no apologies necessary. the only reason i might have come across a bit whiny was that i've been trying to get a belkin 54mb pci wlan card working in a dell 8300 with xp sp2 for about 3 hours now.
as for (c) - major kudos! the level of wrong moderation due to not following you bit of wisdom is, unfortunately, rising. maybe the changes cmdr taco is planning will help. time will tell.
it ought to be fun seeing what the mods do to this.
(a) they are not "my mods", they are/. mods and it's their mod points to blow if they so choose. you'll notice that the system takes care of itself and the highly unwarranted positive mods i received early on were balanced out quite nicely (though i would hesitate to call my post "flamebait").
(b) i didn't do a byte-by-byte comparison, but it's pretty much a dupe with some extra bits. Not even sure if it's worth a slashback.
(c) i'm desperately hoping the good moderators with points to spare mark this and your post "offtopic" since that *is* what they both are [grin]
Hey folks, since we are/.'ing him and no doubt downloading NetStumbler and MiniStumbler in droves, it might be a good idea if someone could setup a torrent for it (I'm @ school @ the moment, otherwise I would) and/or click on his donation links.
While it's no Kismet, it is a solid tool and the new MiniStumbler actually does a great job on my HP iPaq with integrated WLAN.
The WRT54G model, once re-flashed with some of the very feature-rich firmware produced by the open source community has been a rock-solid, problem-free device.
I would love to be able to spend the money on an apple airport base station, but *this* model Linksys works for me. I can see where an all-Mac home/shop or even a small, multi-platform environment might want to go with easy-to-manage Apple WLAN equipment, tho.
Now, the older, 802.11b AP's from Linksys were not worth the plastic case they came in, so if you're comparing the Apple equipment to those, Apple is definitely worth the price premium.
I think michael hit it right on the head in his post (oh to be both an author and submitter at slashdot!). Most of the topics in this Cryptogram (and the past few) we *have* seen before, here and in many other security news and blog sites. The only thing I hadn't heard before is the audio-credit-card-thing and I really doubt you'll be seeing consumers hold their cards up to their microphones. Heck, most non-techie folks I deal with don't even realize they *have* a microphone and the rest of them still have theirs in the original plastic shipping material it came in.
So, as Cryptogram becomes yet-another-blog, will it cause Schneier to lose relevancy? I hope not, since a large number of "security managers" hang on his every word and, in the past, this has been a positive thing for getting funding so we can get real work done.
Here's hoping for an influx of creative and incisive Cryptograms the rest of the year, otherwise I'll be on the lookout for Schneier with his WiFi laptop @ Starbucks or the next blog convention.
Beat me to it. Great tool, especially on OS X, but the Windows version is equally as good. It's won awards and is an example of how the open source community side of the *nix world has spearheaded the development of cross-platform/high quality free software.
For the original question submitter: follow the advice of a couple of the posts and check sourceforge and freshmeat and stay away from download.com, etc. You'll find a great deal of software for all sorts of tasks.
And, you might want to consider loading cygwin - www.cygwin.com - and take a look at the huge library of stuff that's been ported and packaged for Windows. All free.
We evaluated Vocera last year. Really nice tech, but it wasn't - buzzword warning - enterprise ready. While it may work in one building, the server-side of it isn't scalable (or wasn't - I haven't looked at them since). It didn't help their case that it was Windows-based (get a virus/worm, lose communications *:^).
The lanyard-attached phone was pretty nice (since I can easily lose my cell phone as well) and I believe you can get a headset if you need to keep the receiving end private. I can still see those annoying/loud conversations popping up much more with these units, tho.
The routing capabilities worked well and it would be great for our help desk and emergency incident response teams. Being able to say "Where's Bill?" and get a response was also pretty cool. It's only as accurate as the nearest associated access point, but it's still better then not knowing which side of the building some is on.
Once they get more enterprise features (integration, scalability, global functionality) we'll probably adopt it in key areas.
Amigori: that's pretty much the exact config i want to buy this week but have been a bit scared off by this thread and the threads on a few of the Mac sites.
i need to be able to run M$ Mac Office, a bunch of open source security tools and may want to play around with some music apps.
i gather your experience has been good, but just want to get another opine before laying out the benjamins (especially if there's going to be a potential price drop in 10-15 days due to a new model).
one of my only questions besides "are you really, really happy with the thing" is how is SSL performance in Safari? I've been really disappointed with Safari SSL performance on my dual G4 867MHz and I'm hoping that the extra 137MHz speeds it up enough to not make me wince everytime i access an SSL site.
Likewise, I'm not sure if I should order the 12" PowerBook I was going to get this week. I'm now considering holding off, but my G4 tower needs a companion!
It's "news" (albeit a bit of a stretch) since there are quite a few Catan "junkies" on/. Also, the shock-value of M$ cornering the Catan market is definitely news for/. readers.
It would have been a bit more useful if the editor included links to the already existing free implementations of Catan on- and off-line (which will probably all be decimated by lawyers now that M$ is "in the game") such as:
The last I checked, it's not native. Take a look @ here for more info.
A KOffice native port is a Very Big Deal. With Konqueror and this now ported (thanks to the kdelibs patch), many other KDE apps will be forthcoming (I've seen the screen shots of them running natively with the pre-release libs). More apps is a Good Thing.
Wow, the original post/reply gets moderated as a Troll, but just two days later, news surfaces about issues with Pakistan's nuclear program.
How quaint for the reactionary, overly sensitive moderators... I'll be timing how quickly this post gets unfairly moderated as a Troll... Seems like the trend these days is to moderate rather than reply intelligently.
FYI:
Army takes full control of Pakistan's nuclear facilities
Wed Dec 24 2003 04:01:11 ET
Islamabad (dpa) - Pakistan's army has taken ``full control'' of the nuclear programme of the country which is being investigated for proliferating nuclear technology, a news report said on Wednesday.
Islamabad's daily The News quoting unnamed official sources said that in an overhaul of its command and control structure started two years ago, ``the army has taken full control of the programme mainly by infusing new blood and strict controls at all levels of hierarchy in all nuclear facilities of the country''.
Between 1974 when the covert nuclear programme began and 1998 when it culminated in open nuclear tests, the top priority of the managers was ``to achieve, enhance and consolidate the very hard earned nuclear potential'', according to the newspaper's sources.
``We were forced to write blank cheques and not to ask for receipts. Administrative checks were difficult to place and devoted and educated human resource was difficult to find,'' the managerial sources said.
They acknowledged that ``maybe a few of the thousands of international complaints and reports circulated to malign Pakistan's nuclear programme had some merit'', the newspaper said.
Dr. Abdul Qaeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, has been questioned about two important officials of the Khan Research Laboratories after the International Atomic Energy Agency informed Islamabad about possible Pakistani links with Iran's nuclear programme.
In all the talk about outsourcing to India, I keep wondering when CxO's and VP's will wake up to the fact that India and Pakistan both have *nukes* pointed at each other. It wouldn't take much for *another* military takeover of Pakistan to start a real war (extremists tend to not flinch at the possibility of killing lots of people).
Even without nukes, both countries have a large population they could throw at each other (India being more capable in this area).
Who in their right mind would invest heavily in such an immensely instable region? "We" are "over there" right now (Afganistan and Iraq) so business folks "feel good" about that area. When we leave (ok, *if* we leave) or if there's a big-ish skirmish between Pakistan "rebels" and/or Indian "rebels", we may just see all the jobs come running home.
i have to admit that i do miss the 192kbps vbr mp3's (still have the ones i encoded, tho).
i really doubt folks who listen to music that actually needs a decent encoding will be using either service much, but i've been satisfied enough with the acoustic pieces i've downloaded that iTunes Works For Me(tm). Orchestral and really exquisite pieces I still buy in the stores. There are just too many artifacts that rear their ugly heads.
For those who listen to Britney or country music, either service will probably do.
According to their license and usage, one can download the music to 1 computer and back up music to up to two additional computers, make 10 burns to a CD and make unlimited transfers to a portable device. That's if you use WMP 9 on a PC.
I was able to download the sample song, play it *and* transcode to mp3 with VLC (too lazy to cmd-line it with other tools) on OS X with no troubles. I tried the same with a song I paid for and got nothing. VLC choked on it, MPlayer gave me no sound and WMP for OS X tried to send Safari to a web site (no doubt for the DRM part).
I'm looking forward to seeing a thorough comparison of the quality of Wal-Mart's encoded WMA (I couldn't readily find the encoding details) and Apple's iTunes AAC. I doubt that Wal-Mart is the store of choice for audiophiles, so I'm suspecting Apple's downloads are of better quality.
iTunes wins hands down on interface, usability and reliability. I can't see Wal-Mart's web-only interface winning them any converts. And, as I was checking back just a couple seconds ago, it appeared to be just starting to feel some pain from the/. effect (it was alot faster earlier today).
The potential "problem" is price. 88 cents is hard to beat, especially when folks are downloading Britney Spears latest pop hits (again, not the audiophile audience). I suspect Wal-Mart *is* making money, if only because they are leveraging their position as the number one retailer. "Want us to carry alot of copies your new album in our store? Then, you'll let us put your song on our online service and let us make money there too!"
Right now, as a Mac user, I just blew 88 cents on a song I'll never be able to hear. They lost a *potential* customer by locking my platform out. That may be their biggest downfall.
Settlers of Catan and it's siblings/children are all worthy of family battle - er -gaming time.
We play them as a family (a wide range of ages) and it's great fun. At times, it can get fairly heated, but overall it's great, especially with the expansions.
Time to remove the programmed recording schedule for these putrid things from my PVR... I'm just glad I didn't waste a CD-R on any of them yet. I can at least recover the bits from the HD.
I kinda realize that I'm a tad on the nitpicking side when it comes to SSL, but think about the applications: online banking, webmail, bill paying, general authentication. Each of them should be in an SSL session. Let's just hope that Apple does improve the speed.
Slashdot Mirror
no apologies necessary. the only reason i might have come across a bit whiny was that i've been trying to get a belkin 54mb pci wlan card working in a dell 8300 with xp sp2 for about 3 hours now.
as for (c) - major kudos! the level of wrong moderation due to not following you bit of wisdom is, unfortunately, rising. maybe the changes cmdr taco is planning will help. time will tell.
it ought to be fun seeing what the mods do to this.
(a) they are not "my mods", they are /. mods and it's their mod points to blow if they so choose. you'll notice that the system takes care of itself and the highly unwarranted positive mods i received early on were balanced out quite nicely (though i would hesitate to call my post "flamebait").
(b) i didn't do a byte-by-byte comparison, but it's pretty much a dupe with some extra bits. Not even sure if it's worth a slashback.
(c) i'm desperately hoping the good moderators with points to spare mark this and your post "offtopic" since that *is* what they both are [grin]
If it looks like Running for Geeks and smells like Running for Geeks then it must be a Running for Geeks reformatted dupe.
It would have taken all of 1.5 minutes to check that.
And I never usually bother, but when I saw the Engadget article myself a day ago I almost knew this would happen.
Give timothy a break tho...it *is* Saturday.
Hey folks, since we are /.'ing him and no doubt downloading NetStumbler and MiniStumbler in droves, it might be a good idea if someone could setup a torrent for it (I'm @ school @ the moment, otherwise I would) and/or click on his donation links.
While it's no Kismet, it is a solid tool and the new MiniStumbler actually does a great job on my HP iPaq with integrated WLAN.
(I'm also glad I got them yesterday [grin])
The WRT54G model, once re-flashed with some of the very feature-rich firmware produced by the open source community has been a rock-solid, problem-free device.
I would love to be able to spend the money on an apple airport base station, but *this* model Linksys works for me. I can see where an all-Mac home/shop or even a small, multi-platform environment might want to go with easy-to-manage Apple WLAN equipment, tho.
Now, the older, 802.11b AP's from Linksys were not worth the plastic case they came in, so if you're comparing the Apple equipment to those, Apple is definitely worth the price premium.
I think michael hit it right on the head in his post (oh to be both an author and submitter at slashdot!). Most of the topics in this Cryptogram (and the past few) we *have* seen before, here and in many other security news and blog sites. The only thing I hadn't heard before is the audio-credit-card-thing and I really doubt you'll be seeing consumers hold their cards up to their microphones. Heck, most non-techie folks I deal with don't even realize they *have* a microphone and the rest of them still have theirs in the original plastic shipping material it came in.
So, as Cryptogram becomes yet-another-blog, will it cause Schneier to lose relevancy? I hope not, since a large number of "security managers" hang on his every word and, in the past, this has been a positive thing for getting funding so we can get real work done.
Here's hoping for an influx of creative and incisive Cryptograms the rest of the year, otherwise I'll be on the lookout for Schneier with his WiFi laptop @ Starbucks or the next blog convention.
Beat me to it. Great tool, especially on OS X, but the Windows version is equally as good. It's won awards and is an example of how the open source community side of the *nix world has spearheaded the development of cross-platform/high quality free software.
For the original question submitter: follow the advice of a couple of the posts and check sourceforge and freshmeat and stay away from download.com, etc. You'll find a great deal of software for all sorts of tasks.
And, you might want to consider loading cygwin - www.cygwin.com - and take a look at the huge library of stuff that's been ported and packaged for Windows. All free.
Doh! I'm just not with it today. Would have been a nice one, too...
We evaluated Vocera last year. Really nice tech, but it wasn't - buzzword warning - enterprise ready. While it may work in one building, the server-side of it isn't scalable (or wasn't - I haven't looked at them since). It didn't help their case that it was Windows-based (get a virus/worm, lose communications *:^).
The lanyard-attached phone was pretty nice (since I can easily lose my cell phone as well) and I believe you can get a headset if you need to keep the receiving end private. I can still see those annoying/loud conversations popping up much more with these units, tho.
The routing capabilities worked well and it would be great for our help desk and emergency incident response teams. Being able to say "Where's Bill?" and get a response was also pretty cool. It's only as accurate as the nearest associated access point, but it's still better then not knowing which side of the building some is on.
Once they get more enterprise features (integration, scalability, global functionality) we'll probably adopt it in key areas.
Same pb config. Recent 10.3 fresh install (then the previous update) just a few days ago. No worries after the upgrade.
Haven't looked @ my Dual G4 tower, but I can ssh to it, so it's up after the remote install/reboot.
just couldn't wait. got the 1GHz PB 12" on Saturday. Memory is on order, but I'm more than elated. Such power in such a small form-factor.
while i read about the airport cards, the ingenuity of the apple hw designers (apart from the Ti/antenna fiasco) is almost unparallelled.
i'm almost compelled to go out and buy a bluetooth compatible phone and a bluetooth module for my pda!
Amigori: that's pretty much the exact config i want to buy this week but have been a bit scared off by this thread and the threads on a few of the Mac sites.
i need to be able to run M$ Mac Office, a bunch of open source security tools and may want to play around with some music apps.
i gather your experience has been good, but just want to get another opine before laying out the benjamins (especially if there's going to be a potential price drop in 10-15 days due to a new model).
one of my only questions besides "are you really, really happy with the thing" is how is SSL performance in Safari? I've been really disappointed with Safari SSL performance on my dual G4 867MHz and I'm hoping that the extra 137MHz speeds it up enough to not make me wince everytime i access an SSL site.
thx
cool. thanks for the URL. i'd kill (actually, horribly mame) to know when the next PB release is. i really want one of the 12" powerbooks.
is the 1GHz combo model so bad?
sigh.
Likewise, I'm not sure if I should order the 12" PowerBook I was going to get this week. I'm now considering holding off, but my G4 tower needs a companion!
Decisions, decisions...
It's "news" (albeit a bit of a stretch) since there are quite a few Catan "junkies" on /. Also, the shock-value of M$ cornering the Catan market is definitely news for /. readers.
It would have been a bit more useful if the editor included links to the already existing free implementations of Catan on- and off-line (which will probably all be decimated by lawyers now that M$ is "in the game") such as:
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/javasettlers
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/settlers3d
- http://gnocatan.sourceforge.net/
There are others lurking out there, but these are the ones I hit regularly. Download the source now while you can!
The last I checked, it's not native. Take a look @ here for more info.
A KOffice native port is a Very Big Deal. With Konqueror and this now ported (thanks to the kdelibs patch), many other KDE apps will be forthcoming (I've seen the screen shots of them running natively with the pre-release libs). More apps is a Good Thing.
How quaint for the reactionary, overly sensitive moderators... I'll be timing how quickly this post gets unfairly moderated as a Troll... Seems like the trend these days is to moderate rather than reply intelligently.
FYI:
In all the talk about outsourcing to India, I keep wondering when CxO's and VP's will wake up to the fact that India and Pakistan both have *nukes* pointed at each other. It wouldn't take much for *another* military takeover of Pakistan to start a real war (extremists tend to not flinch at the possibility of killing lots of people).
Even without nukes, both countries have a large population they could throw at each other (India being more capable in this area).
Who in their right mind would invest heavily in such an immensely instable region? "We" are "over there" right now (Afganistan and Iraq) so business folks "feel good" about that area. When we leave (ok, *if* we leave) or if there's a big-ish skirmish between Pakistan "rebels" and/or Indian "rebels", we may just see all the jobs come running home.
i have to admit that i do miss the 192kbps vbr mp3's (still have the ones i encoded, tho).
i really doubt folks who listen to music that actually needs a decent encoding will be using either service much, but i've been satisfied enough with the acoustic pieces i've downloaded that iTunes Works For Me(tm). Orchestral and really exquisite pieces I still buy in the stores. There are just too many artifacts that rear their ugly heads.
For those who listen to Britney or country music, either service will probably do.
According to their license and usage, one can download the music to 1 computer and back up music to up to two additional computers, make 10 burns to a CD and make unlimited transfers to a portable device. That's if you use WMP 9 on a PC. I was able to download the sample song, play it *and* transcode to mp3 with VLC (too lazy to cmd-line it with other tools) on OS X with no troubles. I tried the same with a song I paid for and got nothing. VLC choked on it, MPlayer gave me no sound and WMP for OS X tried to send Safari to a web site (no doubt for the DRM part).
/. effect (it was alot faster earlier today).
I'm looking forward to seeing a thorough comparison of the quality of Wal-Mart's encoded WMA (I couldn't readily find the encoding details) and Apple's iTunes AAC. I doubt that Wal-Mart is the store of choice for audiophiles, so I'm suspecting Apple's downloads are of better quality.
iTunes wins hands down on interface, usability and reliability. I can't see Wal-Mart's web-only interface winning them any converts. And, as I was checking back just a couple seconds ago, it appeared to be just starting to feel some pain from the
The potential "problem" is price. 88 cents is hard to beat, especially when folks are downloading Britney Spears latest pop hits (again, not the audiophile audience). I suspect Wal-Mart *is* making money, if only because they are leveraging their position as the number one retailer. "Want us to carry alot of copies your new album in our store? Then, you'll let us put your song on our online service and let us make money there too!"
Right now, as a Mac user, I just blew 88 cents on a song I'll never be able to hear. They lost a *potential* customer by locking my platform out. That may be their biggest downfall.
When I grab it later, I'll see if it can work in a Windows/cygwin/XFree86-cygwin environment.
many thanks for the link.
definitely have to check it out. does it work on *BSD?
Settlers of Catan and it's siblings/children are all worthy of family battle - er -gaming time.
We play them as a family (a wide range of ages) and it's great fun. At times, it can get fairly heated, but overall it's great, especially with the expansions.
I'll never get those three minutes back.
Time to remove the programmed recording schedule for these putrid things from my PVR... I'm just glad I didn't waste a CD-R on any of them yet. I can at least recover the bits from the HD.
I kinda realize that I'm a tad on the nitpicking side when it comes to SSL, but think about the applications: online banking, webmail, bill paying, general authentication. Each of them should be in an SSL session. Let's just hope that Apple does improve the speed.