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User: thogard

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  1. Re:Unfortunately that's it on Australia's largest telco to be split · · Score: 1

    Telstra is using HiBIS to knock out wireless ISPs. In real rural areas there is no way to get backhaul except Telstra so they are end up getting most of the HiBIS money anyway. It would have been better for everyone if that program didn't exist.

  2. Re:Unfortunately... on Mac OS X on x86 Videos Get Apple's Attention · · Score: 1

    No what will hurt Apple's adoption is the poor speeds that everyone seems to be getting when they do this. It turns out that a high end gaming machine running os X native is only a bit faster than the G4 minimac and slower than most all all the G5s running most apps (even the ones recompiled using the new dev kit).

  3. Re:Oh come on on Businesses To Be Censored on Use of Olympics · · Score: 1

    I know where Olympic spirt is. Its in a safety deposit box. Back in 1904 my great grandfather asked for permission to sell Olympic labeled junk since had a shop near the venue and he got it. The agreement doesn't have any expiry date so that means its still legal. Maybe I should set up shop in London.

    The 1904 Olympics in St Louis was the 1st to start the mass widespread corruption (the greed came latter). It also had more cheating than any other Olympics games. It was also the 1st time a marathon runner used a car to complete part of the race. Google knows lots about these fun facts and more.

  4. Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam on Ending Spam · · Score: 1

    I wasn't advocating a solution, just describing the what I've heard about.

    I know of 3 cases where spamers have stopped (at least for a bit) doing their dirty work where a baseball bat (or similar) were used. The results are one dead Russian who won't be spaming any more (but his friends have taken over his work), A Kiwi that is now back spaming even though there are rumors that his kid has taken at least one beating for his activity, and one Aussie spamer that decided that a few people showing up at his door (with baseball bats) and asking him to stop spaming was good enough reason for him to stop.

    So It looks like baseball bats only work about one in three times. As far as the police, the Russian cops do seem like they will put up with it, I don't think the Aussie cops were even aware of the incident and I have no info on the other case.

  5. Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam on Ending Spam · · Score: 1

    There are an infinite number of people who find an ad and give spamers thousands of dollars to send out their ad to millions of people. The rich spam bastards don't make money selling pills (even though some have admitted to it), they make their money by reselling spaming services to people who think they will work for their product.

    The only real way to stop a spamer is jail or a baseball bat but someone else will always be in line to replace them.

  6. Assembly on Best Language for Beginner Programmers? · · Score: 1

    Assembly is the only choice if you want any of these kids to grow up to be real programmers. There is a significant gap between programmers that learned assembly 1st and those that learned high level languages 1st. For decades there were rumors that BASIC or Pascal caused irreversible brain damage and now that seems to apply the latest generations of ivory tower languages.

    I don't even think you need don't even need computers at all for much of a decent programming class. My high school had a FORTRAN class and some a few classes on BASIC. With FORTRAN you had to punch the cards and you got one run a day while the BASIC people would tweak things till it worked. With the FORTRAN class you had to think about the problem 1st which is what you want to teach.

    All of the best coders I know spent lots of time in assembly very early after they learned to code. Its the only way to fully understand what a machine has to do and that lets you focus on the real costs of that single high level concept down the road.

  7. Re:Reviewed Canopy for work a year ago on Motorola to Marry BPL and Wireless · · Score: 1

    I've been using Canopy since mid 2002.

    Now you can only upgrade the firmware if you run the right flavor of linux or windows since they won't tell you how to upgrade units without the new CUNT (which kills units but they are only $300+ each so who cares.

    telnet uid is "root" and you can't change it and you can overload its http and telnet by lots of attempts.

    They send 64 byte blocks using DES which means once you find the right key, the rest are trivial. The have known about this for at least a year but think the AES is and upgrade which costs far more.

    They require a broken 3rd party program to maintain lock-downs to mac addressee and that doesn't work like they would want since the program can't pass even a cursory security check.

    There is no way it can be FIPS 140-2 certified. Its got too many weak keys at least in DES mode and I'm guessing that AES has the same weak keys.

  8. Re:Well... on Microsoft's Bold Patent Move · · Score: 1

    Hey, don't mention Knuth in this flamewar since someone might see that some of the examples in the patent look like they came right out of of the textbox section of the TeXbook (published 1984).

  9. Re:Great... on Yahoo Passes Google in Total Items Searched · · Score: 1

    This has gotten far worse since they went from indexing just 4 billion pages to indexing 8 billion. Can we please get a Google Lite?

  10. Re:Technology on FCC Approves Sprint-Nextel Merger · · Score: 1

    You forgot:
    0. Be high up in the FCC when you get the idea.

  11. Re:Who is Joel? on Hiring Good Programmers Matters · · Score: 1

    There is a rumor that the Excel UI design was handed to them as a spreadsheet for the Lisa. Can anyone shed more light on that?

  12. Re:Cisco: "Thugs". on Cisco Warns of Stolen Web Site Passwords · · Score: 1

    You need to go take a few MBA classes to see just why all of this is a "good thing". I'm sure its good, this sort of protection is clearly documented in ivory tower text books as being good and never annoying the customers to the point where they jump ship. Of course I bought my last cisco gear and I'm not looking back. (Anyone got dumps of the nvram for a 2621xm? mine is all FFFF and with not service contract, there is no way to get it repaired according to cisco)

    Maybe its time for the idiots to take a ride on the Clue Train

  13. Re:Thanks, Cisco.... on Cisco Warns of Stolen Web Site Passwords · · Score: 2, Informative

    So you don't store the md5 of the password but an md5 of a a salt, an extra key and your password...
    So you md5("$password") but more of md5("ciscoCCO$UID$password")
    To make it even more fun, drop the last 4 or 8 bytes off the md5 since your hash should never have more bits than your unique secret data

  14. Re:Sign me up on Cosmic Rays Could Kill Astronauts Visiting Mars · · Score: 1

    There is already a screening method... just find out if they have allergies. It seems that people with more allergy problems have less cancer problems.

  15. Re:The USPTO has done it again, brilliant. on Google Patents RSS Advertising · · Score: 1

    If if defensive, having it rejected based on non-patented prior art is still a defense.

    If you care to read the silly thing, the 1st 10 claims are patent lawyer speak for RSS. I wish the claims would be sub divided into statements of fact and invention claims so it wouldn't take a 1/2 hour to figure out which part of this they think is new. In my opinion (as one practiced in the arts), this is just rehashing what everyone has been doing in HTML land for a long time.

    What needs to happen is a few "inventors" need to be brought up on fraud charges since lying to the patent office is the same as lying to a court. Only an idiot would claim this was a innovative new idea with no prior art around their coder friends.

  16. Re:USPTO Mission on Google Patents RSS Advertising · · Score: 1

    If there is no "burden of proof" then why is the title of the person doing the rubber stamping a "patent examiner"?

    There is burden of proof imply with the process so it should be there and the USPTO does not work by what the poorly written law implies.

  17. Re:I wonder... on Researcher Resigns Over New Cisco Router Flaw · · Score: 1

    There are several switching ones where it will take an ietf packet and put an ieee header on it and truncate data. There are also issues with its mac filtering with broadcast packets which means you can't block it from turning into an expensive hub. These were reported when the 2924 was new and again when the 2950 was new and they still aren't fixed.

  18. Re:I wonder... on Researcher Resigns Over New Cisco Router Flaw · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Months? There are outstanding issues on their 2900 switches that have been unfixed there for years.

    I don't buy cisco gear anymore.

  19. Re:Sweet Spot on New iBook and Apple mini · · Score: 1

    There are laser pointer presentation controllers that will do what you want. They are RF wireless and they will have about 5 buttons and it looks like a USB keyboard to the computer.

  20. Re:Meh - American Radio is beyond hope on Sony Agrees to Stop Payola · · Score: 1

    Aussie radio can get much worse.
    Do they Kiwis have any radio stations that aren't Clear Channel crud?

  21. Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels on Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV · · Score: 1

    This box could record Sky. Most sat systems are based on the old analog transponders which they would simply downshift the data off the sat into whatever the local equipment needed. The digital encoding is simply sending compress digital data over the same type of hardware and decoding it at the right time. The end result of this mess is that you should be able to take the signal from a standard dish, filter a single transponder and downshift it to a frequency that the digital tuner wants to see and feed it to this box. Then when you play back the stream, you upshift it back and dump it into the decoder and you have time shifted sat tv.

  22. Re:Goes both ways on Why FreeBSD · · Score: 1

    so I'm hoping 6.x will fix the 5.x mess
    Thats exactly what is wrong with freebsd (and Linux and Windows and OS X ...). The attitude that the next version will fix the problems of the current version usually leads to not fixing the current version properly.

  23. Re:No daylight savings time here on Impact of Daylight Savings Time Changes? · · Score: 1

    There is also a specific class of accidents involving kids going to school that increases dramatically because the DST time change is about 2 weeks off from the best time to do it.

    Won't someone please think of the children?

  24. More feel good security on SiteKey to Prevent Phishing · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The button might help. But the button on the phishing site might go off to a bot network that pulls a real picture off the main site and there is no way to tell if thats happening from the bank side of things.

    There are a few questions I'm not going answer online and I'm guessing most of them will suggested questions.

    The last issue is why the high security when its not needed? My credit card balance is public knowledge at least to anyone that can do a credit check which limits it to about 10 million people.
    A better system is typical lame password security access for read access to balances and transaction lists but an extra layer when I want to do something like move money to a different account and maybe an extra layer if I want to do something like move money to a foreign country.

  25. Re:Deeper Implications on IP Telephony Drives in Power over Ethernet · · Score: 1

    The problem with PoE is that its -48V which is difficult to make unless your a phone company. Look at a typical PoE ethernet switch's power supply vs the lower voltage redundant ones and you'll see a huge difference in size and weight even though they are rated at the same power. 48V plug packs cost a fortune compared to the 5 and 12V versions as well.

    I'm thinking home and small business products won't be using ieee 802.1af ever and someone somewhere will come up with a different standard that fits that market better.