Lets consider for a moment this as a reasonable hypothesis. The largest worry then would be that the lifespan of the particle is less than the time it would take to "fall" to Earth's superdense planetary core. There it might have enough mass packed "near" it to break past equilibrium and start increasing in mass.
This sounds so familiar... oh yeah: Earth by David Brin.
From my experience the past weekend the number one problem facing PC Gamers is not any of the things listed above. In point of fact, all of those things have been true since the very beginning of PC gaming.
However, some of the 4 need not be true (although they are truisms)
1. My brand new Dual core 2.0ghz gaming rig cost me less than the Xbox 360 that I really wanted (but couldn't afford.) 2. Sometimes the hardware is crap, sometimes the drivers are crap, sometimes the firmware on the hardware is crap... Whatever the case all hardware/software combinations have this problem (The original Xbox didn't go from hardware version 1.0 to 1.6 in 2 years for no reason.) 3. The Xbox (again I know) was softhacked through buggy games... 4. This is always the case, PCs always catch up from things learned on the latest gen consoles before the next gen is out. It's a cycle.
To return to the focus only slighty Four reasons Linux isn't gamed on: 1. Linux isn't developed on. If most games lived on linux people would run Linux. Instead we have to live with Cedega, which is ok, but every game has to be manually configured (yes yes the wiki, but some shit still doesn't work, or wasn't documented thorougly etc...) 2. The one thing Windows has is the benefit of "should work" (not "will work") Linux is "might work..." 3. Once the 360 is old enough my platform of the day will be able to emulate it. 4. It's a cycle... PC's are truly the best gaming platform for gamers, but Consoles are more accessible and easier to get going. (Which can make them better in certain circumstances.)
Honestly why is the latest revelation in documented common Microsoft software practices news on/. ? I mean you don't see "Latest yum library that that comes to you downloaded all rpms in one safe ISO!!1!" as a headline...
to break it down from my personal experience in unions: 1. They are run by the smartest useless people in the shop, and are made to serve the useless people in the shop. 2. They are held together by their COLA and Benefits minor victories they are able to eek out from mgmt.
And to make #2 sound even worse, the only time we ever got anything that was beneficial (or more than my employer was going to increase anyways) was due to an accounting error...
That's about it, though as a side note: The better the union is at keeping people, who should have been fired, employed the longer the probation period for a new hire. When I worked for the state it was 1 full year... In which time, you are forced to pay your union dues (for 9 months) before they can actually do you any good.
Better off designing the crap on top of a mountain on Earth. The problem with the moon as a development platform for Mars is there's NO atmosphere. The challenges Mars has are closer to living in the desert & a high plateau at the same time, and then throw in some of the challenges we see on the ocean floor (gotta bring your own air/pressure etc.)
Getting there and landing on Mars will be like doing the same on Earth (with a marked difference in the surface area needed for aerobraking, etc.) But, theoretically anything that would work on Earth could be modified to work on Mars. So the closest thing we've got to landing people on mars from orbit, is landing people on Earth from orbit.
As much as the Rocket cowboys want you to think the hard part is getting there, the really hard part will be getting to the surface and staying alive there, and the moon doesn't offer much help in testing almost anything we'll be sending to Mars.
In summation: A Moonshot does not help our trip to Mars.
In a hazy dream: A permanent Moonbase with a few reactors and a polar (or orbital) Solar station would be a great processing and logistics base for asteroid mining and delivery to Earth. It's position/low mass and lack of atmosphere make it marginally cheaper (fuel wise) to land on and finish the final leg to Earth's surface. It would also make a good place for the space-bound to touch down for a while if they wanna walk around without dying.
There's no reason like substandard bearings to keep your system on the edge of power...
Or the fact that MS has never gotten hibernate/standby right...
Or the fact that many vendors components "say" they support standby mode, but don't...
Power the monitor off, sure.
But hibernate is just the same as powering off, only your HD gets a workout beforehand... So it actually ends up being worse for you than the already bad powering off and on.
There's an insanity that I like to call "climbing the ladder" some people try it, and few people (as I've found) in IT do it very well.
Working 12 hours a day is all well and good if you can swing it, you're not doing it because you have to (overtime pay - taxes = crap.) You're doing it because it increases your knowledgebase, gives you on the job training and gets you visibility.
The bosses I like to work for, are there a little before I am, and leave just after I do... They are there to shovel the shit from all the smartsizing and reorganizing that's come before them. I'm there to figure out all the archaic shit that hamsterlike horders of information before me kept to themselves just before being smartsized.
If you learn enough about the infrastructure, software, and hardware required to keep the business running, you are invaluable, and if you are invaluable there's more projects for you to work on then time in the day...
That, and you have to take a slashdot break occasionally to wind down, especially since the likelihood of actually having a real lunch gets increasingly smaller as the clock ticks closer to noon... A global economy means there's always someone somewhere who isn't on lunch who needs your help.
Taking your car analogy for a moment. Internet explorer is like the display engine for 80% of the in dash LCD systems, without it your car will run, but you won't be able to tell what your tac is doing, how much gas you have or how fast you're going.
Truly, without Internet explorer, you can't use windows explorer (without modifications anyways) the two are linked in the most godawful way humanly possible. The bar along the right, with all the crap options, the search feature with the puppy dog, all that crap is embedded IE.
Not to mention 90% of the crappy third party applications that render HTML were probably made in Visual Studio, which Microsoft has kindly included about a billion ways to embed IE with.
Here's a top five list of IE dependent 'critical' software on my work machine: 1. Outlook 2. Explorer shell (search) 3. IBM Update Utility 4. Windows Update (wuauctl) 5. IPCheck Client Utility
No doubt there are gobs more, I'm sure my corporate installed patching utility uses IE calls to download patches and lots of other crap like that...
There was a point where you could break the executable from opening, but even so unless you can find some way to get rid of the DLL, and associated calls for them every 10 seconds by some random app. even attempting to pull IE out of windows is a real pain (reboot in recovery console/bartpe delete DLLs etc.) all so you can have an OS that is totally crippled...
Netsukuku and other Wireless mesh based routing protocols nearly all share the same two limitations:
Backbone identification/allocation and latency mitigation...
Sure I can build a wireless mesh that's 500 hops deep in diameter, but if I'm on one edge trying to reach the other edge, even if I'm only 250 hops end to end, what the hell happens?
In most designs, the packet gets dropped somewhere between 50-255 hops...
Even protocols with good testing (OLSR) have problems upwards of 500 nodes.
Doesn't really matter tho, this would require massive adoption, which would require a killer app...
Design it and you create the Napster of the mesh network, except this one would learn from napster/kazaa and be totally decentralized.
If you do that, no oppressor, no law enforcement, and most of all no record company lobbyist, could stop it.
Just remember, it's a virtual pandora's box, if you succeed it's the freenet dilema on a global scale...
Portsentry a good idea?
on
Linux Firewalls
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Why has this package (which was last updated over 4 years ago) according to the sf project page become a staple of perimiter defense in many reference books, but hasn't been updated in almost 5 years?
I've used it where I thought it a good idea in the past, but if knowledge of it's existence is apparent to attackers, it becomes a tool for DoS (through spoofing.) Wouldn't a snort+netfilter IPS solution make more sense?
Well, if you've been around since the 1990's on the web, and you haven't been forced into a situation where your credentials are your real name I'd assume you're lucky. Almost my entire web presence as an individual is due to School/Work accounts that forced me to use my real name as my credentials and subsequently published them (or had them published via 3rd party sendlists etc.)
My psuedonym has a 30:1 ratio of hits on google to my real name however, and with a modicum of searching I'm sure you could tie the two together...
In a particularly memorable SeaQuest DSV the world is destroyed by two huge Robotech style robots and they are still running around when the crew gets to the end of time vis a vis the mobius. Turns out it's two kids playing a video game in the same room controlling the robots that destroyed humanity.
Why bother, if they get nuked they just reload the boxen, it's not worth the trouble of taking a 3rd party's word for the fact that it stopped an attack.
Also, anything they get hit with would arguably have to be 0 day, and hence AV would be nearly useless against it anyways.
Or for a closer analogy: 3. buy up 20% of the seats and hold them till the last minute for one of the last shows that that band will have on that tour...
For the reason people like my mother in law are too daft to realize they're being reamed for something that will be much *MUCH* cheaper later. When I told her the retail price of the product she spent $600 dollars on she didn't believe it, when I sent her to Target's link (sold out of course) she was incensed it was sold for so much.
It's the same reason scalpers are derided. They charge a premium because they're sitting on something that was prevented from going in a consumers hands. If the scalper doesn't sell a handful of tickets, they can't enjoy them that evening. Likewise, someone who buys a 100 wii's and sits on them till a busy season can't use them all (barring some notable exceptions.) They take them out of circulation to further increase the after market price by further limiting supply.
That behavior has jackass written all over it... or OPEC, which I guess is the same thing.
What might shoot every flipper in the head, as far as profits go, would be for nintendo to advertise the MSRP of the console in their ads. People would stop paying $600 USD on ebay for something sold for $250.
BS I had to wait 4 months in the late 90's for my Rio 500 which was ordered in December. The Rio was not hyped but the demand was there when all that was affordable was a 128mb Player with a crap memory expansion slot. The MP3 player was proven when it was created. Even though it only had a crap display, indexing only by numbers, and shuffle play, it was worlds better than a crap MD that cost 2x as much or a CD player that could only play a single cd at a time and was huge in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Success!
Taking that and running with it ends in:
No company that can put that much money up would be able to face their shareholders if they won and didn't create a revenue stream out of it.
Lets consider for a moment this as a reasonable hypothesis. The largest worry then would be that the lifespan of the particle is less than the time it would take to "fall" to Earth's superdense planetary core. There it might have enough mass packed "near" it to break past equilibrium and start increasing in mass.
This sounds so familiar... oh yeah: Earth by David Brin.
what the... oh well I thought I deleted the "four reasons..." please disregard.
From my experience the past weekend the number one problem facing PC Gamers is not any of the things listed above. In point of fact, all of those things have been true since the very beginning of PC gaming.
However, some of the 4 need not be true (although they are truisms)
1. My brand new Dual core 2.0ghz gaming rig cost me less than the Xbox 360 that I really wanted (but couldn't afford.)
2. Sometimes the hardware is crap, sometimes the drivers are crap, sometimes the firmware on the hardware is crap... Whatever the case all hardware/software combinations have this problem (The original Xbox didn't go from hardware version 1.0 to 1.6 in 2 years for no reason.)
3. The Xbox (again I know) was softhacked through buggy games...
4. This is always the case, PCs always catch up from things learned on the latest gen consoles before the next gen is out. It's a cycle.
To return to the focus only slighty
Four reasons Linux isn't gamed on:
1. Linux isn't developed on. If most games lived on linux people would run Linux. Instead we have to live with Cedega, which is ok, but every game has to be manually configured (yes yes the wiki, but some shit still doesn't work, or wasn't documented thorougly etc...)
2. The one thing Windows has is the benefit of "should work" (not "will work") Linux is "might work..."
3. Once the 360 is old enough my platform of the day will be able to emulate it.
4. It's a cycle... PC's are truly the best gaming platform for gamers, but Consoles are more accessible and easier to get going. (Which can make them better in certain circumstances.)
Back it up?
Enable Iris Watermark? [YES] [NO]
Honestly why is the latest revelation in documented common Microsoft software practices news on /. ? I mean you don't see "Latest yum library that that comes to you downloaded all rpms in one safe ISO!!1!" as a headline...
to break it down from my personal experience in unions:
1. They are run by the smartest useless people in the shop, and are made to serve the useless people in the shop.
2. They are held together by their COLA and Benefits minor victories they are able to eek out from mgmt.
And to make #2 sound even worse, the only time we ever got anything that was beneficial (or more than my employer was going to increase anyways) was due to an accounting error...
That's about it, though as a side note:
The better the union is at keeping people, who should have been fired, employed the longer the probation period for a new hire. When I worked for the state it was 1 full year... In which time, you are forced to pay your union dues (for 9 months) before they can actually do you any good.
Better off designing the crap on top of a mountain on Earth. The problem with the moon as a development platform for Mars is there's NO atmosphere. The challenges Mars has are closer to living in the desert & a high plateau at the same time, and then throw in some of the challenges we see on the ocean floor (gotta bring your own air/pressure etc.)
Getting there and landing on Mars will be like doing the same on Earth (with a marked difference in the surface area needed for aerobraking, etc.) But, theoretically anything that would work on Earth could be modified to work on Mars. So the closest thing we've got to landing people on mars from orbit, is landing people on Earth from orbit.
As much as the Rocket cowboys want you to think the hard part is getting there, the really hard part will be getting to the surface and staying alive there, and the moon doesn't offer much help in testing almost anything we'll be sending to Mars.
In summation: A Moonshot does not help our trip to Mars.
In a hazy dream: A permanent Moonbase with a few reactors and a polar (or orbital) Solar station would be a great processing and logistics base for asteroid mining and delivery to Earth. It's position/low mass and lack of atmosphere make it marginally cheaper (fuel wise) to land on and finish the final leg to Earth's surface. It would also make a good place for the space-bound to touch down for a while if they wanna walk around without dying.
There's no reason like substandard bearings to keep your system on the edge of power...
Or the fact that MS has never gotten hibernate/standby right...
Or the fact that many vendors components "say" they support standby mode, but don't...
Power the monitor off, sure.
But hibernate is just the same as powering off, only your HD gets a workout beforehand... So it actually ends up being worse for you than the already bad powering off and on.
There's an insanity that I like to call "climbing the ladder" some people try it, and few people (as I've found) in IT do it very well.
Working 12 hours a day is all well and good if you can swing it, you're not doing it because you have to (overtime pay - taxes = crap.) You're doing it because it increases your knowledgebase, gives you on the job training and gets you visibility.
The bosses I like to work for, are there a little before I am, and leave just after I do... They are there to shovel the shit from all the smartsizing and reorganizing that's come before them. I'm there to figure out all the archaic shit that hamsterlike horders of information before me kept to themselves just before being smartsized.
If you learn enough about the infrastructure, software, and hardware required to keep the business running, you are invaluable, and if you are invaluable there's more projects for you to work on then time in the day...
That, and you have to take a slashdot break occasionally to wind down, especially since the likelihood of actually having a real lunch gets increasingly smaller as the clock ticks closer to noon... A global economy means there's always someone somewhere who isn't on lunch who needs your help.
that is microsoft design.
Taking your car analogy for a moment. Internet explorer is like the display engine for 80% of the in dash LCD systems, without it your car will run, but you won't be able to tell what your tac is doing, how much gas you have or how fast you're going.
Truly, without Internet explorer, you can't use windows explorer (without modifications anyways) the two are linked in the most godawful way humanly possible. The bar along the right, with all the crap options, the search feature with the puppy dog, all that crap is embedded IE.
Not to mention 90% of the crappy third party applications that render HTML were probably made in Visual Studio, which Microsoft has kindly included about a billion ways to embed IE with.
Here's a top five list of IE dependent 'critical' software on my work machine:
1. Outlook
2. Explorer shell (search)
3. IBM Update Utility
4. Windows Update (wuauctl)
5. IPCheck Client Utility
No doubt there are gobs more, I'm sure my corporate installed patching utility uses IE calls to download patches and lots of other crap like that...
There was a point where you could break the executable from opening, but even so unless you can find some way to get rid of the DLL, and associated calls for them every 10 seconds by some random app. even attempting to pull IE out of windows is a real pain (reboot in recovery console/bartpe delete DLLs etc.) all so you can have an OS that is totally crippled...
They got better things to do, like keeping OCs up.
Netsukuku and other Wireless mesh based routing protocols nearly all share the same two limitations:
Backbone identification/allocation and latency mitigation...
Sure I can build a wireless mesh that's 500 hops deep in diameter, but if I'm on one edge trying to reach the other edge, even if I'm only 250 hops end to end, what the hell happens?
In most designs, the packet gets dropped somewhere between 50-255 hops...
Even protocols with good testing (OLSR) have problems upwards of 500 nodes.
(Which is why they're designing OLSR-NG)
Doesn't really matter tho, this would require massive adoption, which would require a killer app...
Design it and you create the Napster of the mesh network, except this one would learn from napster/kazaa and be totally decentralized.
If you do that, no oppressor, no law enforcement, and most of all no record company lobbyist, could stop it.
Just remember, it's a virtual pandora's box, if you succeed it's the freenet dilema on a global scale...
Why has this package (which was last updated over 4 years ago) according to the sf project page become a staple of perimiter defense in many reference books, but hasn't been updated in almost 5 years?
I've used it where I thought it a good idea in the past, but if knowledge of it's existence is apparent to attackers, it becomes a tool for DoS (through spoofing.) Wouldn't a snort+netfilter IPS solution make more sense?
Well, if you've been around since the 1990's on the web, and you haven't been forced into a situation where your credentials are your real name I'd assume you're lucky. Almost my entire web presence as an individual is due to School/Work accounts that forced me to use my real name as my credentials and subsequently published them (or had them published via 3rd party sendlists etc.)
My psuedonym has a 30:1 ratio of hits on google to my real name however, and with a modicum of searching I'm sure you could tie the two together...
let me fix that:
o Auto
o Digital/Tech
o Climate/Energy
o Environment
o Cowboy Neal
o Infrastructure
o Science/Education
o Space
In a particularly memorable SeaQuest DSV the world is destroyed by two huge Robotech style robots and they are still running around when the crew gets to the end of time vis a vis the mobius. Turns out it's two kids playing a video game in the same room controlling the robots that destroyed humanity.
Why bother, if they get nuked they just reload the boxen, it's not worth the trouble of taking a 3rd party's word for the fact that it stopped an attack.
Also, anything they get hit with would arguably have to be 0 day, and hence AV would be nearly useless against it anyways.
Or for a closer analogy:
3. buy up 20% of the seats and hold them till the last minute for one of the last shows that that band will have on that tour...
For the reason people like my mother in law are too daft to realize they're being reamed for something that will be much *MUCH* cheaper later. When I told her the retail price of the product she spent $600 dollars on she didn't believe it, when I sent her to Target's link (sold out of course) she was incensed it was sold for so much.
It's the same reason scalpers are derided. They charge a premium because they're sitting on something that was prevented from going in a consumers hands. If the scalper doesn't sell a handful of tickets, they can't enjoy them that evening. Likewise, someone who buys a 100 wii's and sits on them till a busy season can't use them all (barring some notable exceptions.) They take them out of circulation to further increase the after market price by further limiting supply.
That behavior has jackass written all over it... or OPEC, which I guess is the same thing.
What might shoot every flipper in the head, as far as profits go, would be for nintendo to advertise the MSRP of the console in their ads. People would stop paying $600 USD on ebay for something sold for $250.
They've been at capacity for a while, and perhaps more factories is a good idea, they're certainly not meeting demand.
BS I had to wait 4 months in the late 90's for my Rio 500 which was ordered in December. The Rio was not hyped but the demand was there when all that was affordable was a 128mb Player with a crap memory expansion slot. The MP3 player was proven when it was created. Even though it only had a crap display, indexing only by numbers, and shuffle play, it was worlds better than a crap MD that cost 2x as much or a CD player that could only play a single cd at a time and was huge in comparison.