For a large university campus, the old phone system would have probably been a very large PBX type system.
If it's anything like the system at my school, you're looking at a phone for every dorm room, office, and possibly class room. The backend hardware for that was probably a bigger investment than what they just layed out for the new VoIP system. Then there's probably a service contract for when things break (which they are almost guaranteed to eventually) or need replacement and upgrades. A contract like that on a 20-phone PBX at a small business can be a several $K per year, so imagine how that scales to a university wide system.
Lastly, the university phone system must have had a lot of trunk lines to the local telco. The phones on campus here use a 5-digit extension for on-campus calls, but are also part of the local telco system if you add the area code and 27 to the extension. If the new system uses a different scheme, such as a single trunk number + extension for calls from off campus, that would change the cost to the telco quite a bit as well. Eliminating the need to have an entire phone exchange or 10 (first 3 digits) reserved for university numbers, and cutting down on trunk lines needed by routing other calls through the internet as direct VoIP calls would have a huge effect on the phone bills.
I don't profess to be a telecom-expert, but I figure this might explain some of the costs associated with the old phone system. If anyone has deeper knowledge of this subject, I would love to learn more.
Re:Sometimes it's not how loud it is...
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 1
Same thing in my dorm. It's not about drowning out the godawful rap coming from next door, it's about finding the right "ammunition" to make them want to turn it off and leave. Tower of Power and P-Funk seemed to work pretty well this year.
I've been working with one of the Physics profs at my school (U of Rochester) for the past year, helping him update the software they use for cosmic particle experiments. We use a data aquisition board and particle detectors designed by FermiLab. The software runs on Linux, and accesses the DAQ board through the serial port. My job has mostly been adding a GUI to the program, so that the students running the experiments can concentrate more on getting results than understanding the weird command line interface for the program. For more info on the project, see the FermiLab page for the QuarkNet project, and the PARTICLE project page at the university.
The post is referring more to the card system used on many campuses, not the Blackboard Courseware. My school (University of Rochester, NY) uses one of the versions of these swipe cards. The University uses them as Student Id's, building keys for the dorms and for both meal plans and an on-campus debit account. They have nothing to do with the network courseware that we use (WebCT, a godawful kludge). All of the hardware refers to the cards as AT&T One Cards. As far as I know, there haven't been any security issues with the system, but it seems to have lots of bugs anyway (The readers used on vending and washing machines have a slight tendency to charge you and forget to put the "money" into the machine, so you get nothing. Things like that).
With the high cost of everything on campus, I wouldn't be shocked if some enterprising individuals tried to exploit this. The food service company essentially charges monopoly prices for everything, since there is no alternative place to eat if you don't have a car or can't cook.
It does exist. It is called KitchenSync. Currently, it is part of the CVS tree for kdepim, and is scheduled to appear in KDE 3.2 You can have a look at the latest available tarball here. It works well enough. Currently it syncs to Agenda V3 or Qtopia/Opie based handhelds, and supports syncing addressbook, todolist and calendar to KAddressbook and KOrganizer. Works as expected, but it is still pretty much alpha quality. With enough time, this program should be able to sync just about anything to your desktop. A big thank you to the KDE and Handhelds.org people working on this.
I'm positive that this has been talked about in previous stories about both Palladium and TCPA, but I feel that it is important to highlight the distinction once more. TCPA is a hardware product. Palladium is the next level of system-wide DRM that Microsoft is planning on including in Windows Longhorn or Greenhorn or whatever they feel like calling it tomorrow. The TCPA spec calls for code signing for the system BIOS, and for a special chip to handle encryption duties, taking that load off the processor. This is a good thing, as it could make PGP encryption and signing for email transparent, as well as allow for code-signing and verification in the background. It can be turned off if you don't want it, but it can only be a Good Thing. It doesn't mean you can't run anything other than Windows on your hardware. It means that proper security is implemented at the hardware level, making it more difficult to install a trojaned program (ie, the download is automatically checked for the proper checksum etc) With the load taken off the CPU, better crypto for online transactions and things like remote desktop access would no longer cause performance problems.
Palladium would likely make use of this hardware to take care of the crypto aspects of DRM, but it is a part of Windows. If you don't buy Windows, you have nothing to worry about. Microsoft would have to manage to replace every DVD player, computer and MP3 capable device in the world to make DRM mandatory. Palladium may not be great for consumer's rights, but it is also not forced upon anyone. We still have a choice. Run some form of *nix on your current hardware, or buy a Mac. This shall pass.
Anyone think there is any truth to their claims of one million bit encryption? Seems like it would take an awful long time to work with, too long to be really usefull. I thought 4096 keys for current methods were deemed strong enough for at least a few years. Hell, we just had an article about 1024 bit keys needing 1 year and/or large quantities of $$$ to break, how can they claim everything else has been broken in the last 5 years (Brute forced doesn't matter. Anything can be cracked given enough time, flawed methods = cracks without major work for many keysets), and that competing techs use only 256 bits? Hmmm... this needs some investigating. I do like the bit about the NSA wanting to prevent them from exporting(just like every non-flawed encryption system). PGP went through the same thing if I recall correctly, and there were "do not export to warnings" on IE just for having 128-bit SSL. Seems like this may be a little bit of hype and marketing to dig through.
(Congrats and Kudos to them if they pulled it off, but I remain skeptical as always until I see some full-on analysis from experts in the field, not a brochure-derived article)
One would think that once the proper security measures are put in place, even if someone looks at the Google cache, none of the scripts, links or data on those pages would be reachable without proper authentication. I didn't go look at them myself (Rather not get kicked out of school for "Hacking the Army"), but it sounds like the pages in question searched and registered data remotely from the Dod servers. So even if the forms are still in the cache, they would at least require authentication to use once the real sites are properly locked down. This is absolutely the DoD's fault for leaving these sites open.
On a side note, anyone take the time to have a look at what they are running these sites on?
Sadly, the problem is not that there is no encryption in the hardware, but that the encryption built-in to 802.11 hardware (WEP) was not implemented properly. Here is a nice summary of the problems. Essentially, WEP can be cracked in a very short time with minimal effort. Using something like IPSec or SSH to encrypt the data in software before it is transmitted can help secure the data, but does not prevent someone from using the network for other purposes. In the case of businesses or government offices, if the data needs to be kept safe, it should remain on a wired network, with no connection to the outside world.
CNN picked up on the "421 burners" crap the RIAA spewed out after the copy shop bust the other day. I guess even trusted news organizations can't be trusted to cut through the crap for us anymore.
First they say we can't play CDs in our computers (evil pirates that we are), then they want us to play them in our computers so that they can track what we are(not) buying.
If "everyone gets their music from {insert current trendy P2P app here}", then who is going to buy these CDs so they can get more advertising fodder?
On Mac, yes, IE is a bit more friendly to your system. On Windows, messing with individual cookies was a matter of viewing the cookies folder with My Computer or Explorer and deleteing the files directly. As far as uninstall goes, IE for Mac can't tie directly into the operating system, so removing it is quite simple. On Windows, especially XP, removing IE is all but impossible. Even the tool MS released to comply with the recent settlement only hides the IE buttons on the Start Menu and Desktop, and lets you reset the default web browser. It doesn't actually delete it. I think win 95 may have been the last version where it would have been possible to remove IE and have the computer continue to boot up, much less work productively.
Sounds like your friend might have his definition of "standard" a bit backwards. A standard is an open spec that is agreed upon by those who would use it. The MS definition of a standard is "This is how you will code today." A bit different, no?
Odds are his javascript code is based on Microsoft's IE "standards", so of course it won't work quite right in Mozilla. The standards he claims Mozilla is making up are all of the W3C standards that MS pulls the old "embrace and extend" moves on. I think you can safely disregard most of his comments as hot air, and maybe try to teach him a little bit about how standards really work.
While I think that creating more local nets like we see here is great, it will take much more than a project like this to get rid of the "Oppressive ISPs." The community in the article is still getting net access through a DSL modem, so they are still beholden to the Telco powers-that-be. If enough communities were to start up projects like this, and link together using their own methods, then a new form of Internet could take shape independent of the Telcos. Imagine a mesh network on a national or international scale created from local nets and linked through purely public lines. Either that, or enough such networks sharing a few high-bandwidth connections along with freenet and tunnelling to make any monitoring and censorship pointless. The ISP's would have to adapt if enough communities simply shared one connection. The one's that refuse to move away from "one person/household == one account" will hopefully wither away. As much as the Internet has become a big part of the way we live, we must take a greater part in shaping the way it develops if we want to retain the freedom we have with it, or to gain back the freedom we had before the Internet was declared a different arena from any other global communication tool (See DMCA, COPA, the recent decree from Panama etc for examples of this problem).
No comments, and their server is gone (I get "Connection was refused..." from Mozilla whether I click the link or type it in myself). Impressive, most impressive.
This isn't even true peer to peer. Sounds more like XDrive or other online backup services, but with the ability to use it with your cell phone and send stuff to other people's storage areas. The data isn't stored on the phone, and you can't directly share things between phones without network coverage. Why are they bothering with this? Work on getting phones, wireless pdas etc to use cellular or a longer range variant of 802.11 (With better security of course) to create a strongly meshed network that links up to cell nodes. The end result, direct connection if someone is within a few hops of your device, network service with fewer dead spots, since your signal can hop phone to phone until it can reach a network node, and better control over the energy use on the phone. If you are within range of X other phones, lower the power output of the phone to conserve battery life. As long as you have a few possible paths to the main network, you don't need your phone to be able to transmit over a range of X miles between cell towers. Verizon, Cingular, Voicestream and AT&T, hope you are listening.
TechTV had a segment a while back about a submerged liquid cooled system. They placed the mobo and all components in what ammounted to a short, wide fish tank with 2 halves with a small air gap between them. The half with the computer in it was filled with this liquid made by 3M which is apparently completely inert and non-conductive, and can reach sub-zero C temps without freezing. The other half of the box contained a radiator, and was filled with alcohol and dry ice, if i remember correctly. The liquid was pumped through the radiator and into the computer half of the box, with an outlet directly above the CPU, and Athlon sans heatsink, and one to circulate the liquid around the rest of the components. The whole setup was then closed in. A properly sealed version would run without needing new liquid, though theirs was evaporating since the top was not locked down. The dry ice/alcohol would need changing regularly of course. The got the whole system, including CPU temp, down to -30 C, when it stopped working. 3M markets the liquid for cooling super computers. Wonder how fast you could overclock the system like this? They didn't try, although when the turned the pump off, the Athlon started boiling the coolant! Maybe when I have more money than god, or at least CowboyNeal...
Accenture has been around for a while. They are the consulting, not the accounting wing from Andersen. They help companies make their ideas into real products and stuff like that. IBM probably figures that they can make a big chunk of change in this field two ways. The direct revenue from consulting, and I suppose the PWC consultants will be "suggesting" IBM solutions for their clients a lot more often now. Win-win for IBM if they can manage the business right.
Nope, seems that they own both domains. Clicking the "today's news" link on the zdnet.com home page links to zdnet.com.com I guess they use that one for their news stuff that changes more often, the rest of the url is based on the date. Kinda odd though.
The antigames site linked to in the article has been down all day as either "Cannot find site," or more recently, as a blank page with "This site has been taken down due to a denial of service attack which keeps persisting, sorry for the incovenience." It seems that the Slashdot Effect has become more infamous as of late. I implore you, fellow readers of Slashdot, we must use our mighty powers for good, rather than evil! Then, the power of Slashdot will be a force to be respected, not feared.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's anything like the system at my school, you're looking at a phone for every dorm room, office, and possibly class room. The backend hardware for that was probably a bigger investment than what they just layed out for the new VoIP system. Then there's probably a service contract for when things break (which they are almost guaranteed to eventually) or need replacement and upgrades. A contract like that on a 20-phone PBX at a small business can be a several $K per year, so imagine how that scales to a university wide system.
Lastly, the university phone system must have had a lot of trunk lines to the local telco. The phones on campus here use a 5-digit extension for on-campus calls, but are also part of the local telco system if you add the area code and 27 to the extension. If the new system uses a different scheme, such as a single trunk number + extension for calls from off campus, that would change the cost to the telco quite a bit as well. Eliminating the need to have an entire phone exchange or 10 (first 3 digits) reserved for university numbers, and cutting down on trunk lines needed by routing other calls through the internet as direct VoIP calls would have a huge effect on the phone bills.
I don't profess to be a telecom-expert, but I figure this might explain some of the costs associated with the old phone system. If anyone has deeper knowledge of this subject, I would love to learn more.
Same thing in my dorm. It's not about drowning out the godawful rap coming from next door, it's about finding the right "ammunition" to make them want to turn it off and leave.
Tower of Power and P-Funk seemed to work pretty well this year.
I've been working with one of the Physics profs at my school (U of Rochester) for the past year, helping him update the software they use for cosmic particle experiments. We use a data aquisition board and particle detectors designed by FermiLab. The software runs on Linux, and accesses the DAQ board through the serial port. My job has mostly been adding a GUI to the program, so that the students running the experiments can concentrate more on getting results than understanding the weird command line interface for the program. For more info on the project, see the FermiLab page for the QuarkNet project, and the PARTICLE project page at the university.
Ah hell, fscked up my html. Not enough coffee tonight. That said, they need to bring This game to linux. Sorry bout that.
I personally hope that they do some tandem development and bring This one to Linux as well. Then they can be in the Big Leagues.
With the high cost of everything on campus, I wouldn't be shocked if some enterprising individuals tried to exploit this. The food service company essentially charges monopoly prices for everything, since there is no alternative place to eat if you don't have a car or can't cook.
It does exist. It is called KitchenSync. Currently, it is part of the CVS tree for kdepim, and is scheduled to appear in KDE 3.2 You can have a look at the latest available tarball here. It works well enough. Currently it syncs to Agenda V3 or Qtopia/Opie based handhelds, and supports syncing addressbook, todolist and calendar to KAddressbook and KOrganizer. Works as expected, but it is still pretty much alpha quality. With enough time, this program should be able to sync just about anything to your desktop. A big thank you to the KDE and Handhelds.org people working on this.
I'm positive that this has been talked about in previous stories about both Palladium and TCPA, but I feel that it is important to highlight the distinction once more. TCPA is a hardware product. Palladium is the next level of system-wide DRM that Microsoft is planning on including in Windows Longhorn or Greenhorn or whatever they feel like calling it tomorrow. The TCPA spec calls for code signing for the system BIOS, and for a special chip to handle encryption duties, taking that load off the processor. This is a good thing, as it could make PGP encryption and signing for email transparent, as well as allow for code-signing and verification in the background. It can be turned off if you don't want it, but it can only be a Good Thing. It doesn't mean you can't run anything other than Windows on your hardware. It means that proper security is implemented at the hardware level, making it more difficult to install a trojaned program (ie, the download is automatically checked for the proper checksum etc) With the load taken off the CPU, better crypto for online transactions and things like remote desktop access would no longer cause performance problems.
Palladium would likely make use of this hardware to take care of the crypto aspects of DRM, but it is a part of Windows. If you don't buy Windows, you have nothing to worry about. Microsoft would have to manage to replace every DVD player, computer and MP3 capable device in the world to make DRM mandatory. Palladium may not be great for consumer's rights, but it is also not forced upon anyone. We still have a choice. Run some form of *nix on your current hardware, or buy a Mac. This shall pass.
My 0.10 shekels
Anyone think there is any truth to their claims of one million bit encryption? Seems like it would take an awful long time to work with, too long to be really usefull. I thought 4096 keys for current methods were deemed strong enough for at least a few years. Hell, we just had an article about 1024 bit keys needing 1 year and/or large quantities of $$$ to break, how can they claim everything else has been broken in the last 5 years (Brute forced doesn't matter. Anything can be cracked given enough time, flawed methods = cracks without major work for many keysets), and that competing techs use only 256 bits? Hmmm... this needs some investigating. I do like the bit about the NSA wanting to prevent them from exporting(just like every non-flawed encryption system). PGP went through the same thing if I recall correctly, and there were "do not export to warnings" on IE just for having 128-bit SSL. Seems like this may be a little bit of hype and marketing to dig through.
(Congrats and Kudos to them if they pulled it off, but I remain skeptical as always until I see some full-on analysis from experts in the field, not a brochure-derived article)
One would think that once the proper security measures are put in place, even if someone looks at the Google cache, none of the scripts, links or data on those pages would be reachable without proper authentication. I didn't go look at them myself (Rather not get kicked out of school for "Hacking the Army"), but it sounds like the pages in question searched and registered data remotely from the Dod servers. So even if the forms are still in the cache, they would at least require authentication to use once the real sites are properly locked down. This is absolutely the DoD's fault for leaving these sites open.
On a side note, anyone take the time to have a look at what they are running these sites on?
Sadly, the problem is not that there is no encryption in the hardware, but that the encryption built-in to 802.11 hardware (WEP) was not implemented properly. Here is a nice summary of the problems. Essentially, WEP can be cracked in a very short time with minimal effort. Using something like IPSec or SSH to encrypt the data in software before it is transmitted can help secure the data, but does not prevent someone from using the network for other purposes. In the case of businesses or government offices, if the data needs to be kept safe, it should remain on a wired network, with no connection to the outside world.
CNN picked up on the "421 burners" crap the RIAA spewed out after the copy shop bust the other day. I guess even trusted news organizations can't be trusted to cut through the crap for us anymore.
First they say we can't play CDs in our computers (evil pirates that we are), then they want us to play them in our computers so that they can track what we are(not) buying.
If "everyone gets their music from {insert current trendy P2P app here}", then who is going to buy these CDs so they can get more advertising fodder?
On Mac, yes, IE is a bit more friendly to your system. On Windows, messing with individual cookies was a matter of viewing the cookies folder with My Computer or Explorer and deleteing the files directly. As far as uninstall goes, IE for Mac can't tie directly into the operating system, so removing it is quite simple. On Windows, especially XP, removing IE is all but impossible. Even the tool MS released to comply with the recent settlement only hides the IE buttons on the Start Menu and Desktop, and lets you reset the default web browser. It doesn't actually delete it. I think win 95 may have been the last version where it would have been possible to remove IE and have the computer continue to boot up, much less work productively.
Sounds like your friend might have his definition of "standard" a bit backwards. A standard is an open spec that is agreed upon by those who would use it. The MS definition of a standard is "This is how you will code today." A bit different, no?
Odds are his javascript code is based on Microsoft's IE "standards", so of course it won't work quite right in Mozilla. The standards he claims Mozilla is making up are all of the W3C standards that MS pulls the old "embrace and extend" moves on. I think you can safely disregard most of his comments as hot air, and maybe try to teach him a little bit about how standards really work.
While I think that creating more local nets like we see here is great, it will take much more than a project like this to get rid of the "Oppressive ISPs."
The community in the article is still getting net access through a DSL modem, so they are still beholden to the Telco powers-that-be. If enough communities were to start up projects like this, and link together using their own methods, then a new form of Internet could take shape independent of the Telcos.
Imagine a mesh network on a national or international scale created from local nets and linked through purely public lines. Either that, or enough such networks sharing a few high-bandwidth connections along with freenet and tunnelling to make any monitoring and censorship pointless. The ISP's would have to adapt if enough communities simply shared one connection. The one's that refuse to move away from "one person/household == one account" will hopefully wither away.
As much as the Internet has become a big part of the way we live, we must take a greater part in shaping the way it develops if we want to retain the freedom we have with it, or to gain back the freedom we had before the Internet was declared a different arena from any other global communication tool (See DMCA, COPA, the recent decree from Panama etc for examples of this problem).
Funded by DARPA = Eventual military use for this...
So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?
No comments, and their server is gone (I get "Connection was refused..." from Mozilla whether I click the link or type it in myself). Impressive, most impressive.
This isn't even true peer to peer. Sounds more like XDrive or other online backup services, but with the ability to use it with your cell phone and send stuff to other people's storage areas. The data isn't stored on the phone, and you can't directly share things between phones without network coverage. Why are they bothering with this? Work on getting phones, wireless pdas etc to use cellular or a longer range variant of 802.11 (With better security of course) to create a strongly meshed network that links up to cell nodes. The end result, direct connection if someone is within a few hops of your device, network service with fewer dead spots, since your signal can hop phone to phone until it can reach a network node, and better control over the energy use on the phone. If you are within range of X other phones, lower the power output of the phone to conserve battery life. As long as you have a few possible paths to the main network, you don't need your phone to be able to transmit over a range of X miles between cell towers. Verizon, Cingular, Voicestream and AT&T, hope you are listening.
TechTV had a segment a while back about a submerged liquid cooled system. They placed the mobo and all components in what ammounted to a short, wide fish tank with 2 halves with a small air gap between them. The half with the computer in it was filled with this liquid made by 3M which is apparently completely inert and non-conductive, and can reach sub-zero C temps without freezing. The other half of the box contained a radiator, and was filled with alcohol and dry ice, if i remember correctly. The liquid was pumped through the radiator and into the computer half of the box, with an outlet directly above the CPU, and Athlon sans heatsink, and one to circulate the liquid around the rest of the components. The whole setup was then closed in. A properly sealed version would run without needing new liquid, though theirs was evaporating since the top was not locked down. The dry ice/alcohol would need changing regularly of course. The got the whole system, including CPU temp, down to -30 C, when it stopped working. 3M markets the liquid for cooling super computers. Wonder how fast you could overclock the system like this? They didn't try, although when the turned the pump off, the Athlon started boiling the coolant! Maybe when I have more money than god, or at least CowboyNeal...
Accenture has been around for a while. They are the consulting, not the accounting wing from Andersen. They help companies make their ideas into real products and stuff like that. IBM probably figures that they can make a big chunk of change in this field two ways. The direct revenue from consulting, and I suppose the PWC consultants will be "suggesting" IBM solutions for their clients a lot more often now. Win-win for IBM if they can manage the business right.
Nope, seems that they own both domains. Clicking the "today's news" link on the zdnet.com home page links to zdnet.com.com I guess they use that one for their news stuff that changes more often, the rest of the url is based on the date. Kinda odd though.
The antigames site linked to in the article has been down all day as either "Cannot find site," or more recently, as a blank page with "This site has been taken down due to a denial of service attack which keeps persisting, sorry for the incovenience." It seems that the Slashdot Effect has become more infamous as of late. I implore you, fellow readers of Slashdot, we must use our mighty powers for good, rather than evil! Then, the power of Slashdot will be a force to be respected, not feared.
Fools, little do they realize the powers they are dealing with!
why not a . (dot) bomb.... oh wait