For absolutely needing to upgrade your enterprise-wide linux base in a hurry. Which could happen.
I completely stuffed my first 2 or 3 kernel patches/upgrades/compiles etc, but after a couple of dozen it becomes second nature, and in a stressful (read-Manager/client on your back wanting it done yesterday!!) situation that's what you need.
The Empeg (RioCar) also copes with new formats - Ogg Vorbis will be probably be added by the guys there if there is enough call for it. They have said that although they aren't producing any more, they will still support and develop.
And the visuals are lovely.
And you can play Tetris on it, although you have to turn your head on one side:)
Symbol and Aironet/Telxon (now Cisco) did a lot of research into this, and found that they do NOT coexist nicely. Yes they are all in the same 2.4Ghz area, but they are not designed to cooperate with other 2.4Ghz traffic. They are designed to ensure their own traffic gets through even with high interference. In the 802.11 spec, FH and DS coexist reasonably well, but the thing which causes the problems with Bluetooth is that its hop frequency is 100 times faster (IIRC) so it responds faster and breaks 802.11.
I have confirmed this myself on various occasions, and for most clients have proven that 802.11 should be used exclusively. Things may be a little different now we can use the 5Ghz band (and get much higher speeds) for 802.11 and have Bluetooth sitting on 2.4Ghz, but there is not enough of an advantage to do so - it just makes life more difficult as you need to support both forms of comms, and sort out security for them both.
Anyone can video your movements (well authorities or companies can, but they get upset if you try and video them - see Steve's wearcam thread from yesterday. Sorry can't find the link right now)
They do, however, have to give you a copy of all footage and info they have on you if you request it and pay for the privilege.
This is certainly true in the UK and I think it is in the US as well, but feel free to correct me.
I have an old Osborne portable (meaning it's the size of a large suitcase) with 2 8" drives, a 3" screen and 1k of RAM - and I still play Alien Attack on it. Dates from 1976 as far as I can tell, and I have a stack of Dragon games I play on my Emulator - Android Attack, Cuthbert in The Mines, Donkey Kong, Cuthbert goes Skiing, Gridrunner (mmm Gridrunner!!!!) and I had all of these by 1984 so they are at least that old.
Wonderful use for a fast PC, eh? Install MAME and Speccy & Tandy emulators and play better games than most of the junk around today.
Every day is pretty fun for me - and most of my colleagues. We don't have nerf guns or toys, just an enthusiastic team, a good social life and enough intelligence to make any challenging task fun.
Enjoy becoming good at your job - enjoy being good at your job - andjoy getting better at your job>
Don't get too sucked into all work and no play - get your balance right. Remember the most important thing is your family, work is a way to support them so just find one which challenges you enough but isn't crappy and make it all fun.
It'll end up the same as we will have here in the UK soon - the RIP bill basically states that if you don't give up your encryption key when asked to by the police, you will be imprisoned. Even if you don't have the key! For example a consultant at a company I used to work for had been given a copy of a clients key to hold for safekeeping. The client lost theirs and so had my colleague. The RIP bill could send them both to prison, as the onus would be on them to prove they had lost it (HOW???).
Guilty until proven Innocent - sucks don't it!
The US Govt is just using the WTC incident as a scare to push some pretty heavy anti-freedom legislation through while everyone is still shocked.
I've enjoyed it for years and never once did it occur to me that it was about a plane crash. It just is a good uplifting bouncy song with a serious feelgood factor.
The Cosmo Worlds suite from SGI - you can easily knock up virtual rooms/districts/worlds in minutes with the same ease as creating HTML pages with FrontPage or similar. And it definitely has a useful place - for example:
A 3d model of an engine for mech school - click on a part and info flashes up, followed by sequence for removing/fitting the part, maybe with a virtual tutor offering advice.
You wouldn't use it for document browsing, but that isn't what it was designed to do. It really is a piece of cake to edit manually though.
The thing that astonishes me is people complaining of long download times - you can create detailed areas in a staggeringly small size if you are sensible about your image and texture maps. For really high res stuff, yes you will need more bandwidth, but that is always the case.
I used to work for the major AS400 software house in the UK and had a lot of dealings with token ring (and Twinax!!) and we found the major cause of network issues was the type of card.
Madge cards do not like working in an environment with IBM cards (okay they have sorted things out a wee bit, but it still isn't perfect) because IBM token ring cards run to lower timing tolerances. This is fine where all other cards on the ring accept this, but Madge cards are designed to much higher specifications and easily start beaconing if the previous/next card round the ring is off on its timing.
Your best bet is to get hold of those IBM drivers and use an IBM card - and go for a test environment for a wee while too:)
If we want to hear more about the terrorism we can go to cnn.com etc, but most of what the media is saying today has zero information content - they keep showing the vids, 'experts' keep coming up with ideas and theories, but until there is some identification of the group involved it has no impact on my day to day business, which keeps going as usual. It hasn't changed anything in Scotland, aside from our car park security guard checking a little more carefully.
Granted, I keep checking back to see updates on casualties and it is a relief every time more survivors are rescued, but I do that through other sites.
Slashdot - news for nerds - HD specs definitely come into that category. On with the day.
I am in a hurry otherwise I would put the link up but NewScientist had article with stats showing very little correlation between DU and cancer - levels around normal statistical distribution.
Still, I agree that it has to be a good thing if all waste products of armaments are environmentally sound - DU lasts forever (ish:)
I for one would feel happiest and safest in a Russian space station - they have proven that it will stay inhabitable under very serious conditions of damage and failure which is exactly what you want for a metal box speeding through orbiting debris.
Also, space travel and exploration should be funded by business - who have a much better incentive to get costs down and safety up in the pursuit of the magic profit -> Must attract those tourists/manufacturers/science companies etc etc.
Governments just have far too much in the way of personal agendas.
I can think of nothing I'd like better than to spend a month in a hotel on the mars, say. Sorry to sound daft, but how cool would that be, eh? Standing on another planet has got to be a step along the way to expansion ever onward, and governments aren't necessarily going to want that - businesses will!
You'll find if you read the article that the authors specifically state that they know it is more computationally intensive to do this. It is purely a theoretical exercise in the true spirit of hackerdom -> who cares if it has a purpose, let's just see if we can do it:)
When I was a child, my parents didn't spoil me with expensive computers and toys, but instilled a sense of the value of goods and encouraged my brothers and I to make toys or entertain ourselves out in the fields, hills or sea.
This meant that when Lego (and to a lesser degree Meccano) turned up it was an outstanding toy. Lego packs for the next 10 years or so (for all of us) created a massive base for development of all types of creations - we made mechanical linkages before Technics came out, working wave and wind driven generators, a hideously inaccurate clock and once Technics came out we built a Babbage machine.
By the time I got a Dragon 32 (like a Tandy to the west-of-the-pond types) I had no interest in playing computer cames, but in writing assemblers, games, word processors, etc.
And now we are all in Mensa and have excellent jobs - you've got to get the brain development in early!
My kids are getting Lego and books - and no computer games for years, so they can get the good start my siblings and I got.
I think the definition of power user here is incorrect - there is no Microsoft product which comes into the "Power" category. Clustering windows servers gets you possibly into mid-range, but it's pretty much low end.
For high end, you are talking big iron from IBM, SUN, Cray or SGI, or massive Unix/Linux clusters a la ASCI, Lawrence Livermore etc.
However, if these hackers you mention do get ticked off and learn linux/freeBSD or a.n.other *nix the experience may well be good for them. Some of these people may be the gurus of the future.
Linux car dashboard music player - does mp3 and various others, and you can add whatever codec you like if you can write in Python. Many codecs already exist for it.
Okay, dev seems to have slowed since Diamond bought it, but it still rocks in my car.
I have 580-ish CD's stored on it at 192kb Xing Mp3 compression. In car that is easily good enough. At home I use ogg and it is slightly better than LAME mp3.
This will definitely give us a good solid dedicated multimedia box, but what I for one really want is my current distro - which is is running a fairly lean, fast kernel - with all these applications added. I'm quite happy to shut down any resource hogging processes while I record/mix/edit etc, but I can't really be bothered setting up a whole new box just for this, or wiping my one as it's quite happy right now.
I'm sure other users are the same - it'll only be the dedicated music makers who will go to these lengths. Of course, maybe us part timers have no need of such low latency, I mean I use Cubase on my Windows partition pretty successfully, but aside from that and Unreal Tournament I would rather dump that partition completely.
Of course, at the moment I have no sound support at all:) A 1.2GHz Athlon, 500Mb RAM, 1.2Tb disk, Voodoo3 all supported, but my SBLive! card...damn!
Various analysts - myself included - were not happy about the breakup anyway. It actually seemed to allow MS some extra potential for market stranglehold, and on balance - except for legal costs and stock price fluctuations - they would end up pretty much the same either way.
At least they are just one big monopoly that everyone can watch closely, as opposed to a few smaller monopolies in various markets.
They are doing themselves out of business anyway with the rules surrounding XP - all my corporate clients use Ghost for system backups Enterprise-wide and started getting worried when MS discussed unit-specific licensing, yearly software charges and similar issues, not to mention the appalling uptime you get even from an OS as supposedly solid as W2000. Quite a few of them are already rolling out Star Office, and some are seriously considering Linux as next upgrade (even one client with >4000 desktop users)
I use most major OSes for business reasons, and MS for games. It's just not robust/cost-effective/secure enough for today's world.
Not a troll/flamebait - the facts I get from corporations every day support my viewpoint.
Frequency hopping 802.11a is dead easy to hack into - the standard ensures it. Basically, because all devices on the network need to know which frequency to hop to, this info is broadcast, along with timing details and other useful bits and pieces. So you don't need to guess. I have used a £100 802.11a card to hop on to a WLAN in under 2 minutes. It would have been faster, but I was using Winblows that day, and I had to reboot. 802.11a is cheap, low security and dead simple.
802.11b has its advantages - it is a lot harder to hack in a lot of situations, due to ambient rf noise and the chipping code can add a fair amount of front end security if you use a very long sequence, but it too can be monitored. Hence the term WEP - wired equivalent privacy.
I agree with the rest of the post, though:
You wouldn't have sensitive data on your wired network for all to see would you? No, you would encrypt it and use secure encrypted links. Do the same on your wireless LAN.
THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT
Here in the UK, the fact that we can only transmit at 100mW means an attacker does have to be fairly close, and some of my clients do add 'Tempest' type shielding where there is rf leakage, but again, their security comes from encrypted point to point links, and other means
I liked it. In fact, Slashdot has had the only April Fools jokes I've encountered this year. Is it 'cos I'm getting older, my friends just aren't as keen to play japes on me?
Slashdot Mirror
For absolutely needing to upgrade your enterprise-wide linux base in a hurry. Which could happen.
I completely stuffed my first 2 or 3 kernel patches/upgrades/compiles etc, but after a couple of dozen it becomes second nature, and in a stressful (read-Manager/client on your back wanting it done yesterday!!) situation that's what you need.
Plus, it is kind of fun and interesting.
The Empeg (RioCar) also copes with new formats - Ogg Vorbis will be probably be added by the guys there if there is enough call for it. They have said that although they aren't producing any more, they will still support and develop.
And the visuals are lovely.
And you can play Tetris on it, although you have to turn your head on one side:)
Symbol and Aironet/Telxon (now Cisco) did a lot of research into this, and found that they do NOT coexist nicely. Yes they are all in the same 2.4Ghz area, but they are not designed to cooperate with other 2.4Ghz traffic. They are designed to ensure their own traffic gets through even with high interference. In the 802.11 spec, FH and DS coexist reasonably well, but the thing which causes the problems with Bluetooth is that its hop frequency is 100 times faster (IIRC) so it responds faster and breaks 802.11.
I have confirmed this myself on various occasions, and for most clients have proven that 802.11 should be used exclusively. Things may be a little different now we can use the 5Ghz band (and get much higher speeds) for 802.11 and have Bluetooth sitting on 2.4Ghz, but there is not enough of an advantage to do so - it just makes life more difficult as you need to support both forms of comms, and sort out security for them both.
Anyone can video your movements (well authorities or companies can, but they get upset if you try and video them - see Steve's wearcam thread from yesterday. Sorry can't find the link right now)
They do, however, have to give you a copy of all footage and info they have on you if you request it and pay for the privilege.
This is certainly true in the UK and I think it is in the US as well, but feel free to correct me.
I have an old Osborne portable (meaning it's the size of a large suitcase) with 2 8" drives, a 3" screen and 1k of RAM - and I still play Alien Attack on it. Dates from 1976 as far as I can tell, and I have a stack of Dragon games I play on my Emulator - Android Attack, Cuthbert in The Mines, Donkey Kong, Cuthbert goes Skiing, Gridrunner (mmm Gridrunner!!!!) and I had all of these by 1984 so they are at least that old.
Wonderful use for a fast PC, eh? Install MAME and Speccy & Tandy emulators and play better games than most of the junk around today.
Admittedly I play a lot of Unreal Tournament too!
Every day is pretty fun for me - and most of my colleagues. We don't have nerf guns or toys, just an enthusiastic team, a good social life and enough intelligence to make any challenging task fun.
Enjoy becoming good at your job - enjoy being good at your job - andjoy getting better at your job>
Don't get too sucked into all work and no play - get your balance right. Remember the most important thing is your family, work is a way to support them so just find one which challenges you enough but isn't crappy and make it all fun.
I don't sound like I'm on Prozac do I?
It'll end up the same as we will have here in the UK soon - the RIP bill basically states that if you don't give up your encryption key when asked to by the police, you will be imprisoned. Even if you don't have the key! For example a consultant at a company I used to work for had been given a copy of a clients key to hold for safekeeping. The client lost theirs and so had my colleague. The RIP bill could send them both to prison, as the onus would be on them to prove they had lost it (HOW???).
Guilty until proven Innocent - sucks don't it!
The US Govt is just using the WTC incident as a scare to push some pretty heavy anti-freedom legislation through while everyone is still shocked.
Long live Steganography
I've enjoyed it for years and never once did it occur to me that it was about a plane crash. It just is a good uplifting bouncy song with a serious feelgood factor.
Same as most of the other songs on the list
The Cosmo Worlds suite from SGI - you can easily knock up virtual rooms/districts/worlds in minutes with the same ease as creating HTML pages with FrontPage or similar. And it definitely has a useful place - for example:
A 3d model of an engine for mech school - click on a part and info flashes up, followed by sequence for removing/fitting the part, maybe with a virtual tutor offering advice.
You wouldn't use it for document browsing, but that isn't what it was designed to do. It really is a piece of cake to edit manually though.
The thing that astonishes me is people complaining of long download times - you can create detailed areas in a staggeringly small size if you are sensible about your image and texture maps. For really high res stuff, yes you will need more bandwidth, but that is always the case.
I used to work for the major AS400 software house in the UK and had a lot of dealings with token ring (and Twinax!!) and we found the major cause of network issues was the type of card.
Madge cards do not like working in an environment with IBM cards (okay they have sorted things out a wee bit, but it still isn't perfect) because IBM token ring cards run to lower timing tolerances. This is fine where all other cards on the ring accept this, but Madge cards are designed to much higher specifications and easily start beaconing if the previous/next card round the ring is off on its timing.
Your best bet is to get hold of those IBM drivers and use an IBM card - and go for a test environment for a wee while too:)
If we want to hear more about the terrorism we can go to cnn.com etc, but most of what the media is saying today has zero information content - they keep showing the vids, 'experts' keep coming up with ideas and theories, but until there is some identification of the group involved it has no impact on my day to day business, which keeps going as usual. It hasn't changed anything in Scotland, aside from our car park security guard checking a little more carefully.
Granted, I keep checking back to see updates on casualties and it is a relief every time more survivors are rescued, but I do that through other sites.
Slashdot - news for nerds - HD specs definitely come into that category. On with the day.
They had business as usual, but knocked off very sharpish.
It isn't horrible - it's about as poisonous as lead, and used for the same reason as lead is used: it's very heavy.
To find more info google search for "depleted uranium" or New Scientist has lots of info.
I am in a hurry otherwise I would put the link up but NewScientist had article with stats showing very little correlation between DU and cancer - levels around normal statistical distribution. Still, I agree that it has to be a good thing if all waste products of armaments are environmentally sound - DU lasts forever (ish:)
I for one would feel happiest and safest in a Russian space station - they have proven that it will stay inhabitable under very serious conditions of damage and failure which is exactly what you want for a metal box speeding through orbiting debris.
Also, space travel and exploration should be funded by business - who have a much better incentive to get costs down and safety up in the pursuit of the magic profit -> Must attract those tourists/manufacturers/science companies etc etc.
Governments just have far too much in the way of personal agendas.
I can think of nothing I'd like better than to spend a month in a hotel on the mars, say. Sorry to sound daft, but how cool would that be, eh? Standing on another planet has got to be a step along the way to expansion ever onward, and governments aren't necessarily going to want that - businesses will!
You'll find if you read the article that the authors specifically state that they know it is more computationally intensive to do this. It is purely a theoretical exercise in the true spirit of hackerdom -> who cares if it has a purpose, let's just see if we can do it:)
When I was a child, my parents didn't spoil me with expensive computers and toys, but instilled a sense of the value of goods and encouraged my brothers and I to make toys or entertain ourselves out in the fields, hills or sea.
This meant that when Lego (and to a lesser degree Meccano) turned up it was an outstanding toy. Lego packs for the next 10 years or so (for all of us) created a massive base for development of all types of creations - we made mechanical linkages before Technics came out, working wave and wind driven generators, a hideously inaccurate clock and once Technics came out we built a Babbage machine.
By the time I got a Dragon 32 (like a Tandy to the west-of-the-pond types) I had no interest in playing computer cames, but in writing assemblers, games, word processors, etc.
And now we are all in Mensa and have excellent jobs - you've got to get the brain development in early!
My kids are getting Lego and books - and no computer games for years, so they can get the good start my siblings and I got.
I think the definition of power user here is incorrect - there is no Microsoft product which comes into the "Power" category. Clustering windows servers gets you possibly into mid-range, but it's pretty much low end.
For high end, you are talking big iron from IBM, SUN, Cray or SGI, or massive Unix/Linux clusters a la ASCI, Lawrence Livermore etc.
However, if these hackers you mention do get ticked off and learn linux/freeBSD or a.n.other *nix the experience may well be good for them. Some of these people may be the gurus of the future.
Linux car dashboard music player - does mp3 and various others, and you can add whatever codec you like if you can write in Python. Many codecs already exist for it.
Okay, dev seems to have slowed since Diamond bought it, but it still rocks in my car.
I have 580-ish CD's stored on it at 192kb Xing Mp3 compression. In car that is easily good enough. At home I use ogg and it is slightly better than LAME mp3.
So I'm going ogg all the way:)
Okay, jobs.osdn.com may be running M$, but check out the netcraft site for www.osdn.com and compare uptimes.
That is all you should need to know about web server choice.
Frog51
This will definitely give us a good solid dedicated multimedia box, but what I for one really want is my current distro - which is is running a fairly lean, fast kernel - with all these applications added. I'm quite happy to shut down any resource hogging processes while I record/mix/edit etc, but I can't really be bothered setting up a whole new box just for this, or wiping my one as it's quite happy right now.
I'm sure other users are the same - it'll only be the dedicated music makers who will go to these lengths. Of course, maybe us part timers have no need of such low latency, I mean I use Cubase on my Windows partition pretty successfully, but aside from that and Unreal Tournament I would rather dump that partition completely.
Of course, at the moment I have no sound support at all:) A 1.2GHz Athlon, 500Mb RAM, 1.2Tb disk, Voodoo3 all supported, but my SBLive! card...damn!
Frog51
Various analysts - myself included - were not happy about the breakup anyway. It actually seemed to allow MS some extra potential for market stranglehold, and on balance - except for legal costs and stock price fluctuations - they would end up pretty much the same either way.
At least they are just one big monopoly that everyone can watch closely, as opposed to a few smaller monopolies in various markets.
They are doing themselves out of business anyway with the rules surrounding XP - all my corporate clients use Ghost for system backups Enterprise-wide and started getting worried when MS discussed unit-specific licensing, yearly software charges and similar issues, not to mention the appalling uptime you get even from an OS as supposedly solid as W2000. Quite a few of them are already rolling out Star Office, and some are seriously considering Linux as next upgrade (even one client with >4000 desktop users)
I use most major OSes for business reasons, and MS for games. It's just not robust/cost-effective/secure enough for today's world.
Not a troll/flamebait - the facts I get from corporations every day support my viewpoint.
Frog51
Frequency hopping 802.11a is dead easy to hack into - the standard ensures it. Basically, because all devices on the network need to know which frequency to hop to, this info is broadcast, along with timing details and other useful bits and pieces. So you don't need to guess. I have used a £100 802.11a card to hop on to a WLAN in under 2 minutes. It would have been faster, but I was using Winblows that day, and I had to reboot. 802.11a is cheap, low security and dead simple.
802.11b has its advantages - it is a lot harder to hack in a lot of situations, due to ambient rf noise and the chipping code can add a fair amount of front end security if you use a very long sequence, but it too can be monitored. Hence the term WEP - wired equivalent privacy.
I agree with the rest of the post, though:
You wouldn't have sensitive data on your wired network for all to see would you? No, you would encrypt it and use secure encrypted links. Do the same on your wireless LAN.
THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT
Here in the UK, the fact that we can only transmit at 100mW means an attacker does have to be fairly close, and some of my clients do add 'Tempest' type shielding where there is rf leakage, but again, their security comes from encrypted point to point links, and other means
Frog51
A little like me.
I liked it. In fact, Slashdot has had the only April Fools jokes I've encountered this year. Is it 'cos I'm getting older, my friends just aren't as keen to play japes on me?
Frog51
LAVARAND. The coolest random number generator on the web since 1996!
It is always good seeing SGI at the forefront of technology:)
Frog51