I'd like to see some additional on-line banking security in these areas:
1. 100% first-class support for macs, linux, solaris, firefox, opera, etc. Any environment that is less targetted than windows+IE should be encouraged by the banks as a way to reduce fraud.
2. Start issuing SecurID tokens (or similar) to bank customers. This would take care of the simpler keyloggers and phishing attacks.
3. Pay attention to the IP addresses. Compare them to known bot-infested netblocks. Track the IP's that a particular customer uses and flag it when it's not from their home ISP or employer's http proxy.
4. Don't allow wire-transfers or on-line bill pay of large amounts to arbitrary parties via the web banking interface.
5. Look for *patterns*. Change of address followed by any kind of withdrawal or request for a card or checks. Transactions from different people's accounts sending money to the same or similar destination. Hire some game AI dude or data mining people to proactively look for fraud in real time instead of waiting for customers to report missing funds.
6. Criminally investigate fraud. Don't just push the problem back on the customer or write it off as a business expense, actually go out and prosecute the people committing the fraud. Hire the RIAA's legal staff and put them to good use.
7. Implement an undo. On-line transactions should only be allowed to/from banks and financial institutions that pledge to reverse any disputed transaction (instantly) and assist in investigating those who would have benefited from it.
I've seen some smoke-related failures...if this guy chain smokes while playing games that can gum up everything from optical drives to power supplies. Not saying for sure, just something that can lead to serial failures.
part of the system is to see how agitated people become while doing all this waiting. the idea is that someone who is doing or planning something illegal will become nervous and evasive when they finally get to talk to the agent. the more stressed they are from waiting in line, the more likely they are to betray their true intent.
not sure that's scientifically sound, but it seems like it would at least make it easier to spot the amateur or newly recruited terrorist.
I was going to suggest that since most terrorists are male, we simply request vaginaprints. If you cannot produce a valid vaginaprint you cannot get on the plane or enter the country.
Where I get tripped over ID is that when *I* am Intelligently Designing something, such as a software module, there is a process of evolution going on in my head. I start out with the basic idea, do a first try, step back and look at it, make adaptations and enhancements, evaluate it in a test environment, refine it some more, plug it into a larger module and test that out, fix some stuff I forgot to deal with, rewrite the whole thing from scratch a couple times, try out the alternatives, pick one and go with that, do some performance tuning, roll it out to QA and customers, make staged changes based on feedback, roll those out, then maybe go work on another software module with the same process.
So even if ID is true, it's still evolution, it's just moving the venue from "stuff happening on earth" to "stuff happening in supreme space alien's brain".
If you're going to be using the thing for 3 or 4 years, get the machine that you enjoy using and which meets your computing needs the best.
Don't fret about an extra $500 either way. If money is that tight maybe look at a used laptop with Ubuntu, then you'll save money not just on the initial purchase but on the cost of software too.
and the low gravity would make gas trapped in the lava be in less of a hurry to escape, so it could build up to be larger than similar features on earth.
>> It's always dangerous to extrapolate Earth features to other planets >> and expect there to be no difference.
And if there are enough differences, it is no longer the same kind of feature. It's really to hard to tell w/o further info.
I didn't say so in my previous message but I'm suspecting it's a small caldera. On earth these can be highly circular and quite deep. They get filled up with water or dirt and become deep lakes or unremarkable valleys. On Mars it should get filled up with dust, but maybe it's young enough that it's not there yet.
1. the opening would be elongated along the axis of the tube 2. it should be more cracked and irregular since there would be little surface erosion to smooth things out 3. lava tubes tend to be fairly shallow so the bottom should be visible 4. lava tubes tend to be curved and smooth inside, so you'd expect more reflection 5. the walls would be visible on two sides and at least one of them should be getting sunlight
so except for those small issues, I would agree with you.
1. Microsoft and a handful of 3rd party tools pretty much let you configure, control, lock down, patch, update, or install anything anywhere in your enterprise. You don't have to log into each machine: you just set up some policies or put stuff in netlogon.exe. ActiveDirectory, MOM, and stuff just propagates anew each time someone logs in. The interface to all this is point-and-drool as they say.
2. At this point lots of, perhaps even most, universities have a computer lab full of microsoft windows machines with visual studio (express apparently) and NO solaris or linux machines anywhere to be found. Perhaps in the past there were more solaris boxes and whatnot, but that has changed, thanks to microsoft making an effort to supply schools with "educational" software.
linux wins: * can run efficiently on cheap, out of date x86 machines * g++ and lots of developer tools pre-installed by most distros * out of the box can scale to 64 CPU's. some kernel tweaks and IBM uses it as a supercomputer OS with thousands of nodes. * wide variety of virtualization solutions, many of them completely free
windows wins: * easier to control large number of machines in a corporate environment * support techs are cheaper to employ * games, games, games
mac wins: * the higher initial price is offset by longer hardware and OS lifetime (5 year old mac's still have significant resale value)
I see, but if the concentrator can be done cheaply (compared to installing additional solar panels) as little as 2 or 3 suns amplification would be enough to bring the cost-per-watt well below grid prices. That would be enough to start with.
I'm kind of puzzled as to why few or no installed solar systems use mirrors or lenses to concentrate the sunlight. Mirrors are cheap and lightweight compared to solar panels so it should be a win compared to adding more panels. Fresnel lenses seem slightly less practical but still within the realm of possibility.
And the mirrors don't have to be exactly parabolic since they aren't focusing on a point, you just need something that spreads a few more sq ft of sunlight across the panel, that would be great.
Sun trackers would really benefit from this, since there would be no danger that the sunlight would hit the back of the mirrors and obscure the panel during early morning or late evening.
The option I was using was --cwlimit (LAME 3.93). It takes a paramater, the frequency in kilohertz above which to treat all frequencies as atonal, e.g. --cwlimit 20 pretty much tells it not do anything stupid with even the highest octave. I think the default is around 7 or 8. Experiment with the setting a bit if you like, but I wouldn't be surprised if you were hearing plain old compression.
Me, personally, what I find unsatisfying about compressed music is that the treble is the first thing to go, and even at high bit rates AAC and MP3 each seem to just make all cymbals, brushes, triangles, and synthetic tones in the high registers sound equally like white noise.
I found a tonality frequency setting in LAME that seemed to cure this problem, but neither iTunes nor ITMS seems to let you adjust or purchase based on this issue.
Perhaps not everyone is sensitive to this, but maybe there are other settings or aspects of compression that other people are sensitive to which I am not...leading one to the possible conclusion that compressed music might be made better by personalizing each rip to the hearing response of the listener rather than compromising on an average human hearing model.
Wondering out loud...seems like threads need to adopt a rollback/redo log approach too. Let the threads do their thing, but when two threads try to use the same resources, don't prevent it with a mutex, roll it back to the last point at which there was no possible conflict. If the winning thread needs to roll back because of competition for a second resource, the loser of the first resource can redo and continue.
Well, I hope the transition to the new software enables comcast to not make the same mistakes as most other digital set top boxes. Let's see if I can remember all my complaints.
- widescreen support somewhere between zero and none - menu tree overly deep and wide, with a bad bad case of feature creep - distracting ad banners in every corner of the screen - video-on-demand jerky and unresponsive to ff/rew/pause buttons - huge fonts means you can only see listings for 1 hour and 5 channels on the screen at once - huge overscan margins which is not required for LCD or plasmas anyway - horrible play-skool color choices for the buttons, lists, menus, overlays. - cheesy 3-D looking buttons that look like windows 3.1 or motif 1.0 at best - showing channel number and station ID in pop-up or overlays instead of spending $5 to display it in LED's on the front of the box - button only remotes--how about a jog/shuttle scroll wheel like VCR's used to have - remotes with 60 buttons of which you only use 8 most of the time - the 1/4 size live picture when you pull up the menus or the guide is cute, except for those rare occasions when you're trying to read the menus or the guide - the box that supports DD5.1 or component video costs way more than it should...you can get the same outputs on a $30 DVD player at wal-mart, why should it cost so much more on a STB - how about an open protocol so i can access the cable feed from myth tv directly instead of having to use an IR emitter or cable card - maybe not charge so much for PPV movies since they're $1/day to rent at Kroger - when you do the triple-play, how about not sending me two or three boxes, how about just one box with a telephone jack, an ethernet port, and component video jacks? - why do you have to have some guy come out to "install" this thing when I can connect cables together just fine myself - how about HD actually being the same bandwidth as what I can get for FREE from rabbit ears instead of compressing the living daylights out of it - set top box can't actually set on top anymore if you have a flat panel TV, how about some brackets or let it look decent mounted in a vertical position - record button should be able to start my VCR (or should have 10 years ago) like directv receivers can, not just change the channel - even if the STB was flawless and seamless to use, the actual content is crap. i swear i spend more time using the cable modem to view stuff on youtube than i do watching TV.
The main thing to affect solar energy would be a change in cloud cover. Cloud formation is dependent on lots of factors besides temperature so it would be hard to say whether global warming will help. Most likely scenario is that some areas will benefit slightly, others will suffer slightly.
sending a malicious email is not my definition of a local exploit. you don't have to be logged into a windows machine to send malicious email to a user on that windows machine.
if you're going to blame the user for opening the email, you might as well blame the user for running windows, and that's probably where we would agree.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, still there.
I'd like to see some additional on-line banking security in these areas:
1. 100% first-class support for macs, linux, solaris, firefox, opera, etc. Any environment that is less targetted than windows+IE should be encouraged by the banks as a way to reduce fraud.
2. Start issuing SecurID tokens (or similar) to bank customers. This would take care of the simpler keyloggers and phishing attacks.
3. Pay attention to the IP addresses. Compare them to known bot-infested netblocks. Track the IP's that a particular customer uses and flag it when it's not from their home ISP or employer's http proxy.
4. Don't allow wire-transfers or on-line bill pay of large amounts to arbitrary parties via the web banking interface.
5. Look for *patterns*. Change of address followed by any kind of withdrawal or request for a card or checks. Transactions from different people's accounts sending money to the same or similar destination. Hire some game AI dude or data mining people to proactively look for fraud in real time instead of waiting for customers to report missing funds.
6. Criminally investigate fraud. Don't just push the problem back on the customer or write it off as a business expense, actually go out and prosecute the people committing the fraud. Hire the RIAA's legal staff and put them to good use.
7. Implement an undo. On-line transactions should only be allowed to/from banks and financial institutions that pledge to reverse any disputed transaction (instantly) and assist in investigating those who would have benefited from it.
Just my thoughts.
I've seen some smoke-related failures...if this guy chain smokes while playing games that can gum up everything from optical drives to power supplies. Not saying for sure, just something that can lead to serial failures.
part of the system is to see how agitated people become while doing all this waiting. the idea is that someone who is doing or planning something illegal will become nervous and evasive when they finally get to talk to the agent. the more stressed they are from waiting in line, the more likely they are to betray their true intent.
not sure that's scientifically sound, but it seems like it would at least make it easier to spot the amateur or newly recruited terrorist.
I was going to suggest that since most terrorists are male, we simply request vaginaprints. If you cannot produce a valid vaginaprint you cannot get on the plane or enter the country.
Problem solved!
Whalers on the moon?
Where I get tripped over ID is that when *I* am Intelligently Designing something, such as a software module, there is a process of evolution going on in my head. I start out with the basic idea, do a first try, step back and look at it, make adaptations and enhancements, evaluate it in a test environment, refine it some more, plug it into a larger module and test that out, fix some stuff I forgot to deal with, rewrite the whole thing from scratch a couple times, try out the alternatives, pick one and go with that, do some performance tuning, roll it out to QA and customers, make staged changes based on feedback, roll those out, then maybe go work on another software module with the same process.
So even if ID is true, it's still evolution, it's just moving the venue from "stuff happening on earth" to "stuff happening in supreme space alien's brain".
If you're going to be using the thing for 3 or 4 years, get the machine that you enjoy using and which meets your computing needs the best.
Don't fret about an extra $500 either way. If money is that tight maybe look at a used laptop with Ubuntu, then you'll save money not just on the initial purchase but on the cost of software too.
and the low gravity would make gas trapped in the lava be in less of a hurry to escape, so it could build up to be larger than similar features on earth.
>> It's always dangerous to extrapolate Earth features to other planets
>> and expect there to be no difference.
And if there are enough differences, it is no longer the same kind of feature. It's really to hard to tell w/o further info.
I didn't say so in my previous message but I'm suspecting it's a small caldera. On earth these can be highly circular and quite deep. They get filled up with water or dirt and become deep lakes or unremarkable valleys. On Mars it should get filled up with dust, but maybe it's young enough that it's not there yet.
maybe, but i'd expect in that case...
1. the opening would be elongated along the axis of the tube
2. it should be more cracked and irregular since there would be little surface erosion to smooth things out
3. lava tubes tend to be fairly shallow so the bottom should be visible
4. lava tubes tend to be curved and smooth inside, so you'd expect more reflection
5. the walls would be visible on two sides and at least one of them should be getting sunlight
so except for those small issues, I would agree with you.
Sadly,
1. Microsoft and a handful of 3rd party tools pretty much let you configure, control, lock down, patch, update, or install anything anywhere in your enterprise. You don't have to log into each machine: you just set up some policies or put stuff in netlogon.exe. ActiveDirectory, MOM, and stuff just propagates anew each time someone logs in. The interface to all this is point-and-drool as they say.
2. At this point lots of, perhaps even most, universities have a computer lab full of microsoft windows machines with visual studio (express apparently) and NO solaris or linux machines anywhere to be found. Perhaps in the past there were more solaris boxes and whatnot, but that has changed, thanks to microsoft making an effort to supply schools with "educational" software.
If you don't mind some additions:
linux wins:
* can run efficiently on cheap, out of date x86 machines
* g++ and lots of developer tools pre-installed by most distros
* out of the box can scale to 64 CPU's. some kernel tweaks and IBM uses it as a supercomputer OS with thousands of nodes.
* wide variety of virtualization solutions, many of them completely free
windows wins:
* easier to control large number of machines in a corporate environment
* support techs are cheaper to employ
* games, games, games
mac wins:
* the higher initial price is offset by longer hardware and OS lifetime (5 year old mac's still have significant resale value)
I see, but if the concentrator can be done cheaply (compared to installing additional solar panels) as little as 2 or 3 suns amplification would be enough to bring the cost-per-watt well below grid prices. That would be enough to start with.
I'm kind of puzzled as to why few or no installed solar systems use mirrors or lenses to concentrate the sunlight. Mirrors are cheap and lightweight compared to solar panels so it should be a win compared to adding more panels. Fresnel lenses seem slightly less practical but still within the realm of possibility.
And the mirrors don't have to be exactly parabolic since they aren't focusing on a point, you just need something that spreads a few more sq ft of sunlight across the panel, that would be great.
Sun trackers would really benefit from this, since there would be no danger that the sunlight would hit the back of the mirrors and obscure the panel during early morning or late evening.
Anyone know why this isn't commonplace?
I completely stopped shopping at circuit city back when they tried to foist DIVX on the world.
i'd still like to hear the initial hit accurately.
The option I was using was --cwlimit (LAME 3.93). It takes a paramater, the frequency in kilohertz above which to treat all frequencies as atonal, e.g. --cwlimit 20 pretty much tells it not do anything stupid with even the highest octave. I think the default is around 7 or 8. Experiment with the setting a bit if you like, but I wouldn't be surprised if you were hearing plain old compression.
Me, personally, what I find unsatisfying about compressed music is that the treble is the first thing to go, and even at high bit rates AAC and MP3 each seem to just make all cymbals, brushes, triangles, and synthetic tones in the high registers sound equally like white noise.
I found a tonality frequency setting in LAME that seemed to cure this problem, but neither iTunes nor ITMS seems to let you adjust or purchase based on this issue.
Perhaps not everyone is sensitive to this, but maybe there are other settings or aspects of compression that other people are sensitive to which I am not...leading one to the possible conclusion that compressed music might be made better by personalizing each rip to the hearing response of the listener rather than compromising on an average human hearing model.
>
Wondering out loud...seems like threads need to adopt a rollback/redo log approach too. Let the threads do their thing, but when two threads try to use the same resources, don't prevent it with a mutex, roll it back to the last point at which there was no possible conflict. If the winning thread needs to roll back because of competition for a second resource, the loser of the first resource can redo and continue.
Well, I hope the transition to the new software enables comcast to not make the same mistakes as most other digital set top boxes. Let's see if I can remember all my complaints.
- widescreen support somewhere between zero and none
- menu tree overly deep and wide, with a bad bad case of feature creep
- distracting ad banners in every corner of the screen
- video-on-demand jerky and unresponsive to ff/rew/pause buttons
- huge fonts means you can only see listings for 1 hour and 5 channels on the screen at once
- huge overscan margins which is not required for LCD or plasmas anyway
- horrible play-skool color choices for the buttons, lists, menus, overlays.
- cheesy 3-D looking buttons that look like windows 3.1 or motif 1.0 at best
- showing channel number and station ID in pop-up or overlays instead of spending $5 to display it in LED's on the front of the box
- button only remotes--how about a jog/shuttle scroll wheel like VCR's used to have
- remotes with 60 buttons of which you only use 8 most of the time
- the 1/4 size live picture when you pull up the menus or the guide is cute, except for those rare occasions when you're trying to read the menus or the guide
- the box that supports DD5.1 or component video costs way more than it should...you can get the same outputs on a $30 DVD player at wal-mart, why should it cost so much more on a STB
- how about an open protocol so i can access the cable feed from myth tv directly instead of having to use an IR emitter or cable card
- maybe not charge so much for PPV movies since they're $1/day to rent at Kroger
- when you do the triple-play, how about not sending me two or three boxes, how about just one box with a telephone jack, an ethernet port, and component video jacks?
- why do you have to have some guy come out to "install" this thing when I can connect cables together just fine myself
- how about HD actually being the same bandwidth as what I can get for FREE from rabbit ears instead of compressing the living daylights out of it
- set top box can't actually set on top anymore if you have a flat panel TV, how about some brackets or let it look decent mounted in a vertical position
- record button should be able to start my VCR (or should have 10 years ago) like directv receivers can, not just change the channel
- even if the STB was flawless and seamless to use, the actual content is crap. i swear i spend more time using the cable modem to view stuff on youtube than i do watching TV.
The main thing to affect solar energy would be a change in cloud cover. Cloud formation is dependent on lots of factors besides temperature so it would be hard to say whether global warming will help. Most likely scenario is that some areas will benefit slightly, others will suffer slightly.
Neither, it is my honest opinion that microsoft should clean up its own mess.
Since most of this malware attacks windows machines, isn't google helping microsoft more than it's helping linux or apple?
sending a malicious email is not my definition of a local exploit. you don't have to be logged into a windows machine to send malicious email to a user on that windows machine.
if you're going to blame the user for opening the email, you might as well blame the user for running windows, and that's probably where we would agree.