It's interesting that now the EU wants to push problems with more and more counterfeiting money appearing on the market to graphics software makers...
How do they think, that this will improve the situation? Look at what TODAY's Gimp, Photoshop, and others can do... All I would need to do is stick with a current version and not upgrade, if I really wanted to counterfeit money on my own. And if you would integrate this into the printers, then I'll just print the banknote in two or three passes (always just print another part of the banknote so that the printer will never get to see the whole thing in one go).
Why not integrate this into the FUTURE banknotes (they already have RFIDs in there, don't they? All it would need to take would be to issue unique codes to EACH banknote so that they could verify the identity of the banknote there)
Re:Answer from someone in the business
on
RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 1
I would guess that boosting readers is possible, and it's somewhat clear that the card can not know how far it is off the reader...
But - wouldn't it be technically possible to limit the output power? (maybe in a way that the transmitter would either block higher power; or maybe just fry when trying -- I'd rather find my card destroyed than someone accessing it).
Another (simple) way would also be to deactivate the sender unless a specific area of the card was pressed at the time (very much like the battery testers on some AA batteries only work while you're closing the circuit with your fingertips)...
(Of course - now it's a bit late to enter these things into the production...;-)
Where is the security measure? (was: Re:How long?)
on
RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's nice to say "you have to be within one inch of the reader for the card to be read", but WHERE is this limit built in?
a) If it's the card itself (a "hacked" RFID that has a very weak response signal), we're on the "safe" side.
b) If it's in the reader (i.e. the reader sends out a weak signal, so that only cards within a few centimeters are capable to receiving to the signal), then we're in trouble.
Given - option B gives stores the "peace of mind", that they'll always read the "correct" card (i.e. the stores won't get in trouble for accidentally charging YOUR purchases to the guy next in line).
BUT - option B means, that crooks can use stronger readers that can scan your card from a few meters away (all that while the user thinks that even crooks need to make it to within an inch of their cards).
Before I'd go for such a card, I would most definetely like THAT question answered...
It's kind of interesting that the NYT would engage in what I would consider sensationalist press. I remember that in the late 1990s a German TV report came out with a sensationalist article about the fact that there was a "secret document" on the Internet which would describe how to build bombs - and that this would be totally scandalous.
This "*secret* document" was the FAQ rec.pyrotechnics...
After reading the article, I feel there is a slight bias in favour of the libraries when looking at the questions. Of course a library has a master index of books of one author. Or - to find out about some very specific question about an event you immediately know what kind of journals to look in.
The only question really geared for search engines was the Thatcher quote (as that would be a full text search).
Would this be the time to create a true categorisation of questions to be used in comparisons? (Note - not the ACTUAL questions, so that search engines could optimise for them, but only specify the general direction of questions).
I admit, it would be pretty hard to do, but I guess it could be worth the effort...
Well - if BGP gets seriously hit by this, this might wreak *quite* massive havoc on the net...
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is one of the core routing protocols - one of those protocols used to make redundant routing (and hence error tolerance) work... The question is, whether any similar protocols (e.g. OSPF) are also vulnerable...
The advent of bayesian spamming brought spams that included whole paragraphs of random words - just so that your list would get more and more bloated...
How long do you think it will take spammers to add dozens of valid - but in the context of the spam nonsensical - URLs just to fill up the black-list and make it useless?
Blocking URLs is an "ACTIVE" measure - and one that opens very bad possibilities for abuse. While the While-List would protect against this it will protect the BIG players on the market - it can still wreak havoc on small/medium enterprises - e.g. a competitor of a (pretty much) 'niche' firm could get a spam out advertising the COMPETITOR in order to get HIM blocked...
Or - the other way around - a company gets itself a whitelisting (via a "fake" joe-job on itself) and then continues spamming...
Please stick to PASSIVE measures! They can't be abused...
> They rely on content filters and their users determining if an email is legit or not.
And - how would a content filter find out whether the content of the spam would actually try and sell the product listed in the spam, or whether it's advertising a product listed on the target server in the hopes that the target server gets blocked?
You *can't* read the true motives of a spam out of its content...
But in this case we're back to square one - we're already fighting KNOWN spammers like Ralsky...
There's nothing new in that. But do you seriously think, AOL will pay dozens of employees to find out just WHETHER a spam is "legit" (in the sense that it's really advertising the target site) or "fake" (in the sense that the real goal is to get the target site blocked)? This will become some seriously tough piece of work!
And it's kind of doubtful, whether it will help or not.
Also - surfing TO a website just to find out whether it's a spam site or not is nowadays also giving away WHO is doing the surfing. By now I get more and more spams that have my email address encoded in the host names of the target site, e.g. the first part of the host name http://sx1piznvxr0svy.froidnet.com/ sx1piznvxr0sv y is beh@icemark.ch (a replaced with z, b with y,..., y with b, z with a, 0 with @, and 1 with '.' -- and the whole thing in reverse).
So by now we are in a situation, where not just 'unsubscribe' lists are a way for a spammer to check the validity of our email addresses - no, even the host name we use to 'look at their "great" sites' give our identities away.
It'd be really great if some people would finally clue in that the more successful spammers are actually pretty smart as well! (unfortunately for us though)
Right now I think the best policy is still the passive filtering of incoming spams.
- Filtering destination sites will open doors to abuse in terms of using fake spam to block unwanted sites...
- automatic downloading of spamvertised sites will confirm which addresses are "good".
The latter idea MIGHT still be workable, since the spammer will also get to know WHO has spam-scanners installed (provided the automatic download of the page actually has the name of the spam-filter in the User-Agent header field of the get request). That way the spammer would also be able to drop email addresses blocking his sites. On the other hand, this has one very big issue with it - if the spammer filters out these addresses for his sales, he could at the same time COLLECT these addresses for DDoS uses...
No - PASSIVE measures are the only GOOD solution we have. Spam-Filters in addition to tar-pits slowing the the spam delivery...
Everything else will - as sad as it sounds - open way to many doors to abuse!
I don't know, whether this is such a brilliant idea - if this gets widely adopted it can't be long before some idiot will get the idea of paying for a spam to "advertise" one of his competitors just to get HIS site blocked...
I see loads of abuse potential here... While AOL might be smart enough not to block sites like microsoft.com or ebay.com if they showed up in a spam, it could be a knock-out blow to relatively small and medium (and hence little known) companies on the web.
The only "problem" I've had with Knoppix was, that it didn't figure out, what kind of display resolution my Thinkpad A30P could do (1600x1200)... BUT - just the fact, that Knoppix 3.0 was able to boot off a notebook and recognize most of the hardware - that was something I found pretty impressive. Especially bearing in mind the kind of setup problems a lot of people HAVE with notebooks and their special hardware.
Also, I recently showed some people at my last job Knoppix 3.2 - and even there it booted off without a hitch on the Dell Latitude notebooks they've had in their offices...
The download mirrors still have a packages-dvd.txt file listing all the packages of the DVD version. But is this version available for download somewhere (with DVD burners becoming more and more common, I would assume, that this image should appear somewhere as well...;-)
Alas - the packages-dvd.txt is pretty old - does that mean, the DVD doesn't get updated any more? (Again - I think it would be a shame - it would be really great to have a really filled up live system that could be used to REALLY show off linux some more...;-)
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool
on
Sun and Eclipse Squabble
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's easy for multiple IDEs to cause problems...
Some form of unification wouldn't be all that bad - but unification should not be misread as "only one IDE".
As much as Sun created a "the same bytecode runs on all platforms" - and the much the same, that XML data is portable between platforms - exactly the same way we would need some unification in the "project properties" files. If you really WANT competition to happen, what we need is a way, that the same project can be opened with a number of IDEs, but before that can happen, we need a good way of doing this. Otherwise we will end up in a situation, where either whole teams need to decide which tool to use (so that the project metadata can be used by all) or there will be a semipermanent importing of projects/project data whenever the structure of the project got changed (e.g. during refactoring) by someone using a DIFFERENT IDE.
(Actually - I would even wish for SOME unification WITHIN eclipse; e.g. with all those DB plugins, wouldn't it be nice, if there was a SINGLE DB-Connection-Manager plugin, which would you would configure for all your DB connections, and other DB plugins would just query that single plugin for the known DB connections and prompt the user which connection to use? -- To ME this sounds a lot better, than to enter the DB configuration [JARs+JDBC URLS+Username+possibly passwords] into EACH DB Plugin (Azurri, DBEdit,...).
Don't get me wrong, Eclipse has easily managed to "eclipse" XEmacs as my primary IDE (and I've used (X)Emacs as my primary IDE for more than 10 years with no serious contender to its throne). But eclipse definetely has SOME quirks that could use some cleaning up work.
Google's approach is good for google. If Google would want to make good use of significantly faster CPUs, they would also need significantly more RAM in their machines (a CPU faster by a factor of 10 can't yield a speed-up factor of ten, if the network can't deliver the data fast enough).
For Google it's fine, if a request can be done in say half-a-second on a slower machine, that is a lot cheaper then a 10* as fast machine doing each request in.05 seconds, but the machine costs 50* more than the slower machine. On the other hand, if you have a job that can only be done sequentially (or can't be parallelized all to well), then having 100s of computers won't help you very much......on the other hand - there is one question left: Is it really worth while having 100s or 1000s of PC class servers working your requests as opposed to a handful really fast servers?
The more expensive servers will definitely be more expensive when you buy them - on the other hand the more expensive faster machines might save you a lot of money in turns of less rent for the offices (lower space requirements) or - perhaps even more important - save on energy...
The company where I'm working switched all their work PCs to TFTs relatively early, when TFTs were still expensive. The company said, that this step was done on the expected cost saving in power bills and also saving on air conditioning in rooms with lots of CRTs...
I can't help myself, but the words "ethical bullshit" is something, I'd apply more to what a certain G.W.Bush does...
Personally, I think, that this particular experiment on the rats IS highly unethical; even more so, than most other experiments. If you ask why this is more unethical than other methods - simple: While still being dangerous to the animals, other experiments leave some choice to the animals. As far as we can tell, animals don't seem to have a free will, but at least have some form of decision making. And these kinds of experiments in controlling rats are even taking this away, and it is a line, that in MY opinion never should have been crossed.
The next logical step, for those "so-called" scientists, who did this, is of course to apply this to the next higher live forms, while already planning to try it on primates some time in the forseeable future.
The last step - your homeland secretary requiring theses procedures on some select groups of your citizens (e.g. moslems and other "potential terrorists") doesn't seem all that far-fetched anymore, after we sacrifice the first primate in this manner.
There is a German expression "Wehret den Anfaengen!", that would have been called for with these experiments a good while back.
This is hardly true - Science advanced by probing into subjects, driven by the question "WHY...?".
At that time, men certainly was "primitive" in the way, that he wasn't so much "shareholder value" driven.
What is mankind doing today? Due to economical pressure, lots of science findings are released into the public, before we know, whether it's dangerous or not. Of course we can't know, whether something is NOT dangerous, but we can at least try things on a smaller scale first, rather than immediately going for the big and more marketable ideas.
Think of something: This mammoth will only be about "88% pure" -- which leaves 12% margin of error, and mankind can hardly show off hundreds of years of experience in cloning and genetics, now can it? If mankind would have this experience, then 12% margin of error might be deemed "well worth the risk". But - since we don't we can hardly know, what will greet us at the birth of this thing.
Just imagine for a second - at the time, when the first nuclear reactors were built - did your government opt for the reactor the size of Chernobyl and allow this to be built with a 10%+ margin of error? You could wipe out entire neighbourhoods with that -- and while this mammoth could still be killed, we don't know, what kind of new bacteria, viri or anything this thing that far, and how much of this was due to these little 12% impurity? (Take the example of Creuzfeld-Jacob// Mad-Cow-Disease, and you might become aware, that diseases in animals CAN be dangerous to humans as well.)
Also - the idea of mixing Mammoth with Elephant - is that really a wise idea...?...well - I have this freshly scanned/OCRd copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but 12% of the letters in it are broken -- well, let's just fill these 12% with letters from a law book, or the latest Tom Clancy novel -- that should work; after all, both are books!
Just remember "Faust", "The ghosts I summoned, I can't get rid of them any more"! (Sorry, don't know the exact translation, so I just tried translating it myself from "Die Geister, die ich rief, die werd ich nicht mehr los"...
Well, about two years ago I bought myself a PJB-100 (6GB disk), and was rather satisfied with it.
Pros:
long battery life time
very well designed UI
very stable
really great headphones included
can be operated in it's pouch - LCD
and buttons are visible/accessible from
the outside
Cons:
No playlists
USB1.1 (guess, how long it took to
upload 6GB on to its disk...)
pouch just has a hook to wear it on a
belt -- it never happened to me, since I
don't do sports - but I imagine, it COULD
slip off your jogging trousers that
way
Since the 6GB were getting rather crowded, and I was looking at a model that could also record data, I bought an Archos Recorder 20GB a few months ago...
Pro:
support for playlists; even though - this is
a minor pro issue
pouch strap, which requires your trouser belt
to go through it - so it's more "tight" in
spot
USB 2: Makes uploading the songs a lot
faster...
Cons:
UI is definetely severely inferior to the
navigation on the PJB (I'll go into that
further down).
Power: the batteries don't last as long, as
the LiIon battery of the PJB; it's only a
very minor issue -- since I've bought the
Archos, I've replaced its batteries with
digital camera batteries (1900mAh), and since
then battery times are about the same as I
was used to on my PJB
BIG CON: The Archos just "crashes" about once
a day (I'm using it fairly constantly during
the day, so this is not something just
"interpolated" from one or two crashes...
As a comparison - in over a year, the PJB
crashed some 3 or so times
usability: It'd be really cool, if the PJB
would remember my "last position" in each
playlist. Either I would need tons of
playlists to make selection better - but
everytime I choose my Queen playlist, it
starts at the first piece, so it'll hardly
ever reach the end of the playlist...
The included headphones suck...
The built-in microphone is more a "feature"
than a "microphone"; especially since it
catches a lot of noise from the internal
hard disk spinning up and down regularly.
While it has a LINE-in, it doesn't have a MIC
in; so I wouldn't need a pre-amplified
Microphone to record...
I AM using the Archos mostly now (but with my trusty PJB ["Koss portaPro"] headphones), since it can hold all my CDs, not just a little selection of it, but I'd wish, that Archos really improves the firmware a good deal further, with software stability and some song navigation and UI improvements coming in first.
From my point of view, the following are my main "problems"/"wishes" for an improved GUI (if you think, THESE are important to you, ask Archos to implement them first, or go with some other player):
when I press fast forward, the Archos shouldn't immediately start the next song, but rather display it's info and wait for me to press play again -- or maybe just delay the start a second or two. Motivation: Sometimes I'd like to skip some 3 or four songs ahead within the playlist; right now, that means, press 'forward', wait until the next song is loaded and started, then press forward again, wait for the next song to start,... -- this only unneccessarily slows down the process, and also costs a good deal of battery life. If it would just display the new song title and then either waits for myself pressing play or just wait for 2-3 seconds to pass without me pressing forward again, it would definetely add to its usefulness...;-) Note: just choosing "browse" and then select the song you want, works to get you the song, but it breaks the clean playlist behaviour.
It lacks a feature to skip forward WITHIN an MP3 -- if you use the recorder to record a meeting or something, you might later want to skip to a specific thing within the MP3; but that can only be done by downloading it from the Archos first and using a normal player
For navigation, it'd be nice to have something similar to the PJBs "previous/next set" or "previous/next disk"; it makes navigation a
lot faster - and when I want to change a tune, I certainly don't want to spend some 15-20 seconds to achieve that, when it could be done more easily in some 3-5 seconds...;-)
As for the Archos hardware: The PJB might actually be better for jogging, since the PJB has enough memory to store songs for ~10 Minutes, whereas the Archos spins up some 2-3 times in some songs. And the time the disk is spinning is probably the most problematic during running around. (Also, adding some more memory to the system might improve the battery running time some further -- while the additional RAM will eat more battery - it will certainly save a good deal of battery power, if the disk would spin up less often.
For anyone thinking about getting an Archos - it's a nice little toy, but if you compare it's price to other players, either increase the Archos price for the price of higher capacity batteries and better headphones -- or subtract them from the PJB price, since you won't need to spend extra money on those with it...;-)
I just wished, the PJB people had a box, that could also RECORD...
Well, the 32bit time_t might not actually NEED further change - current unix time, if I am not mistaken will be sufficient until 2038 or something. So it would last almost 20 years after "total destruction".
In that case, this might be the first computer "assumption", that might prove sufficient in the long run - unlike the famous "640k will be enough for everybody"...;)
Well - for an MP3 player, that's hardly an issue... My Personal JukeBox (check it out at www.pjbox.com) has a hard disk in it - but it also has enough RAM to buffer something like 10 minutes worth of MP3, which means, that the HD will be up an running for about 20-25 seconds (including spinning up and spinning down) once every 10 minutes..
I own and during the day almost constantly use the player - and I have more problems with the cabling for the headset, than with the player itself, which worked absolutely fine.
Personally - if you're looking for an MP3 player, I can only recommend this one - (since I am even listening to music at work with it), I would say, that the player has already seen more than 1000 running hours in the time, and it still works fine... I'll just need a new pouch some time - as the old one is slowly "falling apart"...;)
The idea behind connecting electronics is mainly an idea of adding/repairing sensory information or giving meaning to the brains output (in terms of say artificial muscle movement).
Connecting electronics into the brain could have more far reaching possibilities, like - maybe in the future either inhibit certain reactions or actually taking part in the brains' decision making process (or other internal processes of the brain).
I can already see M$ thinking of a first application for this: "You can't handle money? Fine, we have a brain module for you, that makes sure you don't spend more than you earn"... Of course they won't tell you, that in the future (except for anything to maintain your basic life), all of your money will be spent on more M$ products...;)
On the other hand - M$ writing modules for the brain, wouldn't that give the term "blue eyes" a whole new meaning? Or where else would they project yours truly's blue screen...;)
Well, if you think playing Quake III would give you whiplash - think of the retrogamers playing
old sportsgames. I am sure I wouldn't want to
play "Daley Thompsons Decathlon" with THAT kind
of joystick. That game probably killed more
joysticks than any other game.
Imagine - if you wanted to play Decathlon with it, you'd probably need to whip your head left and right about 30-50 times within 10-15 seconds on the 110m hurdles event alone [shudder]...
Oh well, he's been rather helpful so far in pointing out what can and can't be done. Of course I will have to do most on my own; but it's certainly a good thing to get any kind of help.
As for the "I don't give a shit"; this is actually not 100% true. To a certain extend I don't. I am certainly NOT into yielding any email address in my domain, just that some idiot can use it for his own pleasure.
One thing - did you also think about some other implication? Those who entered the false email address also accepted some kind of use policy (basically in MY name!) for some product downloaded.
How would you think, if someone downloaded a product and when required to give some email address (before accepting all sort of things) just give out your email address?
How much will it cost the "registrant" to either pick an email address that surely is not in use; get his own domain and have some "spam" address in their domain, or even create a "spam" account of their own on hotmail or the like?
Instead people just display their own ignorance by entering existing email addresses belonging to other (if the other doesn't like it, all it takes him is either giving up the email address or writing to the vendor to be crossed off the lists there).
Personally, while I understand the motives of these people, in my opinion these kind of people are WORSE than spammers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting that now the EU wants to push problems with more
and more counterfeiting money appearing on the market to graphics
software makers...
How do they think, that this will improve the situation? Look at
what TODAY's Gimp, Photoshop, and others can do... All I would need
to do is stick with a current version and not upgrade, if I really
wanted to counterfeit money on my own. And if you would integrate
this into the printers, then I'll just print the banknote in two or
three passes (always just print another part of the banknote so
that the printer will never get to see the whole thing in one go).
Why not integrate this into the FUTURE banknotes (they already have RFIDs in there, don't they? All it would need to take would be to issue unique codes to EACH banknote so that they could verify the identity of the banknote there)
I would guess that boosting readers is possible, and it's somewhat clear that the card can not know how far it is off the reader...
;-)
But - wouldn't it be technically possible to limit the output power? (maybe in a way that the transmitter would either block higher power; or maybe just fry when trying -- I'd rather find my card destroyed than someone accessing it).
Another (simple) way would also be to deactivate the sender unless a specific area of the card was pressed at the time (very much like the battery testers on some AA batteries only work while you're closing the circuit with your fingertips)...
(Of course - now it's a bit late to enter these things into the production...
It's nice to say "you have to be within one inch of the reader for the card to be read", but WHERE is this limit built in?
a) If it's the card itself (a "hacked" RFID that has a very weak response signal), we're on the "safe" side.
b) If it's in the reader (i.e. the reader sends out a weak signal, so that only cards within a few centimeters are capable to receiving to the signal), then we're in trouble.
Given - option B gives stores the "peace of mind", that they'll always read the "correct" card (i.e. the stores won't get in trouble for accidentally charging YOUR purchases to the guy next in line).
BUT - option B means, that crooks can use stronger readers that can scan your card from a few meters away (all that while the user thinks that even crooks need to make it to within an inch of their cards).
Before I'd go for such a card, I would most definetely like THAT question answered...
It's kind of interesting that the NYT would engage in what I would
consider sensationalist press. I remember that in the late 1990s a
German TV report came out with a sensationalist article about the
fact that there was a "secret document" on the Internet which would
describe how to build bombs - and that this would be totally
scandalous.
This "*secret* document" was the FAQ rec.pyrotechnics...
After reading the article, I feel there is a slight bias in favour of the libraries when looking at the questions. Of course a library has a master index of books of one author. Or - to find out about some very specific question about an event you immediately know what kind of journals to look in.
The only question really geared for search engines was the Thatcher quote (as that would be a full text search).
Would this be the time to create a true categorisation of questions to be used in comparisons? (Note - not the ACTUAL questions, so that search engines could optimise for them, but only specify the general direction of questions).
I admit, it would be pretty hard to do, but I guess it could be worth the effort...
Well - if BGP gets seriously hit by this, this might wreak *quite* massive havoc on the net...
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is one of the core routing protocols - one of those protocols used to make redundant routing (and hence error tolerance) work... The question is, whether any similar protocols (e.g. OSPF) are also vulnerable...
Might this be THE final topic to bring IPv6 to a wider attention?
I'd hope so...
Boy - that list will be f***ed up pretty soon...
(one minor thing I missed before:
The advent of bayesian spamming brought spams that included whole paragraphs of random words - just so that your list would get more and more bloated...
How long do you think it will take spammers to add dozens of valid - but in the context of the spam nonsensical - URLs just to fill up the black-list and make it useless?
Blocking URLs is an "ACTIVE" measure - and one that opens very bad
possibilities for abuse. While the While-List would protect against
this it will protect the BIG players on the market - it can still
wreak havoc on small/medium enterprises - e.g. a competitor of a
(pretty much) 'niche' firm could get a spam out advertising the
COMPETITOR in order to get HIM blocked...
Or - the other way around - a company gets itself a whitelisting
(via a "fake" joe-job on itself) and then continues spamming...
Please stick to PASSIVE measures! They can't be abused...
> They rely on content filters and their users determining if an email is legit or not.
And - how would a content filter find out whether the content of the spam would actually try and sell the product listed in the spam, or whether it's advertising a product listed on the target server in the hopes that the target server gets blocked?
You *can't* read the true motives of a spam out of its content...
But in this case we're back to square one - we're already fighting KNOWN spammers like Ralsky...
v y is beh@icemark.ch (a replaced with z, b with y, ..., y with b, z with a, 0 with @, and 1 with '.' -- and the whole thing in reverse).
There's nothing new in that. But do you seriously think, AOL will pay dozens of employees to find out just WHETHER a spam is "legit" (in the sense that it's really advertising the target site) or "fake" (in the sense that the real goal is to get the target site blocked)? This will become some seriously tough piece of work!
And it's kind of doubtful, whether it will help or not.
Also - surfing TO a website just to find out whether it's a spam site or not is nowadays also giving away WHO is doing the surfing. By now I get more and more spams that have my email address encoded in the host names of the target site, e.g. the first part of the host name http://sx1piznvxr0svy.froidnet.com/
sx1piznvxr0s
So by now we are in a situation, where not just 'unsubscribe' lists are a way for a spammer to check the validity of our email addresses - no, even the host name we use to 'look at their "great" sites' give our identities away.
It'd be really great if some people would finally clue in that the more successful spammers are actually pretty smart as well! (unfortunately for us though)
Right now I think the best policy is still the passive filtering of incoming spams.
- Filtering destination sites will open doors to abuse in terms of using fake spam to block unwanted sites...
- automatic downloading of spamvertised sites will confirm which addresses are "good".
The latter idea MIGHT still be workable, since the spammer will also get to know WHO has spam-scanners installed (provided the automatic download of the page actually has the name of the spam-filter in the User-Agent header field of the get request). That way the spammer would also be able to drop email addresses blocking his sites.
On the other hand, this has one very big issue with it - if the spammer filters out these addresses for his sales, he could at the same time COLLECT these addresses for DDoS uses...
No - PASSIVE measures are the only GOOD solution we have. Spam-Filters in addition to tar-pits slowing the the spam delivery...
Everything else will - as sad as it sounds - open way to many doors to abuse!
I don't know, whether this is such a brilliant idea - if this gets widely adopted it can't be long before some idiot will get the idea of paying for a spam to "advertise" one of his competitors just to get HIS site blocked...
I see loads of abuse potential here... While AOL might be smart enough not to block sites like microsoft.com or ebay.com if they showed up in a spam, it could be a knock-out blow to relatively
small and medium (and hence little known) companies on the web.
I don't know what kind of problems you've had...
The only "problem" I've had with Knoppix was, that it didn't figure out, what kind of display resolution my Thinkpad A30P could do (1600x1200)... BUT - just the fact, that Knoppix 3.0 was able to boot off a notebook and recognize most of the hardware - that was something I found pretty impressive. Especially bearing in mind the kind of setup problems a lot of people HAVE with notebooks and their special hardware.
Also, I recently showed some people at my last job Knoppix 3.2 - and even there it booted off without a hitch on the Dell Latitude notebooks they've had in their offices...
The download mirrors still have a packages-dvd.txt file listing all the packages of the DVD version. But is this version available for download somewhere (with DVD burners becoming more and more common, I would assume, that this image should appear somewhere as well...
Alas - the packages-dvd.txt is pretty old - does that mean, the DVD doesn't get updated any more? (Again - I think it would be a shame - it would be really great to have a really filled up live system that could be used to REALLY show off linux some more...
It's easy for multiple IDEs to cause problems...
...).
Some form of unification wouldn't be all that bad - but unification should not be misread as "only one IDE".
As much as Sun created a "the same bytecode runs on all platforms" - and the much the same, that XML data is portable between platforms - exactly the same way we would need some unification in the "project properties" files. If you really WANT competition to happen, what we need is a way, that the same project can be opened with a number of IDEs, but before that can happen, we need a good way of doing this. Otherwise we will end up in a situation, where either whole teams need to decide which tool to use (so that the project metadata can be used by all) or there will be a semipermanent importing of projects/project data whenever the structure of the project got changed (e.g. during refactoring) by someone using a DIFFERENT IDE.
(Actually - I would even wish for SOME unification WITHIN eclipse; e.g. with all those DB plugins, wouldn't it be nice, if there was a SINGLE DB-Connection-Manager plugin, which would you would configure for all your DB connections, and other DB plugins would just query that single plugin for the known DB connections and prompt the user which connection to use? -- To ME this sounds a lot better, than to enter the DB configuration [JARs+JDBC URLS+Username+possibly passwords] into EACH DB Plugin (Azurri, DBEdit,
Don't get me wrong, Eclipse has easily managed to "eclipse" XEmacs as my primary IDE (and I've used (X)Emacs as my primary IDE for more than 10 years with no serious contender to its throne). But eclipse definetely has SOME quirks that could use some cleaning up work.
Benedikt
The question is always, what you're doing.
.05 seconds, but the machine costs 50* more than the slower machine. ...on the other hand - there is one question left: Is it really worth while having 100s or 1000s of PC class servers working your requests as opposed to a handful really fast servers?
Google's approach is good for google. If Google would want to make good use of significantly faster CPUs, they would also need significantly more RAM in their machines (a CPU faster by a factor of 10 can't yield a speed-up factor of ten, if the network can't deliver the data fast enough).
For Google it's fine, if a request can be done in say half-a-second on a slower machine, that is a lot cheaper then a 10* as fast machine doing each request in
On the other hand, if you have a job that can only be done sequentially (or can't be parallelized all to well), then having 100s of computers won't help you very much...
The more expensive servers will definitely be more expensive when you buy them - on the other hand the more expensive faster machines might save you a lot of money in turns of less rent for the offices (lower space requirements) or - perhaps even more important - save on energy...
The company where I'm working switched all their work PCs to TFTs relatively early, when TFTs were still expensive. The company said, that this step was done on the expected cost saving in power bills and also saving on air conditioning in rooms with lots of CRTs...
I can't help myself, but the words "ethical bullshit" is something, I'd apply more to what a certain G.W.Bush does...
Personally, I think, that this particular experiment on the rats IS highly unethical; even more so, than most other experiments. If you ask why this is more unethical than other methods - simple: While still being dangerous to the animals, other experiments leave some choice to the animals. As far as we can tell, animals don't seem to have a free will, but at least have some form of decision making. And these kinds of experiments in controlling rats are even taking this away, and it is a line, that in MY opinion never should have been crossed.
The next logical step, for those "so-called" scientists, who did this, is of course to apply this to the next higher live forms, while already planning to try it on primates some time in the forseeable future.
The last step - your homeland secretary requiring theses procedures on some select groups of your citizens (e.g. moslems and other "potential terrorists") doesn't seem all that far-fetched anymore, after we sacrifice the first primate in this manner.
There is a German expression "Wehret den Anfaengen!", that would have been called for with these experiments a good while back.
This is hardly true - Science advanced by probing into subjects, driven by the question "WHY...?".
// Mad-Cow-Disease, and you might become aware, that diseases in animals CAN be dangerous to humans as well.)
...well - I have this freshly scanned/OCRd copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but 12% of the letters in it are broken -- well, let's just fill these 12% with letters from a law book, or the latest Tom Clancy novel -- that should work; after all, both are books!
At that time, men certainly was "primitive" in the way, that he wasn't so much "shareholder value" driven.
What is mankind doing today? Due to economical pressure, lots of science findings are released into the public, before we know, whether it's dangerous or not. Of course we can't know, whether something is NOT dangerous, but we can at least try things on a smaller scale first, rather than immediately going for the big and more marketable ideas.
Think of something: This mammoth will only be about "88% pure" -- which leaves 12% margin of error, and mankind can hardly show off hundreds of years of experience in cloning and genetics, now can it? If mankind would have this experience, then 12% margin of error might be deemed "well worth the risk". But - since we don't we can hardly know, what will greet us at the birth of this thing.
Just imagine for a second - at the time, when the first nuclear reactors were built - did your government opt for the reactor the size of Chernobyl and allow this to be built with a 10%+ margin of error? You could wipe out entire neighbourhoods with that -- and while this mammoth could still be killed, we don't know, what kind of new bacteria, viri or anything this thing that far, and how much of this was due to these little 12% impurity? (Take the example of Creuzfeld-Jacob
Also - the idea of mixing Mammoth with Elephant - is that really a wise idea...?
Just remember "Faust", "The ghosts I summoned, I can't get rid of them any more"! (Sorry, don't know the exact translation, so I just tried translating it myself from "Die Geister, die ich rief, die werd ich nicht mehr los"...
Pros:
Cons:
Since the 6GB were getting rather crowded, and I was looking at a model that could also record data, I bought an Archos Recorder 20GB a few months ago...
Pro:
Cons:
- UI is definetely severely inferior to the
navigation on the PJB (I'll go into that
further down).
- Power: the batteries don't last as long, as
the LiIon battery of the PJB; it's only a
very minor issue -- since I've bought the
Archos, I've replaced its batteries with
digital camera batteries (1900mAh), and since
then battery times are about the same as I
was used to on my PJB
- BIG CON: The Archos just "crashes" about once
a day (I'm using it fairly constantly during
the day, so this is not something just
"interpolated" from one or two crashes...
As a comparison - in over a year, the PJB
crashed some 3 or so times
- usability: It'd be really cool, if the PJB
would remember my "last position" in each
playlist. Either I would need tons of
playlists to make selection better - but
everytime I choose my Queen playlist, it
starts at the first piece, so it'll hardly
ever reach the end of the playlist...
- The included headphones suck...
- The built-in microphone is more a "feature"
than a "microphone"; especially since it
catches a lot of noise from the internal
hard disk spinning up and down regularly.
- While it has a LINE-in, it doesn't have a MIC
in; so I wouldn't need a pre-amplified
Microphone to record...
I AM using the Archos mostly now (but with my trusty PJB ["Koss portaPro"] headphones), since it can hold all my CDs, not just a little selection of it, but I'd wish, that Archos really improves the firmware a good deal further, with software stability and some song navigation and UI improvements coming in first. From my point of view, the following are my main "problems"/"wishes" for an improved GUI (if you think, THESE are important to you, ask Archos to implement them first, or go with some other player):- when I press fast forward, the Archos shouldn't immediately start the next song, but rather display it's info and wait for me to press play again -- or maybe just delay the start a second or two. Motivation: Sometimes I'd like to skip some 3 or four songs ahead within the playlist; right now, that means, press 'forward', wait until the next song is loaded and started, then press forward again, wait for the next song to start,
... -- this only unneccessarily slows down the process, and also costs a good deal of battery life. If it would just display the new song title and then either waits for myself pressing play or just wait for 2-3 seconds to pass without me pressing forward again, it would definetely add to its usefulness... ;-)
- It lacks a feature to skip forward WITHIN an MP3 -- if you use the recorder to record a meeting or something, you might later want to skip to a specific thing within the MP3; but that can only be done by downloading it from the Archos first and using a normal player
- For navigation, it'd be nice to have something similar to the PJBs "previous/next set" or "previous/next disk"; it makes navigation a
lot faster - and when I want to change a tune, I certainly don't want to spend some 15-20 seconds to achieve that, when it could be done more easily in some 3-5 seconds...
;-)
As for the Archos hardware: The PJB might actually be better for jogging, since the PJB has enough memory to store songs for ~10 Minutes, whereas the Archos spins up some 2-3 times in some songs. And the time the disk is spinning is probably the most problematic during running around. (Also, adding some more memory to the system might improve the battery running time some further -- while the additional RAM will eat more battery - it will certainly save a good deal of battery power, if the disk would spin up less often.Note: just choosing "browse" and then select the song you want, works to get you the song, but it breaks the clean playlist behaviour.
For anyone thinking about getting an Archos - it's a nice little toy, but if you compare it's price to other players, either increase the Archos price for the price of higher capacity batteries and better headphones -- or subtract them from the PJB price, since you won't need to spend extra money on those with it...
I just wished, the PJB people had a box, that could also RECORD...
Well, the 32bit time_t might not actually NEED further change - current unix time, if I am not mistaken will be sufficient until 2038 or something. So it would last almost 20 years after "total destruction".
;)
In that case, this might be the first computer "assumption", that might prove sufficient in the long run - unlike the famous "640k will be enough for everybody"...
Well - for an MP3 player, that's hardly an issue... My Personal JukeBox (check it out at www.pjbox.com) has a hard disk in it - but it also has enough RAM to buffer something like 10 minutes worth of MP3, which means, that the HD will be up an running for about 20-25 seconds (including spinning up and spinning down) once every 10 minutes..
I own and during the day almost constantly use the player - and I have more problems with the cabling for the headset, than with the player itself, which worked absolutely fine.
Personally - if you're looking for an MP3 player, I can only recommend this one - (since I am even listening to music at work with it), I would say, that the player has already seen more than 1000 running hours in the time, and it still works fine... I'll just need a new pouch some time - as the old one is slowly "falling apart"...
The idea behind connecting electronics is mainly an idea of adding/repairing sensory information or giving meaning to the brains output (in terms of say artificial muscle movement).
;)
;)
Connecting electronics into the brain could have more far reaching possibilities, like - maybe in the future either inhibit certain reactions or actually taking part in the brains' decision making process (or other internal processes of the brain).
I can already see M$ thinking of a first application for this: "You can't handle money? Fine, we have a brain module for you, that makes sure you don't spend more than you earn"... Of course they won't tell you, that in the future (except for anything to maintain your basic life), all of your money will be spent on more M$ products...
On the other hand - M$ writing modules for the brain, wouldn't that give the term "blue eyes" a whole new meaning? Or where else would they project yours truly's blue screen...
Well, if you think playing Quake III would give you whiplash - think of the retrogamers playing
old sportsgames. I am sure I wouldn't want to
play "Daley Thompsons Decathlon" with THAT kind
of joystick. That game probably killed more
joysticks than any other game.
Imagine - if you wanted to play Decathlon with it, you'd probably need to whip your head left and right about 30-50 times within 10-15 seconds on the 110m hurdles event alone [shudder]...
Oh well, he's been rather helpful so far in pointing out what can and can't be done. Of course I will have to do most on my own; but it's certainly a good thing to get any kind of help.
As for the "I don't give a shit"; this is actually not 100% true. To a certain extend I don't. I am certainly NOT into yielding any email address in my domain, just that some idiot can use it for his own pleasure.
One thing - did you also think about some other implication? Those who entered the false email address also accepted some kind of use policy (basically in MY name!) for some product downloaded.
How would you think, if someone downloaded a product and when required to give some email address (before accepting all sort of things) just give out your email address?
How much will it cost the "registrant" to either pick an email address that surely is not in use; get his own domain and have some "spam" address in their domain, or even create a "spam" account of their own on hotmail or the like?
Instead people just display their own ignorance by entering existing email addresses belonging to other (if the other doesn't like it, all it takes him is either giving up the email address or writing to the vendor to be crossed off the lists there).
Personally, while I understand the motives of these people, in my opinion these kind of people are WORSE than spammers.