Some kernel hackers will tell you that Posix is broken in that a feature can be better implemented or more functional if the feature is not Posix compliant. Others will tell you that there are some useless Posix features that are not worth implementing (ie the feature is not interesting). Both groups could be right. I don't do kernel design.
The "criminal mind" is different from others: they truely believe that they won't get caught. I think neither criminal was really worried about getting caught. They took certain precautions, but it is these precautions that allow them to feel uncatchable.
The OS rpg has been done atleast one. Search for FUDGE. There are others as well including a drop in replacement to AD&D or atleast the beginings of one. The only problem I saw is that everyone has very different ideas for game machanics.
Thanks for the link! There is some great old stuff there. Some of those old modules bring back memories. Hediously horrible memories of torture and mayhem at the hands of a sadistic DM.
I quit AD&D and vowed to never purchase another T$R product when T$R sued to shut down ftp sites like soda and other archives of excellent player contributed D&D material. However TSR of the 70s and early 80s did advance RPGS. I have been looking through some of my old TSR stuff and it is good stuff. I think it was around the time 2nd AD&D came out they switched from being TSR to T$R. The endless player's handbooks ("complete book of" etc), and useless boxed sets
was the begining of the end. At the same time other companies were producing wonderfull game worlds with great new game machanics.
To the poster at the top of the tread. WotC has done a wonderfull job with 3rd ed D&D. I have not played yet, but the game looks to be much more modern while keeping the original feel of D&D and AD&D.
The linked article is out of date. On January 18th Mafiaboy pleaded guilty to 56 of the 66 charges. The other 10 charges were withdrawn. CBC has some details.
You should have carried your back of hand calculations one step furthure: $300,000 * 365 = $109,500,000 less then 10e9. (or is it a british billion 10e12?) Your estimate is off by 100 times. As my math prof once said: "that is a lot of wiggle room."
Interesting. However I don't think that the situation in the middle east will lead to a global conflict. If we look to what has happened recently in the former Yugoslavia and parts of Africa as a model, I think that the US and the EU will try very hard to contain any conflict. This could very well involve sending troops to beef of the border guards of neighbouring states. Several countries from the EU, as well as the US, and even at times Russia (and the former USSR) have been working "towards peace" in the middle east for at least the past decade. Ofcourse this has nothing to do with humanitarian issues and "peace." Stability in the middle east allows stability in the oil prices and hence the world economy. Furthure more racial conflicts like this always have the potential to spill over into countries where there are immigrants from the countries involved. While having Sharon on the scene dosen't help, it isen't going to be the spark that starts the next global conflict.
Actually it might happen. Any time you have two different cunduction meterials, a sounding board, and an attenna you can recieve AM type radio transmissions. True story: a gentleman had a cheap folding table that would recieve a local AM station that had an antenna nearby. You had to be really quite but you could hear a garbled voice. It is speculated that the rusted joints of the table legs were enough of a semi conductor to rectify the signal. It was very weird.
I never claimed that rxvt was userfriendly or intuitive. Really this issue with rxvt has nothing to do with the "user friendliness of Unix". If you want a gui menu use xterm or the KDE, GNOME, or E equivalent. My response "read the man page" was because I do not know what the key sequence to change fonts is, but I know that it is documented.
Rxvt does not have a gui menu to save ram. The author wanted a small xterm like app that would use as little ram as possible. If you were a user that did not have the same goals as the author, you could use something other then rxvt. User friendly is really an abused idea. What your grandmother finds easy to use is probably not want I would want to use. The features and behieviour I expect in a program (and hence its level of user friendliness) are not always the featuers that others expect. This is one of the reasons I don't find WinXX user friendly: it dosen't have a good shell, or non-click mouse focus.
On my win2k box drag and drop and related mouse actions stop working after some time. Sometimes it takes 2 hours, sometimes it takes a number of weeks. I have to reboot to correct the problem. The same hardware once ran NT 4.0 sp6 and it was fine.
For the record I prefer a Unix over WinXX as: I am never sure what the OS is doing; I can't configure the GUI to behave they way I want (hot keys & sloppy focus).
HAM radio operators have been concerned about the affects of rf radiation for a long time. Look through some of the older mags and you will find a lot of articles dealing with transmitter power and how far away the antenna should be from the operator. Talk to rf engineering profs and you will get the same story. The reason HAM's weren't all dying from cancer is that they generally did not hold the antenna up to their head.
The affects of large ammounts of rf radiation have been well known since WWII and the advent of radar. The question today now is not: "Does rf radiation cause cancer?" but rather "Do cellphones produce enough radiation (enough power) to cause cancer?"
Paypal may work in other countries but there is a "processing" fee everytime the money enters or leaves the US. It gets quite expensive if the recipient and sender are not in the US. I have 1-day couriered a certified check for less.
A quote from Tom's "informants":
In some ways, the 1st generation P4 is a bit like the Pentium Pro in Socket8, which enjoyed a rather short life before
getting replaced by PII/Slot1. By the time Northwood/Brookdale is launched, Willamette/i850 will be completely phased
out.
Basically, the PPro was simply a test run, since Intel isn't stupid - they know when they're next chips are coming out way
before we do... The P4 is nothing but a place-holder (or short-term filter" as Tom calls it) before Intel actually brings something
worthwhile out..
That is not quite correct. Intel was certain that the PPro was the way ahead. In many ways it was. The PPro had a fast achitechture with a big full speed cache. Unlike the later PII, the PPro could be used in big SMP machines with atleast 1024 processors. (Sequent made such a beast.) The PPro was going to be Intel's next big chip after the pentium.
Unfortunately there were two drawbacks to the PPro: There were poor yields due to the huge on die cache (512k or 1024k). This drove prices up. More importantly 16bit code ran much slower on the PPro compared to an equally clocked Pentium. Microsoft had harsh words for Intel because of this. Microsoft was not even close to getting rid of all the 16bit code in Win95 and Win95 wasn't even out. A lot of bad press was generated and people were told not to buy PPro by the trade rags. This more then anything forced Intel back to the design room to hack together a chip that ran 16bit code better then the PPro. The press was so bad over the PPro that Intel made a lot of marketing noise to distance the PII from the PPro. While Intel was designing the PII they came out with pentiumMMX to satisfy consumers and keep Cyrix and others from eating Intel's lunch. The mess over the PPro really pushed back Intel's roadmap.
Intel made a mistake with the PPro. They had a vison of the future, (all 32bit code) but the market wasn't ready for it. I think that they have made the same mistake with the P4. Intel wants to move on, but the market is demanding backwards compatibility. It is too bad really. I think that Intel gets overly critised for keeping the i386 alive well past its prime. Intel is not blameless, but the fault mostly lies with a market demanding that they be able to run their 8 bit 8088 apps on the latest Intel chips.
The colour of the PCB is not going to affect the heat disapation in any significant way. If the colour did matter a red PCB would be better anyway. A green PCB asorbes red light and reflects green light. A red PCB reflects red light.
Celestica ram used to be on a red PCB. It was very distinctive. The reason most PCBs are green is more historical then anything. People expect PCBs to be green as in the past the most common epoxy used was green. Today most PCBs are brown with a green sealant coat.
I recently setup a MAC for a gentleman who can only read text that is about 1.5inches high. I setup his 19" monitor to run at 1024x768. I then jacked up the font size. He and I tested various modes and it was found that the higher resolution was best. The reason was that the useless windowing crap was small enough that it did not take up huge ammounts of screen space, but the important text information was still readable.
Not all was perfect though. While MacOS was very good at scalling the fonts and icons some of the applications were not. Word in particular is very bad at scaleing fonts. The zoom feature seems to be pixel based. If the document is zoomed to 400% the fonts looked awfull as the fonts were very blocky. Instead of taking a 12pt font and scaleing it to 400%, the pixels of the 12pt font are expanded 400%. The hack was simple two macro keys were programmed to switch the font between 12pt and 60pt (or 48pt can't remember).
The problem is not the high resolution monitors, but rather the software that does not scale its fonts. I am very disapointed with how most software treats fonts. The user should be able to control the size of all fonts. If software was designed properly it would not care what font size was used.
Web pages are a whole other matter. There is no need for a web page to dictate what font and font size is used. Web designers that need to do that generally make ugly, hard to read pages that don't have anything content.
As all the OSs have a different way of setting up ip6 over ip4. You probably won't find a usefull generic how-to. There was I site I found in the past that had howto's for many OSs. I can't find the exact link, but start looking at www.freenet6.net.
I local DSL ISP offered pay per use software using Novell tech. This wasn't fancy web apps but full blown software like MS Office. Last I checked none of the costomers cared. All they wanted was an Internet connection.
A serious theif will beat all these "call in" methods. The only theives it will catch are the stupid ones. As for the "reformat, it still works" forget it. Use fdisk to overwrite the MBR, format the disk and the software is effectively gone.
Proper physical security is the number one defence against theft and espionage.
It is said that the number one place laptops are stolen from is the dining room table. This may be an exageration, but the point is valid. A laptop is probably more likely to be stolen from an employee's home or car then the workplace.
Lock the laptop up in a good safe and invest in a actively monitored security system.
The only thing that a web certificate proves is that the owner had access to a (stolen) credit card.
SSL certificates can cryptographically prove identity. However as currently implemented commercial certificates do not prove identity. Just about anyone can get a commericial certificate without properly proveing their identity to the CA.
I have thought about this and have decided that I will complain to tech support whenever there is the slightest outage, or server (mail and dns) problem. Rogers tech support should be honoured: they are one of the few numbers I have botherd to program the speed dial for.
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Some kernel hackers will tell you that Posix is broken in that a feature can be better implemented or more functional if the feature is not Posix compliant. Others will tell you that there are some useless Posix features that are not worth implementing (ie the feature is not interesting). Both groups could be right. I don't do kernel design.
The "criminal mind" is different from others: they truely believe that they won't get caught. I think neither criminal was really worried about getting caught. They took certain precautions, but it is these precautions that allow them to feel uncatchable.
The OS rpg has been done atleast one. Search for FUDGE. There are others as well including a drop in replacement to AD&D or atleast the beginings of one. The only problem I saw is that everyone has very different ideas for game machanics.
Thanks for the link! There is some great old stuff there. Some of those old modules bring back memories. Hediously horrible memories of torture and mayhem at the hands of a sadistic DM.
I quit AD&D and vowed to never purchase another T$R product when T$R sued to shut down ftp sites like soda and other archives of excellent player contributed D&D material. However TSR of the 70s and early 80s did advance RPGS. I have been looking through some of my old TSR stuff and it is good stuff. I think it was around the time 2nd AD&D came out they switched from being TSR to T$R. The endless player's handbooks ("complete book of" etc), and useless boxed sets was the begining of the end. At the same time other companies were producing wonderfull game worlds with great new game machanics.
To the poster at the top of the tread. WotC has done a wonderfull job with 3rd ed D&D. I have not played yet, but the game looks to be much more modern while keeping the original feel of D&D and AD&D.
The linked article is out of date. On January 18th Mafiaboy pleaded guilty to 56 of the 66 charges. The other 10 charges were withdrawn. CBC has some details.
stupid me! note to self: always preview...
You should have carried your back of hand calculations one step furthure: $300,000 * 365 = $109,500,000 less then 10e9. (or is it a british billion 10e12?) Your estimate is off by 100 times. As my math prof once said: "that is a lot of wiggle room."
You should have carried your back of hand calculations one step furthure: $300,000 * 365 = $109,500,000
Interesting. However I don't think that the situation in the middle east will lead to a global conflict. If we look to what has happened recently in the former Yugoslavia and parts of Africa as a model, I think that the US and the EU will try very hard to contain any conflict. This could very well involve sending troops to beef of the border guards of neighbouring states. Several countries from the EU, as well as the US, and even at times Russia (and the former USSR) have been working "towards peace" in the middle east for at least the past decade. Ofcourse this has nothing to do with humanitarian issues and "peace." Stability in the middle east allows stability in the oil prices and hence the world economy. Furthure more racial conflicts like this always have the potential to spill over into countries where there are immigrants from the countries involved. While having Sharon on the scene dosen't help, it isen't going to be the spark that starts the next global conflict.
Actually it might happen. Any time you have two different cunduction meterials, a sounding board, and an attenna you can recieve AM type radio transmissions. True story: a gentleman had a cheap folding table that would recieve a local AM station that had an antenna nearby. You had to be really quite but you could hear a garbled voice. It is speculated that the rusted joints of the table legs were enough of a semi conductor to rectify the signal. It was very weird.
hi troll
I never claimed that rxvt was userfriendly or intuitive. Really this issue with rxvt has nothing to do with the "user friendliness of Unix". If you want a gui menu use xterm or the KDE, GNOME, or E equivalent. My response "read the man page" was because I do not know what the key sequence to change fonts is, but I know that it is documented.
Rxvt does not have a gui menu to save ram. The author wanted a small xterm like app that would use as little ram as possible. If you were a user that did not have the same goals as the author, you could use something other then rxvt. User friendly is really an abused idea. What your grandmother finds easy to use is probably not want I would want to use. The features and behieviour I expect in a program (and hence its level of user friendliness) are not always the featuers that others expect. This is one of the reasons I don't find WinXX user friendly: it dosen't have a good shell, or non-click mouse focus.
Read the man page. You can bind a key sequence to change the font size. You can set the 4 or 5 fonts through X resources.
On my win2k box drag and drop and related mouse actions stop working after some time. Sometimes it takes 2 hours, sometimes it takes a number of weeks. I have to reboot to correct the problem. The same hardware once ran NT 4.0 sp6 and it was fine.
For the record I prefer a Unix over WinXX as: I am never sure what the OS is doing; I can't configure the GUI to behave they way I want (hot keys & sloppy focus).
HAM radio operators have been concerned about the affects of rf radiation for a long time. Look through some of the older mags and you will find a lot of articles dealing with transmitter power and how far away the antenna should be from the operator. Talk to rf engineering profs and you will get the same story. The reason HAM's weren't all dying from cancer is that they generally did not hold the antenna up to their head.
The affects of large ammounts of rf radiation have been well known since WWII and the advent of radar. The question today now is not: "Does rf radiation cause cancer?" but rather "Do cellphones produce enough radiation (enough power) to cause cancer?"
Paypal may work in other countries but there is a "processing" fee everytime the money enters or leaves the US. It gets quite expensive if the recipient and sender are not in the US. I have 1-day couriered a certified check for less.
That is not quite correct. Intel was certain that the PPro was the way ahead. In many ways it was. The PPro had a fast achitechture with a big full speed cache. Unlike the later PII, the PPro could be used in big SMP machines with atleast 1024 processors. (Sequent made such a beast.) The PPro was going to be Intel's next big chip after the pentium.
Unfortunately there were two drawbacks to the PPro: There were poor yields due to the huge on die cache (512k or 1024k). This drove prices up. More importantly 16bit code ran much slower on the PPro compared to an equally clocked Pentium. Microsoft had harsh words for Intel because of this. Microsoft was not even close to getting rid of all the 16bit code in Win95 and Win95 wasn't even out. A lot of bad press was generated and people were told not to buy PPro by the trade rags. This more then anything forced Intel back to the design room to hack together a chip that ran 16bit code better then the PPro. The press was so bad over the PPro that Intel made a lot of marketing noise to distance the PII from the PPro. While Intel was designing the PII they came out with pentiumMMX to satisfy consumers and keep Cyrix and others from eating Intel's lunch. The mess over the PPro really pushed back Intel's roadmap.
Intel made a mistake with the PPro. They had a vison of the future, (all 32bit code) but the market wasn't ready for it. I think that they have made the same mistake with the P4. Intel wants to move on, but the market is demanding backwards compatibility. It is too bad really. I think that Intel gets overly critised for keeping the i386 alive well past its prime. Intel is not blameless, but the fault mostly lies with a market demanding that they be able to run their 8 bit 8088 apps on the latest Intel chips.
Yes! I have been out of tha industry for a while and could not remember "solder mask" for the life of me.
The colour of the PCB is not going to affect the heat disapation in any significant way. If the colour did matter a red PCB would be better anyway. A green PCB asorbes red light and reflects green light. A red PCB reflects red light.
Celestica ram used to be on a red PCB. It was very distinctive. The reason most PCBs are green is more historical then anything. People expect PCBs to be green as in the past the most common epoxy used was green. Today most PCBs are brown with a green sealant coat.
I recently setup a MAC for a gentleman who can only read text that is about 1.5inches high. I setup his 19" monitor to run at 1024x768. I then jacked up the font size. He and I tested various modes and it was found that the higher resolution was best. The reason was that the useless windowing crap was small enough that it did not take up huge ammounts of screen space, but the important text information was still readable.
Not all was perfect though. While MacOS was very good at scalling the fonts and icons some of the applications were not. Word in particular is very bad at scaleing fonts. The zoom feature seems to be pixel based. If the document is zoomed to 400% the fonts looked awfull as the fonts were very blocky. Instead of taking a 12pt font and scaleing it to 400%, the pixels of the 12pt font are expanded 400%. The hack was simple two macro keys were programmed to switch the font between 12pt and 60pt (or 48pt can't remember).
The problem is not the high resolution monitors, but rather the software that does not scale its fonts. I am very disapointed with how most software treats fonts. The user should be able to control the size of all fonts. If software was designed properly it would not care what font size was used.
Web pages are a whole other matter. There is no need for a web page to dictate what font and font size is used. Web designers that need to do that generally make ugly, hard to read pages that don't have anything content.
As all the OSs have a different way of setting up ip6 over ip4. You probably won't find a usefull generic how-to. There was I site I found in the past that had howto's for many OSs. I can't find the exact link, but start looking at www.freenet6.net.
For Linux specific try Linux: IPv6
I local DSL ISP offered pay per use software using Novell tech. This wasn't fancy web apps but full blown software like MS Office. Last I checked none of the costomers cared. All they wanted was an Internet connection.
A serious theif will beat all these "call in" methods. The only theives it will catch are the stupid ones. As for the "reformat, it still works" forget it. Use fdisk to overwrite the MBR, format the disk and the software is effectively gone.
Proper physical security is the number one defence against theft and espionage.
It is said that the number one place laptops are stolen from is the dining room table. This may be an exageration, but the point is valid. A laptop is probably more likely to be stolen from an employee's home or car then the workplace.
Lock the laptop up in a good safe and invest in a actively monitored security system.
The only thing that a web certificate proves is that the owner had access to a (stolen) credit card.
SSL certificates can cryptographically prove identity. However as currently implemented commercial certificates do not prove identity. Just about anyone can get a commericial certificate without properly proveing their identity to the CA.
I have thought about this and have decided that I will complain to tech support whenever there is the slightest outage, or server (mail and dns) problem. Rogers tech support should be honoured: they are one of the few numbers I have botherd to program the speed dial for.