I stay in two kinds of hotels: More expensive ones (Hyatts, Conrads, W, etc.) while travelling on business and mid-priced ones (Holiday Inns, Courtyards, etc.) when it's my nickel. Interestingly, the cheaper the hotel, the more likely they are to have free Internet access these days. The expensive hotels nickel and dime you for everything: half a buck for a local call, $19.95 for a day's worth of Internet, even if you're only going to use a few hours' worth. One hotel, The Labourdonnais in Port Louis, Mauritius, charges the equivalent of US$42 for a day of access. This is in a country where high-speed DSL is easy to get and priced very reasonably. (Side note: The entire island is also blanketed with WiMax, and MauriTel offers wireless local loop and Internet at the same rates they charge for wired. This is actually a very cool thing, becuase the island has wicked thunderstorms in February/March and going wireless removes one vector for a strike to toast your equipment.)
I use Connexion between the east coast and Tokyo, and $30 for 14 hours of entertainment (including streaming Sirius onto the plane) is a bargain. Yes, the latency makes SSH a little less "interactive," but since it invloves a trip through a satellite, the laws of physics must be obeyed.
Some people have occasionally picked up old cesium clocks from ebay to set the PC's time. Most are from labs and after purchase, probably gather dust in the garage.
The "clocks" aren't really clocks per se; they give you a long-term stable frequency reference. The HP5071A has a clock built into it, but it's more for show than anything else, because there's no way to get the time off the unit accurately. You see a lot of 5061s on FleaBay because they're old and the Cesium tubes in them deteriorate over time. It costs about $16,000 to have a replacement put in.
GPS takes advantage of the two Cesium and two Rubidium clocks on each of the satellites, and with a not-very-expensive receiver you can recover time to within a few microseconds of UTC.
I have several systems at work that use GPS and a 5071A to recover and maintain to within 15 nanoseconds. That's the specification, anyway... Last I looked at the one in the lab, it thought it was good to within 3 nanoseconds.
(And yes, my application needs that kind of precision. We actually have to calibrate out the delay in the cables.)
Since we're splitting hairs, let's at least use the right axe to do it...
There's nothing misleading about TCP/IP and UDP/IP. The former stands for Transport Control Protocol {over,for} Internet Protocol and the latter stands for User Datagram Protocol {over,for} Internet Protocol. Neither were is based on IP; it just happens that both are pretty much universally encapsulated in IP packets. Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is similarly encapsulated. There's nothing in TCP, UDP or ICMP that prevents them from being run over, say, Ethernet or AX.25 frames. You'd have to use a different addressing scheme and you'd lose the use of a lot of software that assumes your host addressing scheme is IP, but it could still be done.
If you run a network that supports TCP, UDP and ICMP, it's generally called an "IP network." You can have a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks router that can only recognize and route IP packets, and it will send TCP, UDP and ICMP on its merry way because it all looks like IP packets with some "stuff" in it.
I have several HP 5071As, and if the clock's not set, they show no time at all.
Seriously... how do you set the time on one of them?
From the front panel. I think HP put the clock on it as a gag, because there's no highly-accurate way to set it. The 5071's primary purpose is to provide extremely accurate 10 MHz and 1 PPS references. There are other gadgets that can derive the time from GPS to within 10 ns of UTC and will steer the oscillator on the 5071 to that spec.
Microsoft/Intel was careful to guarantee them a consistent software experience across a broad selection of hardware.
It's a broad selection in brand name only. Whether it's Dell, HP, Alienware or a garage clone, it's still the same basic innards under the hood.
Linux and the BSDs run identically across a list of platforms ranging from microcontrollers to mainframes. Marcus has been around the block enough times to remember that Sun made the transition from 68K to SPARC with a brief stop in i386 land with with the old BSD-based SunOS. They did it again going from SPARC to x86 with the SVR4-based Solaris. Apple gets props for having nicely made the transition from 68K to PPC with MacOS and should probably get a couple of points for its rumored internal port of OS X to x86.
When Microsoft can release a fully-functioning version of one of its current products that runs on another platform and looks, smells and tastes like the same product on Intel, I'll agree with Marcus. Let's try hard not to remember NT on Alpha.
Perhaps none of what anyone's predicted will be Microsoft's undoing will actually be it. Maybe it will be some huge non-x86-compatible advance in harware so compelling that nobody can resist it. The race will be on to see who can have a working OS on that hardware, and I'd put my money on it being one of the Unixes.
...you are just spreading the word to anyone who knows where identity info gets fenced.
People in the identity markets, just like every other market for stolen goods, have their own channels to let their customers know when there's a new batch of data available. I'm reasonably certain that Slashdot and the Washington Post aren't among them. If the stolen information was sold, it probably hit the market and was gobbled up long before the Post heard about it. Spreading the word means the former employees SAIC couldn't reach have a better chance of not being burned by this gaffe.
You're not one of those folks who believes that people who point out obvious, gaping holes in airport security are giving terrorists a roadmap for their next attack, are you?
...this sucks in spades...
Yes, it does, and I'm sorry you're having to be put through all of the inconvenience of double-checking the safeguards on your finances. It's a big pain in the ass.
...and we really don't need MORE publicity just now.
Why? Because it will reflect poorly on SAIC's ability to safeguard employee information and lead to questions about how it protects sensitive information provided by its customers? Well, those questions should be asked. Federal contractors screw up all the time on the taxpayer's nickel and walk off having made a tidy profit. SAIC goofed, and it's going to have to live with the possible impacts to its bottom line.
As a stockholder, you should be hopping mad about this. If SAIC were a public company, I can almost guarantee Wall Street would react negatively. Perhaps the thing to so would be for you and your fellow stockholders to force the board to hold the butts of Ken Dalhberg, Duane Andrews, Tom Darcy and John Warner in a sling until they can explain why this happened and provide regular, outside-verified reports on what they're doing to make sure it won't happen again.
Encryption would have had no bearing on this case whatsoever. Some of the evidence against this guy was a copy of a conversation printed by his victim.
Encryption is effective only when both parties don't want the content divulged.
A scaled-down two-receiver version is installed in both VC-25s that fly the President and two of the four C-32s that cart the First Lady, VP, Secretaries of State and Defense and other muckety-mucks around. This one gets DirecTV when flying in the U.S. and a number of free channels on similar systems in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The U.N. is an organization full of people who've spent their lives prefecting their delivery of "please pass the sweet and sour shrimp." Put that organization in charge of the Internet and you're going to have endless meetings to come to agreement on whether bits should be represented by 1 and 0 or something else. Don't even get me started on anything more complex.
...can they also ban other legal activities such as gambling, marching in protest or interracial dating? Not sure of the answer, but my guess is they can't.
You can be prevented from doing anything legal if you agree to it contractually. If you signed a contract to live in the university's housing that says you have to abide by the their rules, that's a decision you have to live with until the end of the contract. If you don't like a rule they enacted this year, you're free to find housing elsewhere with rules you can live with.
Hot plates with open burners have banned from dorm rooms at most universities for decades, and while decidedly low-tech, they're otherwise perfectly legal.
College is a whole different ballgame. Unless you take a few semesters of independent study on a single project, nothing you get assigned to do is going to run any longer than the end of the semester. That'll help with the short attention span.
Most of the people I went to high school with that had good grades fell on their faces in college because the coursework went beyond memorize-and-regurgitate and into critical thinking. A lot of people who couldn't do M&R very well and came out of high school with only "fair" grades (i.e., myself) did very well in college and life.
Go to college, find something interesting to engross yourself in, work hard and have some fun doing it and it'll turn out fine.
That's a small factor, but it isn't what drives the rule.
The whole cellular concept relies on having a limited number of channels and re-using them to cover a wide area. Each base station is allocated a number of channels to use in fielding mobile calls. (How a channel is defined depends on which mobile service is in use, but for simplicity's sake, think of them in terms of TV channels.) Each base station is designed to have an artificially-limited coverage area, achieved through a combination of low power, low antenna height and, in some cases, tailored radiation patterns. The base station's coverage area is called a "cell." Cells overlap a bit, and because of that, adjacent cells can't use the same channels without stepping on each other's calls. A channel can be re-used as long as the two base stations using it are far enough apart that there's no risk of interference.
An airborne handset screws that whole model right into the ground. Its altitude gives it a much larger coverage area than one on the ground. Inside that larger area, there are might be many cells assigned to a channel. If one base station fields the handset's call, all of the other cells that can "see" it would be forced to abandon use of the same channel until the call ends or moves out of range. At very high altitudes, it's likely a single handset could "see" an entire metropolitan area, and the loss of capacity that would result is simply unacceptable. (If you were a carrier, would you like to have 100 of your cells lose, say, 5% of their capacity?)
So, the FCC has rules that forbid the use of mobile phones in the air, and cellular carriers contractually bind their subscribers to obey them. (Read the fine print. I have yet to see a contract that doesn't.)
Now there's wifi capability on some planes, but only through the carrier... and do you think that those carriers have figured out some way to isolate that signal that regular industry hasn't?
Why yes, they have. It's called having a device capable of radiating no more than 100 mW RMS into a low-quality omnidirectional antenna enclosed in an aluminum can moving at well over 500 miles per hour at an altitude of 39,000 feet. If you've invented something that can reliably, repeatably make an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi card communicate with a network of access points on the ground under those conditions, call me. We'll make a buttload of money together.
The FCC doesn't allow mobile phones on planes because they were licensed as a land mobile service based on a petition from the people with a buck to make: the future cellular companies. If they were thinking ahead when they petitioned the FCC, they'd have included provisions for airborne operation.
I call it "getting back to the basics." Anybody who's successfully coding good games on the 2600 has a bright future in the embedded systems world, where limitations like that are commonplace. The current crop of small microcontrollers (PICs and the like) have similar constraints, and cleverly-designed software is landing them in all sorts of places.
Don't take this personally, but that fact that people are staggered by things like this worries me. Limitations were what we had back then, and we dealt with it, in the snow, up hill, both ways.:-) The cheap and ever-expanding supply memory and disk is, I think, one of the reasons software has become as bloated as it is. We went to the moon on systems with less combined horsepower than a 1996-model Palm Pilot, and I think it would do wonders for this business if more people understood what made the machines they programmed tick at the lowest levels.
Before everyone breaks ankles jumping to conclusions...
Some web sites (like the New York Times) have others redistribute their content and customize their pages accordingly. LT's link may have used a URL that said it was for one of those partners, and CMP's server, seeing that it wasn't referred by that partner, threw the BS flag. Don't forget that there's money tied to some referrals, and the company writing the check would be mighty pissed if the numbers were inflated.
The purpose of a DNS server is to map a host name to an IP address. Ports don't figure into it because IP (not TCP/IP or UDP/IP, just plain IP) doesn't have the concept of a port.
Applications shouldn't have to be modified to tell the DNS server what port it's going to connect to, because it might not be using a protocol that has ports and, more importantly, it's not any of the DNS server's damned business.
Dell gives you a CD that will restore your system to something close to the way it came from the factory. Some others (HPaQ, for example) give you a shovelware CD that preps the machine and then turns it over to a real Windows CD for the rest.
If you read the accompanying licenses carefully, you'll probably notice that the copy of Windows you have is licensed for use only on that box. Gates didn't get rich allowing OEM copies of his products to be installed elsewhere...
Slashdot Mirror
I stay in two kinds of hotels: More expensive ones (Hyatts, Conrads, W, etc.) while travelling on business and mid-priced ones (Holiday Inns, Courtyards, etc.) when it's my nickel. Interestingly, the cheaper the hotel, the more likely they are to have free Internet access these days. The expensive hotels nickel and dime you for everything: half a buck for a local call, $19.95 for a day's worth of Internet, even if you're only going to use a few hours' worth. One hotel, The Labourdonnais in Port Louis, Mauritius, charges the equivalent of US$42 for a day of access. This is in a country where high-speed DSL is easy to get and priced very reasonably. (Side note: The entire island is also blanketed with WiMax, and MauriTel offers wireless local loop and Internet at the same rates they charge for wired. This is actually a very cool thing, becuase the island has wicked thunderstorms in February/March and going wireless removes one vector for a strike to toast your equipment.)
I use Connexion between the east coast and Tokyo, and $30 for 14 hours of entertainment (including streaming Sirius onto the plane) is a bargain. Yes, the latency makes SSH a little less "interactive," but since it invloves a trip through a satellite, the laws of physics must be obeyed.
Some people have occasionally picked up old cesium clocks from ebay to set the PC's time. Most are from labs and after purchase, probably gather dust in the garage.
The "clocks" aren't really clocks per se; they give you a long-term stable frequency reference. The HP5071A has a clock built into it, but it's more for show than anything else, because there's no way to get the time off the unit accurately. You see a lot of 5061s on FleaBay because they're old and the Cesium tubes in them deteriorate over time. It costs about $16,000 to have a replacement put in.
GPS takes advantage of the two Cesium and two Rubidium clocks on each of the satellites, and with a not-very-expensive receiver you can recover time to within a few microseconds of UTC.
I have several systems at work that use GPS and a 5071A to recover and maintain to within 15 nanoseconds. That's the specification, anyway... Last I looked at the one in the lab, it thought it was good to within 3 nanoseconds.
(And yes, my application needs that kind of precision. We actually have to calibrate out the delay in the cables.)
We at least have the option of multiple sources...
That's how it is in China. There are many, many people there who have no idea that Tienamen Square ever happened...
VM.
In other words, they'll be forced to do their jobs.
Since we're splitting hairs, let's at least use the right axe to do it...
There's nothing misleading about TCP/IP and UDP/IP. The former stands for Transport Control Protocol {over,for} Internet Protocol and the latter stands for User Datagram Protocol {over,for} Internet Protocol. Neither were is based on IP; it just happens that both are pretty much universally encapsulated in IP packets. Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is similarly encapsulated. There's nothing in TCP, UDP or ICMP that prevents them from being run over, say, Ethernet or AX.25 frames. You'd have to use a different addressing scheme and you'd lose the use of a lot of software that assumes your host addressing scheme is IP, but it could still be done.
If you run a network that supports TCP, UDP and ICMP, it's generally called an "IP network." You can have a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks router that can only recognize and route IP packets, and it will send TCP, UDP and ICMP on its merry way because it all looks like IP packets with some "stuff" in it.
Cue loud bitching and lawsuits by the incumbent phone companies in 5... 4... 3... 2...
Does it blink 12:00??
I have several HP 5071As, and if the clock's not set, they show no time at all.
Seriously... how do you set the time on one of them?
From the front panel. I think HP put the clock on it as a gag, because there's no highly-accurate way to set it. The 5071's primary purpose is to provide extremely accurate 10 MHz and 1 PPS references. There are other gadgets that can derive the time from GPS to within 10 ns of UTC and will steer the oscillator on the 5071 to that spec.
Pretty cool stuff.
Microsoft/Intel was careful to guarantee them a consistent software experience across a broad selection of hardware.
It's a broad selection in brand name only. Whether it's Dell, HP, Alienware or a garage clone, it's still the same basic innards under the hood.
Linux and the BSDs run identically across a list of platforms ranging from microcontrollers to mainframes. Marcus has been around the block enough times to remember that Sun made the transition from 68K to SPARC with a brief stop in i386 land with with the old BSD-based SunOS. They did it again going from SPARC to x86 with the SVR4-based Solaris. Apple gets props for having nicely made the transition from 68K to PPC with MacOS and should probably get a couple of points for its rumored internal port of OS X to x86.
When Microsoft can release a fully-functioning version of one of its current products that runs on another platform and looks, smells and tastes like the same product on Intel, I'll agree with Marcus. Let's try hard not to remember NT on Alpha.
Perhaps none of what anyone's predicted will be Microsoft's undoing will actually be it. Maybe it will be some huge non-x86-compatible advance in harware so compelling that nobody can resist it. The race will be on to see who can have a working OS on that hardware, and I'd put my money on it being one of the Unixes.
People in the identity markets, just like every other market for stolen goods, have their own channels to let their customers know when there's a new batch of data available. I'm reasonably certain that Slashdot and the Washington Post aren't among them. If the stolen information was sold, it probably hit the market and was gobbled up long before the Post heard about it. Spreading the word means the former employees SAIC couldn't reach have a better chance of not being burned by this gaffe.
You're not one of those folks who believes that people who point out obvious, gaping holes in airport security are giving terrorists a roadmap for their next attack, are you?
Yes, it does, and I'm sorry you're having to be put through all of the inconvenience of double-checking the safeguards on your finances. It's a big pain in the ass.
Why? Because it will reflect poorly on SAIC's ability to safeguard employee information and lead to questions about how it protects sensitive information provided by its customers? Well, those questions should be asked. Federal contractors screw up all the time on the taxpayer's nickel and walk off having made a tidy profit. SAIC goofed, and it's going to have to live with the possible impacts to its bottom line.
As a stockholder, you should be hopping mad about this. If SAIC were a public company, I can almost guarantee Wall Street would react negatively. Perhaps the thing to so would be for you and your fellow stockholders to force the board to hold the butts of Ken Dalhberg, Duane Andrews, Tom Darcy and John Warner in a sling until they can explain why this happened and provide regular, outside-verified reports on what they're doing to make sure it won't happen again.
Encryption would have had no bearing on this case whatsoever. Some of the evidence against this guy was a copy of a conversation printed by his victim.
Encryption is effective only when both parties don't want the content divulged.
Not part of Unix.
Next, please.
And GM owns a chunk of Fuji, hence the Saabaru 9-2.
It was revived.
A scaled-down two-receiver version is installed in both VC-25s that fly the President and two of the four C-32s that cart the First Lady, VP, Secretaries of State and Defense and other muckety-mucks around. This one gets DirecTV when flying in the U.S. and a number of free channels on similar systems in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The U.N. is an organization full of people who've spent their lives prefecting their delivery of "please pass the sweet and sour shrimp." Put that organization in charge of the Internet and you're going to have endless meetings to come to agreement on whether bits should be represented by 1 and 0 or something else. Don't even get me started on anything more complex.
You can be prevented from doing anything legal if you agree to it contractually. If you signed a contract to live in the university's housing that says you have to abide by the their rules, that's a decision you have to live with until the end of the contract. If you don't like a rule they enacted this year, you're free to find housing elsewhere with rules you can live with.
Hot plates with open burners have banned from dorm rooms at most universities for decades, and while decidedly low-tech, they're otherwise perfectly legal.
College is a whole different ballgame. Unless you take a few semesters of independent study on a single project, nothing you get assigned to do is going to run any longer than the end of the semester. That'll help with the short attention span.
Most of the people I went to high school with that had good grades fell on their faces in college because the coursework went beyond memorize-and-regurgitate and into critical thinking. A lot of people who couldn't do M&R very well and came out of high school with only "fair" grades (i.e., myself) did very well in college and life.
Go to college, find something interesting to engross yourself in, work hard and have some fun doing it and it'll turn out fine.
That's a small factor, but it isn't what drives the rule.
The whole cellular concept relies on having a limited number of channels and re-using them to cover a wide area. Each base station is allocated a number of channels to use in fielding mobile calls. (How a channel is defined depends on which mobile service is in use, but for simplicity's sake, think of them in terms of TV channels.) Each base station is designed to have an artificially-limited coverage area, achieved through a combination of low power, low antenna height and, in some cases, tailored radiation patterns. The base station's coverage area is called a "cell." Cells overlap a bit, and because of that, adjacent cells can't use the same channels without stepping on each other's calls. A channel can be re-used as long as the two base stations using it are far enough apart that there's no risk of interference.
An airborne handset screws that whole model right into the ground. Its altitude gives it a much larger coverage area than one on the ground. Inside that larger area, there are might be many cells assigned to a channel. If one base station fields the handset's call, all of the other cells that can "see" it would be forced to abandon use of the same channel until the call ends or moves out of range. At very high altitudes, it's likely a single handset could "see" an entire metropolitan area, and the loss of capacity that would result is simply unacceptable. (If you were a carrier, would you like to have 100 of your cells lose, say, 5% of their capacity?)
So, the FCC has rules that forbid the use of mobile phones in the air, and cellular carriers contractually bind their subscribers to obey them. (Read the fine print. I have yet to see a contract that doesn't.)
Now there's wifi capability on some planes, but only through the carrier... and do you think that those carriers have figured out some way to isolate that signal that regular industry hasn't?
Why yes, they have. It's called having a device capable of radiating no more than 100 mW RMS into a low-quality omnidirectional antenna enclosed in an aluminum can moving at well over 500 miles per hour at an altitude of 39,000 feet. If you've invented something that can reliably, repeatably make an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi card communicate with a network of access points on the ground under those conditions, call me. We'll make a buttload of money together.
The FCC doesn't allow mobile phones on planes because they were licensed as a land mobile service based on a petition from the people with a buck to make: the future cellular companies. If they were thinking ahead when they petitioned the FCC, they'd have included provisions for airborne operation.
I call it "getting back to the basics." Anybody who's successfully coding good games on the 2600 has a bright future in the embedded systems world, where limitations like that are commonplace. The current crop of small microcontrollers (PICs and the like) have similar constraints, and cleverly-designed software is landing them in all sorts of places.
:-) The cheap and ever-expanding supply memory and disk is, I think, one of the reasons software has become as bloated as it is. We went to the moon on systems with less combined horsepower than a 1996-model Palm Pilot, and I think it would do wonders for this business if more people understood what made the machines they programmed tick at the lowest levels.
Don't take this personally, but that fact that people are staggered by things like this worries me. Limitations were what we had back then, and we dealt with it, in the snow, up hill, both ways.
Before everyone breaks ankles jumping to conclusions...
Some web sites (like the New York Times) have others redistribute their content and customize their pages accordingly. LT's link may have used a URL that said it was for one of those partners, and CMP's server, seeing that it wasn't referred by that partner, threw the BS flag. Don't forget that there's money tied to some referrals, and the company writing the check would be mighty pissed if the numbers were inflated.
It's a jump... to conclusions... mat!
Remember: Today's radicals are tomorow's conservatives.
The purpose of a DNS server is to map a host name to an IP address. Ports don't figure into it because IP (not TCP/IP or UDP/IP, just plain IP) doesn't have the concept of a port.
Applications shouldn't have to be modified to tell the DNS server what port it's going to connect to, because it might not be using a protocol that has ports and, more importantly, it's not any of the DNS server's damned business.
Dell gives you a CD that will restore your system to something close to the way it came from the factory. Some others (HPaQ, for example) give you a shovelware CD that preps the machine and then turns it over to a real Windows CD for the rest.
If you read the accompanying licenses carefully, you'll probably notice that the copy of Windows you have is licensed for use only on that box. Gates didn't get rich allowing OEM copies of his products to be installed elsewhere...