A more paranoid person might be worried about the following scenario: She discovers a flaw in her bank's system. She notifies the bank. The bank decides the easiest way to nullify this new threat is to silence her. She is charged with things she did in order to discover the flaw (regardless of whether those things are actually illegal) and a gag order prohibits her from discussing not only the details of the case but even the existence of the case. The public is not informed, at least not for several months and the hole remains open for much longer than it would have if the bank had been forced to close it.
Now, I'm not saying this Dressel guy was thinking along these lines or that his bank has done anything to warrant such paranoia. I'm just saying that it is possible that a person who reports a security flaw to the press and not to the company that created it isn't doing so to be 'leet. --
Hehe. You know how in bad movies about bank robbers they always turn the tv on after the big heist just as their story comes on? Well, as I read your fine post, I figured it would be nice to have the song playing at the same time. I thought to myself "Hey, I'll just turn on the crappy local MTV imitation channel; they only have like 15 videos so there's a good chance it'll be on."
And of course you wouldn't be reading this if it hadn't been:-)
I love long shots and coincidences like that. A few months ago I rented a DVD and started watching it on my weird setup (a vnc-controlled headless Win98 box with an Encore kit would play the disk and I'd watch it on my main machine using a TV tuner card hooked up to the dxr3's s-video out.)
Halfway through the movie, the drive started failing as it often did halfway through a movie and the windows box locked up. While waiting for it to boot, I switched xawtv's video source from S-Video to Televion and was confused for a moment to see a scene I'd just watched 20 minutes earlier off the DVD. It would have been so cool if I'd started watching that DVD a little later so the phase shift hadn't been noticable. Oh well, pretty cool nonetheless. --
Re:It's not the broken mods that piss people off..
on
New Q3A Patch And Mods
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· Score: 2
What do you mean locking them off with giant fences? You mean they can't be changed? You may not believe this, but I once changed "C:\" to "D:\" globally in the registry and got the intended result with not even a hickup. I should think you could do the same with these directory names, unless you know differently. --
One of the screenshots shows an icon on the desktop labelled "File a bug report". Clearly this is not a screenshot of a real Microsoft operating system, which would at most have a "Report an incident" or "Report a QA issue" item 4 levels deep in the Start menu.
PS. If you're enraged or irritated by this post, try being amused instead. --
People have wondered about the possibility of using video RAM as system RAM. Someone suggested adding that capability to Linux. I don't think anything was done about it. Mostly because reading from video RAM has been very slow in the past and somehow, I don't think that's changed.
It may even be that reading from video RAM is so slow that feeding your data to the card, having it process it, and reading it back would be slower than just doing the processing in the CPU.
I remember another queer use of video cards. I once saw an ad for a home backup system that used a VCR and standard VHS tapes. You just hooked up the VCR to the screen card through some kind of adapter and the backup software would display the data to be archived after you pressed Rec and Enter. Come to think of it, I have no idea how you were supposed to get the data back. --
I had a similar setup on my home machine when I had ISDN. I'd call the machine (on its own MSN, so phones in the house wouldn't ring) and it wouldn't pick up. Instead it would check the caller's number and if it was my cellphone, the machine would go online and post its ip address somewhere I could get at it. --
Here's a chance to mention something I think is really cool. There are now 20 or so methane powered cars in Iceland. As an energy storage or transportation medium, methane isn't particularly good. These cars need a large tank pressurised to 200 bars, carrying more methane by weight than they would gasoline (or do, actually, since they're hybrids) and the engine doesn't perform quite as well on methane as it does on gasoline (but pretty close).
But here's the cool part: They don't make or collect the methane specifically to power cars. It's already being generated by rotting biomatter in landfills. It's just a matter of collecting it and they were doing that anyway and burning it to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions because methane is estimated to contribute 20-24 times as much to the greenhouse effect as the CO2 produced by burning it. So basically, from an environmental standpoint, these 20 cars are free.
There's an upper limit on how much methane collected from landfills can do for us. Not enough methane is produced by our waste to power all our cars. The people involved in this methane experiment estimate that the methane being collected now could power 1200-1400 cars and it's not overly optimistic to assume there could be 1000 methane cars on the streets of Reykjavik in just a couple of years. The CO2 emissions saved by 1000 cars would be 100.000 tonnes per year, or 5% of Iceland's total CO2 emissions. In the slightly longer term, it's estimated that by 2012, we'll be collecting enough methane for 2500 cars, which means a savings of 12.5% of the current emission rate. That's not going to take us all the way, but that doesn't make those 12.5% any less important.
Economy is the big problem though. The methane infrastructure costs money to build and operate. Currently, you get 23% better mileage per dollar with methane, but only because methane isn't being taxed. In Iceland, as in much of Europe, a litre of gasoline costs about the same as a gallon costs in the US and 70% of that is tax. The same tax on methane would kill it.
There's also another way of using the methane. Just burn it instead of other fuels in power plants. It's being done on a small scale already. The Icelandic power grid is fed by hydroelectric powerplants so this doesn't do anything to lower Iceland's emissions, but it can help elsewhere. Many of the other "clean fuels" for cars aren't really much cleaner since they have to be produced with energy generated at a power plant which may itself be running on dirty fuel, but if the powerplant is running on methane, you get a real benefit.
PS. The numbers I user here are from this article (it's in Icelandic). If any of them are wrong, I wouldn't know.
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I seem to recall that a while back, someone described how to do that cheaply in a discussion about came consoles. The key point was that both modems had to support certain AT commands (and the particular game console's modem did). --
I don't think porting MS Office to Linux would be as much work for MS as you seem to think. All they have to do is fill in the gaps in Wine(lib)'s coverage of the Win32 API and port using that. Microsoft is uniquely qualified to finish Wine:-) --
If you can somehow get the floppy images on a FAT partition on the machine you're going to install on, you can forgo the use of most of those floppies. I think you'll only need two. (This may be inaccurate; it's been a while since I've done this.) My two Debian installations were done with a lot less than 16 floppies. The only time I've used that many was for my first Slackware installation, way back when. --
I was hearing complaints about dselect long before I had any of my own and I didn't get it either. Then I experienced some of the problems that had bitten other users. My memory of this is a bit blurry so I can't name specific examples, but suffice it to say that there was a lot of frustration as I struggled with dselect's conflict resolution screen and any change I made, even trying to just back out of the change that caused the conflict, would bring about more conflicts. Often I would just hit ctrl-c and start over. --
Vorbis can do a time-domain pre-encoding using wavelets to further reduce spreading of time events and non-tone data. The current libvorbis doesn't have the code to do this yet, but the hooks are there for when we do finish this code...
I was under the impression that basically the whole area of wavelets was so heavily mined with patents that no-one dares go there. Is Christopher headed for trouble or has the severity of the situation been exaggerated? --
No, you don't understand now. Nebby was responding to timothy's question: "How can companies like Sega be convinced that products that don't make them
money anymore should be made GPL?"
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Slashdot Mirror
So, combine this sport with this one.
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Now, I'm not saying this Dressel guy was thinking along these lines or that his bank has done anything to warrant such paranoia. I'm just saying that it is possible that a person who reports a security flaw to the press and not to the company that created it isn't doing so to be 'leet.
--
And of course you wouldn't be reading this if it hadn't been :-)
I love long shots and coincidences like that. A few months ago I rented a DVD and started watching it on my weird setup (a vnc-controlled headless Win98 box with an Encore kit would play the disk and I'd watch it on my main machine using a TV tuner card hooked up to the dxr3's s-video out.)
Halfway through the movie, the drive started failing as it often did halfway through a movie and the windows box locked up. While waiting for it to boot, I switched xawtv's video source from S-Video to Televion and was confused for a moment to see a scene I'd just watched 20 minutes earlier off the DVD. It would have been so cool if I'd started watching that DVD a little later so the phase shift hadn't been noticable. Oh well, pretty cool nonetheless.
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What kind of moves are you talking about?
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When you first heard of random access memory, did you wonder how that could possibly be useful?
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What do you mean locking them off with giant fences? You mean they can't be changed? You may not believe this, but I once changed "C:\" to "D:\" globally in the registry and got the intended result with not even a hickup. I should think you could do the same with these directory names, unless you know differently.
--
PS. If you're enraged or irritated by this post, try being amused instead.
--
It may even be that reading from video RAM is so slow that feeding your data to the card, having it process it, and reading it back would be slower than just doing the processing in the CPU.
I remember another queer use of video cards. I once saw an ad for a home backup system that used a VCR and standard VHS tapes. You just hooked up the VCR to the screen card through some kind of adapter and the backup software would display the data to be archived after you pressed Rec and Enter. Come to think of it, I have no idea how you were supposed to get the data back.
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http://fairtunes.com/
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Indeed. Didn't the GNU tools crash less than vendor tools in the "feed'em input from /dev/urandom" test, for instance?
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And don't forget those creepy teleporters. That whole section of the game was just too eerie.
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I had a similar setup on my home machine when I had ISDN. I'd call the machine (on its own MSN, so phones in the house wouldn't ring) and it wouldn't pick up. Instead it would check the caller's number and if it was my cellphone, the machine would go online and post its ip address somewhere I could get at it.
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"personkind"? gimme a break. Do you also say "personhole cover"?
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Packaging, installer, defaults.
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Oh well, I guess cow farts are next then :-)
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But here's the cool part: They don't make or collect the methane specifically to power cars. It's already being generated by rotting biomatter in landfills. It's just a matter of collecting it and they were doing that anyway and burning it to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions because methane is estimated to contribute 20-24 times as much to the greenhouse effect as the CO2 produced by burning it. So basically, from an environmental standpoint, these 20 cars are free.
There's an upper limit on how much methane collected from landfills can do for us. Not enough methane is produced by our waste to power all our cars. The people involved in this methane experiment estimate that the methane being collected now could power 1200-1400 cars and it's not overly optimistic to assume there could be 1000 methane cars on the streets of Reykjavik in just a couple of years. The CO2 emissions saved by 1000 cars would be 100.000 tonnes per year, or 5% of Iceland's total CO2 emissions. In the slightly longer term, it's estimated that by 2012, we'll be collecting enough methane for 2500 cars, which means a savings of 12.5% of the current emission rate. That's not going to take us all the way, but that doesn't make those 12.5% any less important.
Economy is the big problem though. The methane infrastructure costs money to build and operate. Currently, you get 23% better mileage per dollar with methane, but only because methane isn't being taxed. In Iceland, as in much of Europe, a litre of gasoline costs about the same as a gallon costs in the US and 70% of that is tax. The same tax on methane would kill it.
There's also another way of using the methane. Just burn it instead of other fuels in power plants. It's being done on a small scale already. The Icelandic power grid is fed by hydroelectric powerplants so this doesn't do anything to lower Iceland's emissions, but it can help elsewhere. Many of the other "clean fuels" for cars aren't really much cleaner since they have to be produced with energy generated at a power plant which may itself be running on dirty fuel, but if the powerplant is running on methane, you get a real benefit.
PS. The numbers I user here are from this article (it's in Icelandic). If any of them are wrong, I wouldn't know.
--
I seem to recall that a while back, someone described how to do that cheaply in a discussion about came consoles. The key point was that both modems had to support certain AT commands (and the particular game console's modem did).
--
I don't think porting MS Office to Linux would be as much work for MS as you seem to think. All they have to do is fill in the gaps in Wine(lib)'s coverage of the Win32 API and port using that. Microsoft is uniquely qualified to finish Wine :-)
--
If you can somehow get the floppy images on a FAT partition on the machine you're going to install on, you can forgo the use of most of those floppies. I think you'll only need two. (This may be inaccurate; it's been a while since I've done this.) My two Debian installations were done with a lot less than 16 floppies. The only time I've used that many was for my first Slackware installation, way back when.
--
I was hearing complaints about dselect long before I had any of my own and I didn't get it either. Then I experienced some of the problems that had bitten other users. My memory of this is a bit blurry so I can't name specific examples, but suffice it to say that there was a lot of frustration as I struggled with dselect's conflict resolution screen and any change I made, even trying to just back out of the change that caused the conflict, would bring about more conflicts. Often I would just hit ctrl-c and start over.
--
Most slashdotters believe in copyright, I think. It's the foundation on which the GPL stands.
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Not really. Display in your glasses, twiddler in your pocket. Totally unseen. It exists right now, only at an outrageous price.
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No, you don't understand now. Nebby was responding to timothy's question: "How can companies like Sega be convinced that products that don't make them money anymore should be made GPL?"
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But what if he's blocked up that way too? Imagine the frustration!
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