Slashdot Mirror


User: thogard

thogard's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
3,911
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 3,911

  1. Re:What if ICANN vanished? on ICANN Budget Questioned · · Score: 1

    Revoking class A? Tahts a good thing. ITU vs ICANN? Thats about picking the worse of two evils.

  2. Re:What if ICANN vanished? on ICANN Budget Questioned · · Score: 0, Troll

    I think one of the 1st things the ITU will do is revoke all existing class A address and give notice to all class B holder to reduce their holdings. Then I expect the existing class A address space to be split up by the most complex way any group of people could think of based mostly on population potential relative to existing ip address assignments and existing social boundires or something like that.

  3. Find the offsping of Tiger on Open Maps? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tiger is the format of the census files and they list every road where people live or work in theory. They are also only accurate for time of the census (1990,2000,2010) and some of the pre/post processing checks (1989,1992,1999,2002,2005,...) and are accurate relitive to the local map datum which may or may not be anywhere close to WGS-84 (which is what your GPS will most likly default to). A while back a new group was set up to prevent the duplication of work between the Census dept and others that also need the same data (USPS, Dept of Interior, USDA). I'm not sure what that dept is called.

    There are plenty of resources on the net about how to parse Tiger line data and most of the main mapping programs that do street level views where based on that data with many corrections. For example its common that older streets will be on a state map datum and improperly adjusted to NAD27 and/or WGS85 or something else. You can find roads that aren't parallel even though they all are directly north or you can get some interesting results when one township was on one datum and the next township over was in a different one which results in the streets appearing to be in the order of 1st, 3rd, 2nd. You also have things like auto placement where one road is just so out of place, auto placement aginst sat photos puts the wrong name on it and somehow it bounces the correctly named road someplace else. The plan was to clean that up for the 2000 census data but I think the task was just too large.

    There is a programm called "Grass" that will read in these files. It might be a place to start.

    You might want to do a google groups search in the newsgroup sci.geo.cartography as well.

  4. Whats required for vonage like services? on Suggestions for a Home VOIP Provider? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I make too many calls to the US from Australia and I've heard tht you need 200ms pings. I can get 150ms pings to some places in San Jose but typical ping times are 220 to 250 ms for random places in the US. What I'm looking for is where are the gateways located? What are their unoffical rules about getting connections that aren't from the US? How much does the adapter cost and how much does it cost me if I bail out of their serivce in the 1st month?

  5. Re:The important question... on Dinosaurs Died Within Hours of Asteroid Impact, says New Study · · Score: 1

    There is also another option in that as the enviroment changed so fast, it led to massive disease. Since many of the dinos were not eating as well as they normally did, that left them in a state that made them much more likely to catch stuff. There is also the posibility that they couldn't make some vitamins because either the foor source they got them from or the sun didn't provide enough.

  6. Re:The important question... on Dinosaurs Died Within Hours of Asteroid Impact, says New Study · · Score: 1

    This is an intersting theory I haven't heard of before. There are theories that something big hit the earth and some that looked into that claim the earth was about 60% of the size. I wonder if this teory is a mutation of that theory. Of course there is the problem of MASS_earth_before+MASS_incomming = MASS_moon+MASS_earth_after

  7. Re:Personally... on Geeks and Poker? · · Score: 1

    I've done that in casinos as well. You need to put a small amount in at a time when the place is quiet. I think the psycology is someone is leaving the place, drop one more coin in and then leave but they win...

  8. Just a cell tower and power lines? on Environmental Concerns for a Server Room? · · Score: 1

    I've got a Synchrotron on the other side of the road from my new data center. I know I'll be wishing I had put more shielding in place at some point although I don't know how noisy its going to be.

    One thing to consider for small data centers (mine holds 3 racks) is that modern building construction assumes that the walls go where they build them and the fancy floor gets adjusted to the walls. That turns out to be very nasty when your in a room with 4x7 computer room tiles that are exactly the same size and don't cut easy. In large data centers you will find that you can't remove most of the tiles around the edges of the walls since they were all special cut. Our solution was to make sure the floor supports and a few tiles were in place before two of the walls went up.

  9. Re:Good they've merged. Why XML ? on SPF To Be Integrated With MS 'Caller ID' System · · Score: 1

    Some of us don't use port 53 at all for zone transfers so thats not an issue and no sane request to my DNS server will ever produce a packet bigger than 512 bytes therefore its only misconfigured for people playing with my DNS server which the firewall blocks.

  10. Re:Sounds like a truly awful idea on SPF To Be Integrated With MS 'Caller ID' System · · Score: 1

    who gets the money? Billy Gates?

  11. Re:Sounds like a truly awful idea on SPF To Be Integrated With MS 'Caller ID' System · · Score: 1

    I get spam from people with valid SPF records. SPF has nothing to do with anti-spam.

    As far as its protecting aginst bounces, thats only going to happen if a few million systems start using SPF which is not going to happen for at least a decade. SPF has too many problems to use in the real world.

  12. Re:Good they've merged. Why XML ? on SPF To Be Integrated With MS 'Caller ID' System · · Score: 4, Informative

    Cracker will love the xml format. It turns out that the record size will exceed the UDP packet size for DNS records so they get upsized to use TCP packets.

    The thing is how many people allow TCP packets on port 53 on their firewall? There is no reason execpt to talk to your second-dns records. All other cases should be turned off but this requires that it be turned on.

  13. Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance on GPS vs. Galileo; Where Are They Headed? · · Score: 1

    A US/EU war could happen in one situation. If the revolution happens in Saudi Arabia and the new leaders decide to only sell oil to countries that don't support Israel and force the southern European nations to block US shipping in the mediterranean. The US can get along with out middle east oil but Italy, Spain and Germany can't.

    Keep in mind that the current next in line to rule Saudi has claimed he would like to see oil at $80 to $100 a barrel so he can prepair for his people when it runs out.

  14. Re:Representation on RIAA Sues Nearly 500 New Swappers · · Score: 1

    That would be a very interesting question to show up in court? How much would it cost the RIAA to prove in even a hundred cases? Are they going to get 1000 artists to to show up to sue some broke 19 year old kid whos representing themself? What happens if they win? They collect an unpayable judgement in a civil mater.

  15. Re:History of UNIX on Groklaw's 'Grokline' To Document *nix History · · Score: 4, Funny

    You seem to have left out some details. It turns out there isn't just one Unix, but several. It sort of like Unix and brother Unix and its other brother Unix. Some of them decided they didn't like their name and wanted to be called things like sunos but their birth certificates all claim their name is just Unix and its mother is Bell Lab or its alias AT&T. Few of the birht certs ever mention a father and even when one is mentioned a blood test will shed a different light on the parentage. No one has done a DNA test yet but I expect the result to look like a embryo fertilization gone horribly wrong.

    And that was just the 1st generation. Take a look at some of the offsping? You have the lucky ones like OsX which had Unix (the lsd junky from Berkeley) as a father and its mother was hatched and grew up at CMU. While thats messed up, its nothing compared to the offspring with the worst identity crisis which now wants to be known as Solaris but when pressed on the issue takes its fathers name "sunos". It even gets confused if its sunos jr or sunos XI. Its cousin (like anyone could figure out that DNA mess) was spliced together at an evil lab at IBM where they took several stillborn unix offspring with a bit of stem cells from something that might have been a real unix and mixed it all together. The result of that isn't going to win any cutest baby awards.

    Where does Linux fit into this nice neat family tree? It doesn't. It turns out it was born over the road from the unix family castle and always looked up to them. You could hear them say "when I grow up, I want to be just like them!" Like too many people who grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, linux went off and had several children with several mothers. There was the lady who worked on the corrner who always wore a red hat, you had some German backpacker who seemed to get knocked up and carry her baby suse to full term. Many of the 1st gen breed like rabbits too. Mandrake seemed to be left at an orphanage but the lady in red and sometimes looks like it may head back there or the poor house.

    Recently Linux has some problems that there is a growing battle over the babys name. While both parties claim GNU had nothing to do with the birth, we all know that it takes two to make a baby and Linux is covered hints that GNU was arround at the time of conception. So will Linux ever take on another sirname or is it just that hyphanted last names just aren't cool where it hangs out?

  16. passphrase passwords on Password Memorability and Securability · · Score: 2, Informative

    Some people have been claiming that using things like "fsa7ya" or "4sa7ya" as the 1st letters of "four score and 7 years ago" is a good way to make up paswords. I've got a friend who has a dictionary of about 20,000 such phrases and it took a few of us about a half hour to find a common quote that wasn't in his list. He also happens to have a 50 word lists that is very effective at brute force attacks.

  17. Re:Global Warming - Dead Reefs on Creator of the Gaia Hypothesis Urges Nuclear Power · · Score: 1

    One thing that is killing the smaller reefs is that the cells that live in the coral have evolved over thousnads of years and in one spot will not have much variation which makes them very sensitve to any sort of change in levels of O2, N, CO2, salt(s) and temperature.

    Of course when the reefs are gone, so is the birthplace for most of the fish that end up on the dinner table.

    The places I dive (mid GBR) don't seem to be showing any bleaching yet but I hear its bad on the south end.

  18. Re:Spam And Viruses on University Capitulates, Switches Off Spam Filters · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Most viruses have a text line that start out:
    TVqQAAMAAAAEAAA
    since they are mime encoded .exe. Simple solution is to hunt for that tag when the message comes in and kill any message that has it. Should you have a real person sending an exe attachment, they will get the bounce if you reject it while the SMTP connection is still active and there is no siletnly lost real mail. A patch for sendmail can cope with a few hundred thousand messages an hour on pc class servers so its no big deal but I've got a faster hack when it matters.

  19. Old Tech way on Large-Scale Paper-To-Digital Conversion? · · Score: 1

    Dig out the campus directory and look under "secretary pool" for someone taht can type in the messy text at speeds that may only be 1/2 the speed of a cheap scanner. They will most likly type it into word (or maybe word perfect) but then if you convert it to LaTeX, you can add in all the nice forumlas and figures in a way that they can be properly maintained.

  20. Re:What Enterprise Needs... on Shatner May Return to Star Trek (Briefly?) · · Score: 1

    If they want viewers, maybe they should get Shatner to play a red shirt.

  21. Re:How to filter better - a modest proposal on FBI Plans Spammer Smackdown · · Score: 1

    I don't think "wrong solution" is harsh when it is broken worse than security of a typical MS product.
    Yes, I do have something better. How about something based on what we know works like DNS black lists. We know DNS works and we know most email clients can do DNS-Bl type things. So why not use them?

  22. Re:Konqueror on Future for Web Standards Pondered · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How can you tell if its MSIE 6.0 or just someone claiming to be?

  23. Re:$99 for the cheap fresnel... on Things You Can Do With A Giant Fresnel Lens · · Score: 1

    I knew a guy who bought some pannels from a research project in the CA desert. They came with a book of the logs of power produced every 10 minutes for years. He took them to Minisota and in the winter they produced almost 2x the power they had produced in the sunny desert.

  24. Re:How is this supposed to solve anything? on Microsoft Submits Email Caller ID to the IETF · · Score: 1

    Spamers tend to take in $1000 to $10,000 for every bulk run they do. $20 extra in their costs is nothing. Remember the spamers con small businesses that pay them the money to send out the email. Its not the small businesses in most cases directly sending it, they just outsource thier marketing. In most cases they are told the mailing list is double opt-in.

  25. Re:PATENTS? on Microsoft Submits Email Caller ID to the IETF · · Score: 0

    Of course they have a patent on it. And even if they agree not to charge for it, they can always revoke the license later or sell it to someone who does. They will use this to get more people to move back to their server software.