luminex, we can make our clothes blink on and off just like all the routers in the server room;-).
My girlfriend figured that I'd pay more attention to her breasts if she
did that to her bra. It seems to have worked. Now I can get cuddles and network status all in one stroke.
unemployed and no skillz, I basically can say I am worry free about losing DATA over money
Well if that's the case, then you're unlikely to:
(1) want the services of the company
(2) Be able to afford the services of the company if you wanted it
(3) Need the services of their grief counsellor if you found your hard disk wiped clean in the morning.
I COULD hire a HS intern for minimum wage and buy a cheap 2nd handed CDR drive and make him burn files all day.
... and what good would that do you after you've lost your billing data?
I'm not saying that backups aren't a (really) good idea, but between murphy's law, malicious intent and just plain bad luck, people sometimes lose access to critical and non-recoverable data.
Depending on various issues, that data could be worth anywhere from hundreds of hours to millions of dollars for the owner.
How about this scenario:
A hacker breaks into your system, rewrites the year's worth of backups in your tape library and then stomps all over the data on your RAID array. (yes, it was an inside job!)
I have seen a few shows on discovery channel about avalanches and using transmitters to find people. What is the difference between those devices and this one done by Penn State?
For avalanche rescue, the transmitters are usually being worn by the people who buried. If you're hunting for someone trapped in an avalanche, there's not much need for tranmitting microphones in the hands of the rescuers. At the most, you'd want a microphone on the end of a long stick that you'd poke into the snowpile while listening for an "ouch".
It seems like you never bothered to read the article.. putting it into a baseball was just to test the resilience of the unit--- Hit a home run, then check to see if the microphone is still transmitting when it lands. The reason why they didn't play golf with it may simply be that (including the transmitter and battery) it was simply too big to fit.
"Far be it for me to criticize, sir, but that golf ball aooears to be almost the size of a baseball...
they put one of the mics in a baseball and hit it with a bat to test shock resiliency.
Being in a baseball (well, spherical) case does have some possible uses -- depending on where you wanted it to go. A round, bouncy, shape could allow it to bounce closer to the bottom of a hole. An uneven non-bouncy shape would likely stay near the top. You could use whichever shape was most likely to get themake it microphone where you wanted it.
Odd that Microsoft is simultaneously trying to stop spam sent to Hotmail users, and to make sure that it can send unsolicited commercial email without penalties.
I had to deal with a company that gave up trying to block spammers from hacking into their (windows) servers for spam-routers. All I could do was watch as, over a period of months, just about everybody seemed to block emails from their IP address. Hotmail was one of the few exceptions -- certainly it was the only name I recognized.
I never could figure out why HotMail never banned them.
Back in the mid - late '80s (LOOOONNGGG before commercialization took it's toll on the net), I ran a local (non-backbone) USENET hub. I used to love browsing the raw batch transmission files. All sorts of newsgroups that I'd never, otherwise, get around to reading.
At that time the signal/noise ratio for usenet was high enough that, whatever you read, it was likely to be worth reading.
Why do people keep buying this stuff when they're just going to complain about it?
I'm not buying it.
I do, however, feel sorry for the people who buy it and then find out that it wouldn't run after they upgraded their hard disk and did a bit-copy of their C: and D: partitions to prevent problems -- or after having a system failure that required a full restore.
They're making money with -- or without DRM. All DRM does is kill consumer freedom.
Re:is this really a privacy concern?
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 1
... now if Victoria's Secret leaves thier RFID transmitting and someone goes into Spencer Gifts or the local game store and thier RFID/theft gates are only picking up a transmission as sign of theft,
The point of RFID tags is being able to identify them individually -- This would include use as an anti-theft device. The last thing you'd want to do is mark someone as a thief because (s)he walked back in to the store with something just purchased 1/2 hour ago. If you can identify something purchased 1/2 hour ago, you'll be able to recognize something that was never in your inventory in the first place (if only because you have no data on it).
On the other hand, I can definitely see the cops coming into a store and asking for their RFID and purchase data from last week. With 'patriot'-act II changes, it could get nasty. Imagine getting hassled by police because you've got a "Nader for President" button in your pocket. You ->Green ->Environmentalists ->earth-first ->terrorist ->arrest-the-bastard!
(side rant:
The Bush government seem to be studiously ignoring the fact that the second-worst terrorist attack in the US was comitted by a blond-haired blue-eyed ex-marine.)
This reminds me of the Dirk Gently Navigational techniques.
Follow someone who looks like he knows where he's going.. You may not end up where you want to be, but chances are you'll find your way somewhere interesting.
Me and my friend actually did that, arriving in Vancouver at 4:00AM. We followed a few random people to strange places (We stopped following the armed car when we figured that they might be getting a bit nervous). Befere long, we ended up in front of a Dennys. We stopped for breakfast/supper and then called Peter for directions to his place.
Tried it a few times since then -- as long as you've got a little time to spare, you can find some very interesting things about the place you're in.
Re:is this really a privacy concern?
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Imagine the pain the ass a mall full of RFID tags would be
Wouldn't be a pain in the ass at all -- unless you're worried about your privacy.
Imagine something vaguely along the lines of what's done for ethernet -- .
How about a 64bit message from each tag. The first 32 bits would identify the manufacturer and the last 32 bits would give you the model number and serial number.
At that point you have a mall full of walking marketing information.
When you walked into a store they could figure out what you'd bought, where you bought it, whether you only buy stuff on sale -- and possibly even guess who your girl/boy-friend was (by who bought your underwear).
Imagine being blackmailed because an intrepid data miner figured out that your socks were a birthday present from your wife Cheryl, but your underwear was a birthday present from your secretary Vivienne.
You're a small business owner who gets most of his income during the tax season (most being like 80-90%). It's the end of March and you're about to send out the $2million of billings that will keep you and your employees paid over the rest of the year.
All of a sudden there's a power outage -- Nothing serious, but when the power comes back.... your superblock is trashed. You ask your (part time) sysadmin how old the latest backup is and he reminds you that he's been bugging you for a new tape drive for the last two months (right! you were waiting for the billings to come back to pay for the new drive!).
Sitting on your desk is a $200 hard drive with $2M worth of billings -- all inaccessable. The result of a year's worth of hard work trashed.
Yeah, but what was the MPG of the Excursion/Insight system?
It depends on whether you're measuring the milage in subsystem-miles/gallon or person-miles/gallon.
In the US, easily 75% of all vehicles are Single-occupant units, so vehicle-miles/gallon are pretty much the same as person-miles/gallon. In the system being mentioned above, though, it sounds like there were at least 3 people travelling in the system. If taken in that context, the person-miles/gallon wouldn't be that bad (not wonderful, but not as bad as an SUV by itself).
As far as I'm concerned, spammers hijacking servers / connections to deliver their spam should be open to criminal hacking charges. Is there any reason to not support criminal investigation of these activities?
this is not actually included in the browser package, so it doesn't add to mozilla's bloat. Instead, about:kitchensink directs the user to the xml document on mozilla's website.
urgh:
This is rather silly: the whole document is a full 19K (view page info).
Not exactly the smallest piece of 'code', but 19K in a 12meg(compressed) install (50 meg in my mozilla install directory) doesn't sound like that much bloat to me.
(of course, this is the sort of attitude that leads to bloat in the first place).
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Content-Location: http://www.dpicorp.com/Default.htm Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 05:49:36 GMT .....
Funny thing was: Last night I was talking to my rommate's GF about being paranoid on the net, and I told her that one thing I would not trust my credit card info was anybody running a MS based os.
(There are really 2 reasons:
1) Window has it's well known horrible security
2) almost a corrolary of 1: any company that trusts MS for a high security system like credit card processing either has problems with their IT department, or their IT department has problems with the management.)
Sometime, someone running around threatening unfounded lawsuits if people don't do what they want should get sued for extortion -- because that's really what this is. People are being shaken down daily for what, in any other context, would be
called 'protection money'.
The obvious problem with this, of course, is that if such a lawsuit won, it couldput a dent in the activities of the lawyer cabal.... and lots of
commercial lawyers wouldn't like the idea. (something of a catch-22 problem).
and wouldn't I rather have those developers working to add things like PowerPoint-style page transitions or 3D special effects to web pages? . . . ..I just don't get it.
Three words "Embrace and Extend".
When you own 95% of the browser market, you ARE the standard. Just like word 5-> word 2000, it's far easier to keep control of the market when the target that your competitors are trying to stay compatible with is rapidly moving.
If there's a DOJ-2 lawsuit, I honestly think that the best thing that could be done in terms of limiting the damage that MS can do post-Netscape would have been to force them to keep it compatible with open standards.
A friend of mine related a story from one of his business associates.
They were running a lottery in Eastern Europe. It was based on a computer lottery system, and a good deal of work was done to secure the system... Work was done eneirely off of the internet, and when it came time to run it, the programmer and the program diak were escorted by seriously armed guards (sub-machine guns and all). Once the lottery was run, the programmer and disk were returned to their 'safe' place.
After a couple of rather 'coincidental' wins, some of the winners quieetly disappeared -- along with the programmer.
When you can prove to me that a system is immune from willful mis-programming, then I'll accept a voting system without a paper trail.
Until then.....
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend figured that I'd pay more attention to her breasts if she did that to her bra. It seems to have worked. Now I can get cuddles and network status all in one stroke.
Well if that's the case, then you're unlikely to:
(1) want the services of the company
(2) Be able to afford the services of the company if you wanted it
(3) Need the services of their grief counsellor if you found your hard disk wiped clean in the morning.
I'm not saying that backups aren't a (really) good idea, but between murphy's law, malicious intent and just plain bad luck, people sometimes lose access to critical and non-recoverable data.
Depending on various issues, that data could be worth anywhere from hundreds of hours to millions of dollars for the owner.
How about this scenario:
A hacker breaks into your system, rewrites the year's worth of backups in your tape library and then stomps all over the data on your RAID array. (yes, it was an inside job!)
Or what I'd do with 1Meg of uselessM/b> RAM... (per installed product?)
For avalanche rescue, the transmitters are usually being worn by the people who buried. If you're hunting for someone trapped in an avalanche, there's not much need for tranmitting microphones in the hands of the rescuers. At the most, you'd want a microphone on the end of a long stick that you'd poke into the snowpile while listening for an "ouch".
"Far be it for me to criticize, sir, but that golf ball aooears to be almost the size of a baseball...
Being in a baseball (well, spherical) case does have some possible uses -- depending on where you wanted it to go. A round, bouncy, shape could allow it to bounce closer to the bottom of a hole. An uneven non-bouncy shape would likely stay near the top. You could use whichever shape was most likely to get themake it microphone where you wanted it.
I had to deal with a company that gave up trying to block spammers from hacking into their (windows) servers for spam-routers. All I could do was watch as, over a period of months, just about everybody seemed to block emails from their IP address. Hotmail was one of the few exceptions -- certainly it was the only name I recognized.
I never could figure out why HotMail never banned them.
At that time the signal/noise ratio for usenet was high enough that, whatever you read, it was likely to be worth reading.
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup.
Just how do you manage to restore data that never gets backed up?
I'm not buying it.
I do, however, feel sorry for the people who buy it and then find out that it wouldn't run after they upgraded their hard disk and did a bit-copy of their C: and D: partitions to prevent problems -- or after having a system failure that required a full restore.
They're making money with -- or without DRM. All DRM does is kill consumer freedom.
The point of RFID tags is being able to identify them individually -- This would include use as an anti-theft device. The last thing you'd want to do is mark someone as a thief because (s)he walked back in to the store with something just purchased 1/2 hour ago. If you can identify something purchased 1/2 hour ago, you'll be able to recognize something that was never in your inventory in the first place (if only because you have no data on it).
On the other hand, I can definitely see the cops coming into a store and asking for their RFID and purchase data from last week. With 'patriot'-act II changes, it could get nasty. Imagine getting hassled by police because you've got a "Nader for President" button in your pocket. You ->Green ->Environmentalists ->earth-first ->terrorist ->arrest-the-bastard!
(side rant: The Bush government seem to be studiously ignoring the fact that the second-worst terrorist attack in the US was comitted by a blond-haired blue-eyed ex-marine.)
Follow someone who looks like he knows where he's going.. You may not end up where you want to be, but chances are you'll find your way somewhere interesting.
Me and my friend actually did that, arriving in Vancouver at 4:00AM. We followed a few random people to strange places (We stopped following the armed car when we figured that they might be getting a bit nervous). Befere long, we ended up in front of a Dennys. We stopped for breakfast/supper and then called Peter for directions to his place.
Tried it a few times since then -- as long as you've got a little time to spare, you can find some very interesting things about the place you're in.
We'll have cyber-ants eating our web cookies.
Wouldn't be a pain in the ass at all -- unless you're worried about your privacy.
Imagine something vaguely along the lines of what's done for ethernet -- .
How about a 64bit message from each tag. The first 32 bits would identify the manufacturer and the last 32 bits would give you the model number and serial number.
At that point you have a mall full of walking marketing information. When you walked into a store they could figure out what you'd bought, where you bought it, whether you only buy stuff on sale -- and possibly even guess who your girl/boy-friend was (by who bought your underwear).
Imagine being blackmailed because an intrepid data miner figured out that your socks were a birthday present from your wife Cheryl, but your underwear was a birthday present from your secretary Vivienne.
All of a sudden there's a power outage -- Nothing serious, but when the power comes back.... your superblock is trashed. You ask your (part time) sysadmin how old the latest backup is and he reminds you that he's been bugging you for a new tape drive for the last two months (right! you were waiting for the billings to come back to pay for the new drive!).
Sitting on your desk is a $200 hard drive with $2M worth of billings -- all inaccessable. The result of a year's worth of hard work trashed.
How do you react?
It depends on whether you're measuring the milage in subsystem-miles/gallon or person-miles/gallon.
In the US, easily 75% of all vehicles are Single-occupant units, so vehicle-miles/gallon are pretty much the same as person-miles/gallon. In the system being mentioned above, though, it sounds like there were at least 3 people travelling in the system. If taken in that context, the person-miles/gallon wouldn't be that bad (not wonderful, but not as bad as an SUV by itself).
As far as I'm concerned, spammers hijacking servers / connections to deliver their spam should be open to criminal hacking charges. Is there any reason to not support criminal investigation of these activities?
urgh:
This is rather silly: the whole document is a full 19K (view page info). Not exactly the smallest piece of 'code', but 19K in a 12meg(compressed) install (50 meg in my mozilla install directory) doesn't sound like that much bloat to me.
(of course, this is the sort of attitude that leads to bloat in the first place).
(There are really 2 reasons:
1) Window has it's well known horrible security
2) almost a corrolary of 1: any company that trusts MS for a high security system like credit card processing either has problems with their IT department, or their IT department has problems with the management.)
The obvious problem with this, of course, is that if such a lawsuit won, it couldput a dent in the activities of the lawyer cabal.... and lots of commercial lawyers wouldn't like the idea. (something of a catch-22 problem).
Three words "Embrace and Extend".
When you own 95% of the browser market, you ARE the standard. Just like word 5-> word 2000, it's far easier to keep control of the market when the target that your competitors are trying to stay compatible with is rapidly moving.
If there's a DOJ-2 lawsuit, I honestly think that the best thing that could be done in terms of limiting the damage that MS can do post-Netscape would have been to force them to keep it compatible with open standards.
Nah... As the person who wrote this, I was intending it to be funny. I consider it a complete failure that it managed to get rated +3 interesting.
Is there any limit to the recursion on this?
They were running a lottery in Eastern Europe. It was based on a computer lottery system, and a good deal of work was done to secure the system... Work was done eneirely off of the internet, and when it came time to run it, the programmer and the program diak were escorted by seriously armed guards (sub-machine guns and all). Once the lottery was run, the programmer and disk were returned to their 'safe' place.
After a couple of rather 'coincidental' wins, some of the winners quieetly disappeared -- along with the programmer.
When you can prove to me that a system is immune from willful mis-programming, then I'll accept a voting system without a paper trail.
Until then.....