timeout
Haven't read through all the responses yet, so my apologies if this has already been talked about, but here goes:
This so called "Internet Protocol Address Verifier" could simply be a web bug planted in the reply back to this guy. Usually web bugs manifest themselves as something like 1px x 1px linked images in the email. When you open it your system goes and gets the image from the web server under the control of the person who sent it, and then they have your IP address. Yes this theory has holes in it, like maybe the guy was http proxied, but let's face it...Guys dumb enough to try to extort money out of companies like Best Buy and don't expect the men in black to show up at their doorstep aren't the brightest bulbs in the batch. Maybe they paired the IP address in the email headers with what they got out of the web bug, sprinkled a little Carnivore on it and said "this is our guy".
Anyway, in conclusion, let's remember that this is the media we're talking about reporting on something technical. I don't doubt that Carnivore was involved in some way, but I doubt it was the only thing they used to track this guy down.
Reading the article, it looks like what they did was build a chip that can detect the types of nanotubes growing on it - conductive or semiconductive, with the nanotube actually being grown on the chip itself.
This research is a nanotube manufacturing method, not nanotube circuit fabrication.
I should go find those kids who stole my doormat this weekend and beat the living crap out of them. It was a really cool South Park doormat too. I bet I would get less time for sending them to the hospital than I would for recording a movie.
Your mention of compatibility with the upcoming standards was a valuable addition to the conversation, I just disagree with your delivery that suggested DVD+RW owners are making a mistake.
Well, the subject at hand was DVD+R drives. Truthfully, my post was intended to say something like "DVD+R..I don't like it, here's why". I went on the whole "compatible with future standards" kick to back up my opinion.
A lot of where I come from is based on how I do things. I like to keep data around for a long time...a very long time. I have stuff from 20 years ago floating around my HD. So when I copy it to removable media, I want to make sure I'll be able to read it far into the future, and get the stuff I know will be relatively future proof.
I know I came across as "Hahaha, +R owners are screwed, sorry you threw away your money", but I've never been known for installing tact into my opinions. So accept my apologies if you took offense.
I don't deny you your point, but mine is this: At that point if you need to pull data off of those backups, what are you going to do? Any movies or data you burn with that thing will be globally obsoleted by either of the blue laser standards. True I don't expect to see the blue laser drives ready for the consumer market before 2005, but that gives people a long time to build up a +R library that will be useless when it happens.
Besides, I'm not "stuck on the fence" as you say...I bought into DVD-R, mostly for it's wider compatibility. This blue laser thing just clinches it for me.
Well too bad for those who will get stuck with those +RW drives. I predict the demise of +RW in favor of -RW. Why? Well, first of all -RW has greater compatibility. Of course, this is not enough. You must also consider the looming blue laser DVD format rolling out. As with everything, there are two standards-
The Blu-Ray standard is being put forth by Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (aka Panasonic), Pioneer, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Thomson Multimedia. Blu-Ray will write and rewrite 27GB per side using a 405nm laser.
I am seeing a lot of conflicting information about whether those numbers are for single layer or not. The people reporting these numbers don't seem to know that a single side has two layers, so I'm reading that AOD can hold anywhere from 20 to 40GB per side. However the consensus seems to be that AOD holds less data than Blu-Ray can, but the advantage of AOD lies in the fact that DVD manufacturers don't have to retool their plants for AOD like they would for Blu-Ray. This is probably one of the larger reasons AOD was accepted by the DVD Forum.
Ok, now after all this babble about next gen DVD, what does this have to do with the subject at hand?
NEITHER of these standards is compatible with DVD+R, and both are backwards compatible with DVD-R. So where are you going to put your data?
Slashdot Mirror
While I found the submission entertaining, I still have to give props to Intel. OK, yes, they are making a chip that's compatible with AMD's instruction set, but this can only be a good thing. Instead of running out and introducing a new 64 bit instruction set to the market to directly compete with AMD, and thus create market confusion and compatibility problems, they've decided to do the best thing for us, the consumers and programmers - embrace an existing standard to avoid market fragmentation.
Yes, it might have pissed Linus off that they weren't very forthcoming about it, but just think how ticked he'd be if they introduced something completely different and he had support two competing 64-bit architectures.
Maybe Intel is taking a lesson from IBM. Just because you are the big boy on the block doesn't mean you can make your own rules. Anyone remember Microchannel Architecture?
With their combined expertise on preventing system exploitation, I'm SURE they will find a way to stop the spammers!
Well, I had tried it on and off before that without the Slashdot effect. Besides, with a distributed network like Freenet is supposed to be, you'd think that with all the nodes popping online it would be way faster, if anything.
During the .com boom I invested heavily in NASDAQ and watched my stock go up significantly. However, I only invested in viable companies with an actual product (primarily Cisco), and I COULD smell the trouble with the insane IPO's of the .COM's. I knew they would crash. How could they not? They had lots of VC, fancy buildings, scooters, arcade rooms, and free soda...but no business plan.
.com without a business plan. There is a difference between investment and gambling, and when gambling, remember that the house always wins.
What I DIDN'T count on what that they'd take the rest of the NASDAQ with them. I lost quite a bit of money, but that's the way it goes in investments. And also with investments, if you are in it for the long haul you have nothing to worry about unless you made a stupid investment decision. In my case, I invested more in Cisco after it bottomed out at $10 or so, now it's back up to $25, and I've pretty much made all my money back that I lost in the crash.
IMHO, the only people who lost their ass in the crash are the day traders, the people who pulled out of the market early hoping to cut their losses, and the people who smelled quick money and made a sucker bet on a
I downloaded it and installed it (again), and it's still incredibly slow. If there's any speed improvement, it went from 20 minutes to load each page to 15. I had an easier time getting pr0n out of the 'Net in 1992 than I do getting text in Freenet.
I respect the goals that Freenet is trying to accomplish. And contrary to what some people say in here, it's not the spread of child porn. The ability to say things without fear of reprisal is important. Not just from the government, but from corporations, too. How many times have we heard about a big corp coming down on a whistleblower?
That said, I believe anonymous systems are important to the future of communication, especially with the orgy of civil surveillance that's going on in the US right now. But regarding Freenet specifically, I have to wonder what the point of anonymous system is if it's completely unusable.
What the submission missed, but is worth noting, is that port 3127 is one of the ports that MyDoom.A opens when it infects a machine. In other words, MyDoom.C is exploiting the hole that MyDoom.A opened.
The writeup from Symantec is here.
The article says that they want to impose stiffer sentences for people if the domain has false contact information and IS USED TO COMMIT A CRIME.
The article does seem to hint that the gubermint is going after everyone, though, so I looked up the bill myself. It's true that they will only go after someone for this if a crime has been committed. The problem with it IMHO is that it's pretty broad...It goes after not only the owners of the domain but also "person[s] acting in concert with the violator". And it tacks on 7 years in prison who what one would otherwise get already. And from the text it looks like it's geared strictly towards copyright infringement, never mind ripping off credit card numbers or running a fake shop, or simulating the identity of a reputable company. Of course, coming from Rep. Berman, this is no surprise.
Here's the bill if anyone's interested
The link looks a little weird to me so if it is broken go to http://thomas.loc.gov and look up bill # "H. R. 3754".
that particular sentence is particularly annoying. if you go to china, YOU learn chinese or hire a translator. otherwise you don't go to china.
You are obviously not an American. WE go to China and expect everyone to speak English!
Northwest and Jet Blue.
Yes, Tivo might be all nice and fluffy now, and sure they may say that gather data anonymously. They may even have some privacy policy where they say they won't give up any of your personal information. However, IMHO, the best privacy policy is not to collect or store the information to begin with. Privacy policys can be changed overnight. I do recall having an email address on Yahoo and one day they swtiched all my preferences to accept their spam, and not only did the Yahoo affiliates start spamming me, but my name got out to the Viagra peddlers shortly afterwards. The only thing I used that account for was instant messaging. I KNOW Yahoo or one of their affiliates sold my name to the spammers.
Even if you trust the company, your information is a phone call away for the Feds. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, not only do they not need a court order to get it, but it'll get handed over without you even knowing about it. Maybe they'd like to use that information to plug into MATRIX to see who is watching Arabic channels, hm? And your "trusted" company could not tell you this was happening, and leave you obliviously thinking you are protected by a privacy policy.
Where oh where do they get these figures? At my company we have two lines of defense...One is TrendMicro for Exchange and the other is NAV Corporate Edition. Anything that doesn't get stopped at the SMTP server will get picked up by Norton. I figure the two of them combined cost somewhere around $1000-$1500 to cover all of our workstations. Besides that, the only cost the virus is incurring is my time looking over the logs, which basically have been saying the same thing over and over for the last three days. This is a far cry from the $48,000 - $58,000 they say it takes to secure yourself from one teeny little worm virus.
If the virus got in, the cost of fixing it would be based on the method of removal, how many computers got infected, and what the downtime costs our business. These are three variables that certainly can't be guessed. Something tells me they just pick out numbers that are big enough to impress the media and small enough to avoid losing whatever credibility they have left.
I think the idea is so you don't have to pay the "Microsoft Tax". They're not putting Linux on because they're not prepared to support it.
So you can put on whatever OS you want and Dell doesn't owe you software support. Obviously, this deal is designed to appeal to geeks who want cheap systems.
Silicon dioxide is actually very common. Actually it's a form of quartz. Unless I am mistaken it's the same stuff they put in the little white packet that comes with your hard disk to keep condensation from forming in the antistatic bag...
Regardless, the cost of Aerogel is in its manufacture, not its ingredients. Aerogel is actually just a crystalline structure that forms when SiO2 molecules are suspended in ethanol. The trick is figuring out how to get the ethanol out and replace it with air after the lattices form. This process is called supercritical drying and involves pushing liquid CO2 though the structure at very high pressures. Actually the entire process of how to make the stuff can be found here. It's suprisingly simple. Besides the supercritical drying bit, it seems almost like something you could make yourself.
I was a huge, huge Lego fan. I have most of the space sets from 1980 on to whenever it was I stopped playing with Legos, '87, or '88 I think. Still have all the catalogs, sets, and instructions.
Occasionally in a fit of nostalgia I wander into the toy section to check out the new sets, and boy have they been dumbed down. When I played with Legos, I'd have sets that had 300 pieces. The bricks were bricks...You could put them together in just about any way you wanted, regardless of what the instructions said. Now the pieces are so specialized and few there's only one way to put them together, and you can do it in 5 minutes. It's not "space" and "town" and "castle" sets anymore. I don't think those even exist, and it looks like the offerings are mostly vehicles and micro-sets, so forget building your own town or space base. I think one of the reasons that Lego is doing so badly is that most people who played with Legos when they were kids are parents now, and see the same thing I'm seeing. I bet they have started looking elsewhere for stimulating toys.
The app, by the way, is Predator MDC.
I work at a CNC machine shop and the app that sends programs to the machine broke today because of that. I would have never heard about it if it wasn't for my brother in law, who works for a company running the same application.
The fix was as follows: Open Internet Options, click Advanced tab. Under Security turn off both Check for Server Certificate Revocation and Check for Publisher Certificate Revocation. I think this fix should work for other apps that are affected by the same problem...Thought I'd pass it along.
On a side note, it's pretty scary that this has happened to begin with. What I had to go though was pretty minor since the problem was on one machine, but what about an entire enterprise with an app installed on 1000's of computers that were broken because of this? Because of all this ridiculous "signed app" nonsense, not only are you down, but through proxy Microsoft made you dependant on one of the biggest bastardized companies I know...Verisign. Don't expect this problem to fix itself in a timely manner.
If this is a sign of things to come, Palladium will bring Hell on earth.
Hey mods, the reply above is hardly offtopic, it's a link with alternative video players for both Real and Quicktime.
A newer version can be found here, as well as lots of other interesting stuff...Including an alternative QuickTime player.
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.edskes/finalbuilds.htm
Ever since RealOne came out, I flat out refuse...buffering...buffering...buffering...to install anything from Real on my system. I don't care how good the codec is, when I install player software I don't want to deal with a ...buffering...buffering...buffering...zillion popups and filetype takeovers. Evil software, I want you to play .rm files and that's it, not replace WinAmp and throw popups in my face at rand...Server Timeout
Haven't read through all the responses yet, so my apologies if this has already been talked about, but here goes:
This so called "Internet Protocol Address Verifier" could simply be a web bug planted in the reply back to this guy. Usually web bugs manifest themselves as something like 1px x 1px linked images in the email. When you open it your system goes and gets the image from the web server under the control of the person who sent it, and then they have your IP address. Yes this theory has holes in it, like maybe the guy was http proxied, but let's face it...Guys dumb enough to try to extort money out of companies like Best Buy and don't expect the men in black to show up at their doorstep aren't the brightest bulbs in the batch. Maybe they paired the IP address in the email headers with what they got out of the web bug, sprinkled a little Carnivore on it and said "this is our guy".
Anyway, in conclusion, let's remember that this is the media we're talking about reporting on something technical. I don't doubt that Carnivore was involved in some way, but I doubt it was the only thing they used to track this guy down.
Reading the article, it looks like what they did was build a chip that can detect the types of nanotubes growing on it - conductive or semiconductive, with the nanotube actually being grown on the chip itself.
This research is a nanotube manufacturing method, not nanotube circuit fabrication.
I should go find those kids who stole my doormat this weekend and beat the living crap out of them. It was a really cool South Park doormat too. I bet I would get less time for sending them to the hospital than I would for recording a movie.
Your mention of compatibility with the upcoming standards was a valuable addition to the conversation, I just disagree with your delivery that suggested DVD+RW owners are making a mistake.
Well, the subject at hand was DVD+R drives. Truthfully, my post was intended to say something like "DVD+R..I don't like it, here's why". I went on the whole "compatible with future standards" kick to back up my opinion.
A lot of where I come from is based on how I do things. I like to keep data around for a long time...a very long time. I have stuff from 20 years ago floating around my HD. So when I copy it to removable media, I want to make sure I'll be able to read it far into the future, and get the stuff I know will be relatively future proof.
I know I came across as "Hahaha, +R owners are screwed, sorry you threw away your money", but I've never been known for installing tact into my opinions. So accept my apologies if you took offense.
I don't deny you your point, but mine is this: At that point if you need to pull data off of those backups, what are you going to do? Any movies or data you burn with that thing will be globally obsoleted by either of the blue laser standards. True I don't expect to see the blue laser drives ready for the consumer market before 2005, but that gives people a long time to build up a +R library that will be useless when it happens.
Besides, I'm not "stuck on the fence" as you say...I bought into DVD-R, mostly for it's wider compatibility. This blue laser thing just clinches it for me.
Well too bad for those who will get stuck with those +RW drives. I predict the demise of +RW in favor of -RW. Why? Well, first of all -RW has greater compatibility. Of course, this is not enough. You must also consider the looming blue laser DVD format rolling out. As with everything, there are two standards-
The Blu-Ray standard is being put forth by Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (aka Panasonic), Pioneer, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Thomson Multimedia. Blu-Ray will write and rewrite 27GB per side using a 405nm laser.
NEC and Toshiba put forth their own standard, Advanced Optical Disc,which the DVD Forum has chosen over Blu-Ray. These hold 20GB per side.
I am seeing a lot of conflicting information about whether those numbers are for single layer or not. The people reporting these numbers don't seem to know that a single side has two layers, so I'm reading that AOD can hold anywhere from 20 to 40GB per side. However the consensus seems to be that AOD holds less data than Blu-Ray can, but the advantage of AOD lies in the fact that DVD manufacturers don't have to retool their plants for AOD like they would for Blu-Ray. This is probably one of the larger reasons AOD was accepted by the DVD Forum.
Ok, now after all this babble about next gen DVD, what does this have to do with the subject at hand?
NEITHER of these standards is compatible with DVD+R, and both are backwards compatible with DVD-R. So where are you going to put your data?
As if jacking your rims in a pothole wasn't expensive enough...