While the crime rates in Britain soar, what do we see: > An estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras observe people going
Okay. Lets take pictures of all those fearless criminals. Seems that it's higly unlikely that all of those cameras matter. Out of the many tens of thousands of criminal acts that have taken place recently the cameras can only help with a limited few:
> In the past two months, British police used or > publicized CCTV imagery during investigations > into a 12-year-old robbing a store at gunpoint, > the disappearance of a doctor, attacks by a > serial rapist, a father and son hit by a train >, laptops stolen from a school and a soccer riot.
This is a nightmare of stupidity. I am so glad I don't live there.
> Soho resident Brooke Hartney, 24, a cafe > manager, said she felt comforted by the > cameras, including a fixed one right outside > her apartment bedroom window.
I was looking at the live internet stream coming from that camera outside her bedroom window. She should learn to close her shades.
Dude, Kodak's been around for over 100 years. I think if you review Kodak's history, you'll find that Kodak was THE camera company for the better part of the last 100 years.
> they had never sold high-quality film cameras Get a clue.
> I know I'd work just as hard if I was in a communist country and my "paycheck" was the same as everyone elses, as long as it was run at least as well as my existing government
Some people I work with don't get an hours worth of work done in an 8 hour day. Those folks would probably be willing to work just as hard for less money/rewards.
Other people I work with work 60 and 80 hour weeks and are very successfull, and well paid. These folks, I'm sure, would spend all that extra time doing other things instead of working if they didn't get extra rewards. They might spend time playing with their kids, or going fishing. Why give yourself a headache for no reason?
In capitalism people who put forth extra efforts are likely to get extra rewards.
Back in the 80's some people who were putting in a lot of extra time and trouble ended up getting rich. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc...
Would ( name any successful rich person you know ) have spent as much time and energy doing what they do if they didn't have the possibility of getting rich?? Maybe some would.
Of all of the telephone companies that have lied to me while trying to sell me service, MCI was the most boldface lier.
I guess It's not surprising that they tried to cheat their competitors too.
We've never had MCI. Once they called, and told me wife that they were going to give us $20 to make up for all of the long distance phone problems we'd been having. When the verifier comes on the line [to verify that we wanted to switch to MCI], just say yes to all the questions.
It comes down to a business decision. Can the business be competative w/out "????" Fill in the the question marks.
If you are in a government protected monopoly (phones, power, schools), or a government funded organisation (US Department of anything, etc) , then you don't have to be competative, and you can chastise your engineers and scientists for wanting better tools. (What makes you think you should be as productive as possible, anyway?) You can't loose ( market share.. ) , because your the only show in town.
BUT, if you are a private corporatation, that has competitors, you are running a risk. If your higly paid R&D staff isn't as productive as possible because some IT sloth doesn't think you should need some tool or capability, your company runs the risk of falling behind... This is real... This is a reason why Large S&P 500 companies stop being profitable.
Do you suppose the R&D staff a Xerox has been working at their highest potential for the last few years? I doubt it.. Perhaps, had they been given just a little bit more, better tools, better environment, more freedom to configure systems the way they need them, Xerox could have more quickly developed better products that would have sold more.
Do you suppose that Engineers/Scientists will be real happy with a company that never gives them the tools they want? How costly is it when Xerox looses a talented, experienced engineer to Canon, or Lexmark, or HP? It's hard to measure, but it's a real issue. If you loose all of your most talented employees to your competition, your screwed.
There is no doubt that it costs a lot of money to have good tools. And it's also clear that some things, like 802.11b have a lot of ~hidden costs that make them unexpectedly expensive to deploy.
It's true that you can only use the phone when within range of the Access Point. But for environments that already have the access points, it's perfect.
Actually, It's like a BETTER cordless phone. It's better because with a simple home cordless phone you can't roam from base station to base station. The 802.11B phones should allow you to roam from access point to access point w/out loosing connection.
Cell phones cost the phone + $20 - $?? each, and usage is measured by the minute.
802.11B telephony will cost the phone + the access points, unlimited usage. And if you already have the access points, then all you need to buy is the phone.
The
use of nitrous oxide (N20) as a performance enhancement has been traced
back to World War II, where it was employed to give Allied aircraft
"emergency" boosts in both airspeed and altitude capabilities.
Last year, near Rochester, NY, I took my 8 year old and 12 year old out at 4 AM to see the meteor shower. We counted
over 100 in about 30 minutes, and got sick of counting. It was totally awswome. We took out a tarp which we spread in a field, and crawled in our sleeping bags.
We stayed out for about 2 hours. We were still seeing 1 every couple of minutes when we went back inside.
If you had your eyes open, and were looking anyplace in the sky, you couldn't help but see them.
1) Why do you assume that since it's covering the whole building there
will be a lot of people? I like the the network where most people
use wired ethernet when they can, but they can fall back wireless
when out of their office, say visting a coworkers office, or working in
a LAB, or checking system status on a PDA.
2) The number of people using the network is only 1 factor in a larger
equation for determining the viability of WLAN. Depending on usage,
a single WLAN Access Point may not be fast enough for 1 person. Or
it could be fast enough for 500 people. All depends what they are
using it for. Are servers used extensively?, for Files? Applications?
Do people surf the net? Do processing jobs suck large files over
the network?
3) This article does not state that adjacent channels won't interfere.
They are saying that they won't interfere VERY MUCH. If you are setting
up a 3D grid of WLAN AP's, full coverage with a little interference using
4 channels is better then what can be done using 3 channels. With
only 3 channels with 2 AP's per floor Some adjacent AP's will need to be
on the same channel. That would be bad. With 4 channels, the overall network capacity is a little lower, but you have better coverage.
4) I Agree, people like you should definitely pay somebody for
a site survey. Probably you should hire someone for the entire network
design, not just wireless. I'd be glad to do the job, I'll sub the
work out for $10,000, and put the other $190,000 in my wallet.
This topic is particularly apt, as I was just now thinking I should try to see If I can find a version of Opera that works better.
I have a major pet peeve about "one way" communication. I always wonder if I'm wasting my time to carefully document a crash. Maybe the but has already been fixed after all... I'm not going to go the extra mile unless I can get some idea that I'm breaking new ground, and not just kicking a dead horse.
I have submitted some bug reports for Opera.. And I'd even be willing to trouble shoot, debug, and even submit diffs, if I could only get some feedback from the project team regarding the dispostion of the problems I submitted.
I Like Opera. I'd like it to not lock up once or twice a day like it does.
I predict that the Valanti Disney Warner Microsoft Act of 2015 (named partially in memory of Jack Valenti) will, in additon to increasing the legal limited copywrite term from 175 years to infinity minus 1 day, also reassign the ownership of all valuable public domain art from the public domain to whatever corporation can profit from them the most.
After all, as the new law's text will read, "what is the sense in having art if no corporation can profit from it?
Disney will be required Pay for all their new material by contributing $750,000 to the retirement fund for the Microsoft Geeks that run their "P2P DDOS Strike Force" that has been successful in knocking 99% of all P2P file traders, and FTP shareware sites off the net.
I found through months of testing with 802.11b gear from several vendors like Cisco/Aironet and Lucent/Wavelan that a I NEVER got over 5 Mb/s, and usually stayed under 4 Mb/s. This is less then 50% of advertised 802.11b radio rate, 11 Mb/s.
abhikhurana said I found that in real world conditions, 802.11a averaged four times faster than 802.11b"
Well, 54 Mb/s is about 5 times 11 Mb/s. But abhikhurana only saw a 4x improvement. This lines up well with my own tests show 3 - 4 times improvement.
So that 54 Mb/s rate sounds like about 1/2 of a 100 Mb/s ethernet. But in reality you will only get about 10 - 15 Mb/s under optimum conditions, and it is shared bandwidth, not switched.
Also consider that the range is greatly reduced. Keep in mind that in 802.11b the farther out you are, and the more interference there is, the lower you rate is. It will switch from 11, to 5.5 to 2, and then 1 as the signal gets weaker or more corrupted. The same is true for 802.11A, accept the range is way smaller, so you will get a reduced rate at ranges where 802.11b is still running at full rate.
Unless you are really trying to squeeze more bits down the pipe and your range is small it probably doesn't make sense to upgrade.
Someone should put up a dual NIC router host that is on local broadband internet, and can get on the honey pot WLAN too. Then hack the AP's to make them point to that dual NIC machine as an internet gateway. It would be nice having a small WLAN with 5 AP's available for anyone to use for surfing the internet. ( And the FEDS can even have their fun analyzing the logs.. )
Most heavily polluted? Cite your sources..
on
Sili-Hudson Valley?
·
· Score: 1
Now and then I hear an offhanded remark like that, seem like something the local media here in Rochester would mention once in a while. I've never seen a study or ranking that shows Rochester is one of the most heavily polluted cities in the US.
You may be mixed up. Might you be thinking about how heavily polluted the Hudson River is due to PCB dumping by IBM?
Everytime I here people say stuff this "KDE and GNOME are poor substitues for the Windows desktop" it makes my stomach tighten a little. It's not true.
Maybe KDE or GNOME have their problems. But as long as I can kick off a mail reader, web browser, word processor, and a spreadsheet, the "desktop" software doesn't really matter that much for 99% of users.
As much as people talk about how they can't live without MS tools, I used "vi" for all my document editing for years. I think most people could get along with star office, or other Linux based tools just fine if that's what they were given.
People always talk about file attachments, and interoperability, claiming they need to have Word because everyone else uses it. The neat thing about being a gov't is that you get to set the standards. If you want to deal with the gov't you've got to follow their rules. No Words attachments allowed!
At home I've gotten so annoyed with every piece of SPAM that want's to load web pages over my slow modem, that I now read all my mail on Linux using balsa. It doesn't load HTML by default. I use Netscape and Opera for surfing, and occasionally will run IE of some page won't work right on Netscape. That doesn't happen very often.
For 99% of work place users Linux would be just fine in my opinion. A few will need to run apps that don't have good enough Linux analogs. But that would be few.
Home is a different story. People want to be able to buy, install, and run shrink-wrapped software. People don't wan't to have to hire a UNIX guru to administer their home PCs.
I don't believe that this simputer effort even makes sense. Their are a lot of people here in USA that could afford a computer if they needed or wanted one, but don't have one, because they are not necessary.
It is hoped that the villagers who would use a shared simputer could afford to buy their own $2 smart card. How will those same villagers be able to afford the $5 worth of batteries that this thing is going to burn through 2 or 3 times a week, or even daily under heavy use?
What problem is the the the simputer going to solve for the poor Indian? Balance his checkbook? address book? Notepad? calculator? calendar? Surf the net on a QVGA screen? ( is their a phone? ) spreadsheet? database? email?
A while back someone wrote to Linux Journal asking for help getting FTP server working. The editors printed the letter with an answer from some Shmuck who said basically "You don't want FTP, you want SSH, so you can use SCP to move files. SCP is way better. Just go download SSH and install it."
How very arrogant.
How does the Shmuck know that this guy has a client that can run SSH? I agree the SSH is nice, and probably better, and I agree with advocating it. But he should have answered the question about FTP at least.
Re:vi on Solaris 5.7 still crashes!
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
Good Catch.
For those who aren't familure with marks, that last command should have been c'd not c'm as I wrote.
This reminds me of a bug I found once in a homegrown toolkit I was helping to maintain. It had had a class which could log and printout everything there was to know about the program it was created in. It printed out the link date, the size of the binary, and the explicit full path to the binary, arguments, run date and a bunch of other stuff.
I noticed one day that whenever we turned on this object, the programs that used it would get slow. For some people they would start really slowly, adding 20 - 30 seconds on to a 5 second runtime. Come to find out, the guy who wrote the code was using system() to call the the shell "which" command. And this caused a new shell to be created and even cause.cshrc to be sourced. Interestingly, had anyone executed a program from.cshrc that used this feature, there would have been an infinite recursive system() call loop.
Some of these people had so much crap in their.cshrc file that it took 20 seconds to start a new shell! But that was back when 20 people with "X terminals" ( not xterms.. ) were sharing a Sparc 10 that had 128 megs of RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't look like they are dropping to me. Take a look at the first two Google hits.
/ 21 /205139.shtmli n.pdf
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/3
http://www.claytoncramer.com/Brita
While the crime rates in Britain soar, what do we see:
> An estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras observe people going
Okay. Lets take pictures of all those fearless criminals. Seems that it's higly unlikely that all of those cameras matter. Out of the many tens of thousands of criminal acts that have taken place recently the cameras can only help with a limited few:
> In the past two months, British police used or > publicized CCTV imagery during investigations
> into a 12-year-old robbing a store at gunpoint,
> the disappearance of a doctor, attacks by a
> serial rapist, a father and son hit by a train
>, laptops stolen from a school and a soccer riot.
This is a nightmare of stupidity. I am so glad I don't live there.
> Soho resident Brooke Hartney, 24, a cafe
> manager, said she felt comforted by the
> cameras, including a fixed one right outside
> her apartment bedroom window.
I was looking at the live internet stream coming from that camera outside her bedroom window. She should learn to close her shades.
gs
Dude;
> not everyone can code 4000 (good) lines in a week
Especially not network administrators.
> Yes it is a horrible plan (ebay selling combined with windshield repair)
I'm sure you'll make good with all your ebay selling and windshield repair. Clearly both more lucrative then writing (good) software.
> and plan on hiring part time java programmers
Which part of your business are they going to help with? The windshield repair? or the ebay selling?
> I still come back here even though 95% of the posters on slashdot haven't a clue
I see you what you mean.
k
> But... Kodak was never a camera company
Dude, Kodak's been around for over 100 years. I think if you review Kodak's history, you'll find that Kodak was THE camera company for the better part of the last 100 years.
> they had never sold high-quality film cameras
Get a clue.
Interesting...
> I know I'd work just as hard if I was in a communist country and my "paycheck" was the same as everyone elses, as long as it was run at least as well as my existing government
Some people I work with don't get an hours worth of work done in an 8 hour day. Those folks would probably be willing to work just as hard for less money/rewards.
Other people I work with work 60 and 80 hour weeks and are very successfull, and well paid. These folks, I'm sure, would spend all that extra time doing other things instead of working if they didn't get extra rewards. They might spend time playing with their kids, or going fishing. Why give yourself a headache for no reason?
In capitalism people who put forth extra efforts are likely to get extra rewards.
Back in the 80's some people who were putting in a lot of extra time and trouble ended up getting rich. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc...
Would ( name any successful rich person you know ) have spent as much time and energy doing what they do if they didn't have the possibility of getting rich?? Maybe some would.
So the only way to not dick someone over is to never sell anything??
So the whole world must be covered with aggrarian societies so everyone can grow their own food, so nobody will need to buy?
Sounds limited to me.
Of all of the telephone companies that have lied to me while trying to sell me service, MCI was the most boldface lier.
I guess It's not surprising that they tried to cheat their competitors too.
We've never had MCI. Once they called, and told me wife that they were going to give us $20 to make up for all of the long distance phone problems we'd been having. When the verifier comes on the line [to verify that we wanted to switch to MCI], just say yes to all the questions.
I avoid MCI and AT&T. They are both liers.
Kevin
It comes down to a business decision. Can the business be competative w/out "????" Fill in the the question marks.
.. This is a reason why Large S&P 500 companies stop being profitable.
If you are in a government protected monopoly (phones, power, schools), or a government funded organisation (US Department of anything, etc) , then you don't have to be competative, and you can chastise your engineers and scientists for wanting better tools. (What makes you think you should be as productive as possible, anyway?) You can't loose ( market share.. ) , because your the only show in town.
BUT, if you are a private corporatation, that has competitors, you are running a risk. If your higly paid R&D staff isn't as productive as possible because some IT sloth doesn't think you should need some tool or capability, your company runs the risk of falling behind... This is real.
Do you suppose the R&D staff a Xerox has been working at their highest potential for the last few years? I doubt it.. Perhaps, had they been given just a little bit more, better tools, better environment, more freedom to configure systems the way they need them, Xerox could have more quickly developed better products that would have sold more.
Do you suppose that Engineers/Scientists will be real happy with a company that never gives them the tools they want? How costly is it when Xerox looses a talented, experienced engineer to Canon, or Lexmark, or HP? It's hard to measure, but it's a real issue. If you loose all of your most talented employees to your competition, your screwed.
There is no doubt that it costs a lot of money to have good tools. And it's also clear that some things, like 802.11b have a lot of ~hidden costs that make them unexpectedly expensive to deploy.
But don't forget the cost of "not deploying."
It's true that you can only use the phone when within range of the Access Point. But for environments that already have the access points, it's perfect.
Actually, It's like a BETTER cordless phone. It's better because with a simple home cordless phone you can't roam from base station to base station. The 802.11B phones should allow you to roam from access point to access point w/out loosing connection.
Cell phones cost the phone + $20 - $?? each, and usage is measured by the minute.
802.11B telephony will cost the phone + the access points, unlimited usage. And if you already have the access points, then all you need to buy is the phone.
I stand corrected.
I suspect Les Gasser really meant Nitrous, as in Nitrous Oxide.
Here I found the following:
According to this yahoo article Sony/Panasonic already have a PVR device on the market in Japan that is using Linux called Cocoon.
It makes sense, cost, robustness, development time,....
And this way they don't support MS, who is their competitor.
Last year, near Rochester, NY, I took my 8 year old and 12 year old out at 4 AM to see the meteor shower. We counted over 100 in about 30 minutes, and got sick of counting. It was totally awswome. We took out a tarp which we spread in a field, and crawled in our sleeping bags.
We stayed out for about 2 hours. We were still seeing 1 every couple of minutes when we went back inside.
If you had your eyes open, and were looking anyplace in the sky, you couldn't help but see them.
2) The number of people using the network is only 1 factor in a larger equation for determining the viability of WLAN. Depending on usage, a single WLAN Access Point may not be fast enough for 1 person. Or it could be fast enough for 500 people. All depends what they are using it for. Are servers used extensively?, for Files? Applications? Do people surf the net? Do processing jobs suck large files over the network?
3) This article does not state that adjacent channels won't interfere. They are saying that they won't interfere VERY MUCH. If you are setting up a 3D grid of WLAN AP's, full coverage with a little interference using 4 channels is better then what can be done using 3 channels. With only 3 channels with 2 AP's per floor Some adjacent AP's will need to be on the same channel. That would be bad. With 4 channels, the overall network capacity is a little lower, but you have better coverage.
4) I Agree, people like you should definitely pay somebody for a site survey. Probably you should hire someone for the entire network design, not just wireless. I'd be glad to do the job, I'll sub the work out for $10,000, and put the other $190,000 in my wallet.
This topic is particularly apt, as I was just now thinking I should try to see If I can find a version of Opera that works better.
I have a major pet peeve about "one way" communication. I always wonder if I'm wasting my time to carefully document a crash. Maybe the but has already been fixed after all... I'm not going to go the extra mile unless I can get some idea that I'm breaking new ground, and not just kicking a dead horse.
I have submitted some bug reports for Opera.. And I'd even be willing to trouble shoot, debug, and even submit diffs, if I could only get some feedback from the project team regarding the dispostion of the problems I submitted.
I Like Opera. I'd like it to not lock up once or twice a day like it does.
I predict that the Valanti Disney Warner Microsoft Act of 2015 (named partially in memory of Jack Valenti) will, in additon to increasing the legal limited copywrite term from 175 years to infinity minus 1 day, also reassign the ownership of all valuable public domain art from the public domain to whatever corporation can profit from them the most.
After all, as the new law's text will read, "what is the sense in having art if no corporation can profit from it?
Disney will be required Pay for all their new material by contributing $750,000 to the retirement fund for the Microsoft Geeks that run their "P2P DDOS Strike Force" that has been successful in knocking 99% of all P2P file traders, and FTP shareware sites off the net.
Well, 54 Mb/s is about 5 times 11 Mb/s. But abhikhurana only saw a 4x improvement. This lines up well with my own tests show 3 - 4 times improvement.
So that 54 Mb/s rate sounds like about 1/2 of a 100 Mb/s ethernet. But in reality you will only get about 10 - 15 Mb/s under optimum conditions, and it is shared bandwidth, not switched.
Also consider that the range is greatly reduced. Keep in mind that in 802.11b the farther out you are, and the more interference there is, the lower you rate is. It will switch from 11, to 5.5 to 2, and then 1 as the signal gets weaker or more corrupted. The same is true for 802.11A, accept the range is way smaller, so you will get a reduced rate at ranges where 802.11b is still running at full rate.
Unless you are really trying to squeeze more bits down the pipe and your range is small it probably doesn't make sense to upgrade.
Someone should put up a dual NIC router host that is on local broadband internet, and can get on the honey pot WLAN too. Then hack the AP's to make them point to that dual NIC machine as an internet gateway.
It would be nice having a small WLAN with 5 AP's available for anyone to use for surfing the internet. ( And the FEDS can even have their fun analyzing the logs.. )
Now and then I hear an offhanded remark like that, seem like something the local media here in Rochester would mention once in a while. I've never seen a study or ranking that shows Rochester is one of the most heavily polluted cities in the US.
You may be mixed up. Might you be thinking about how heavily polluted the Hudson River is due to PCB dumping by IBM?
Everytime I here people say stuff this "KDE and GNOME are poor substitues for the Windows desktop" it makes my stomach tighten a little. It's not true.
Maybe KDE or GNOME have their problems. But as long as I can kick off a mail reader, web browser, word processor, and a spreadsheet, the "desktop" software doesn't really matter that much for 99% of users.
As much as people talk about how they can't live without MS tools, I used "vi" for all my document editing for years. I think most people could get along with star office, or other Linux based tools just fine if that's what they were given.
People always talk about file attachments, and interoperability, claiming they need to have Word because everyone else uses it. The neat thing about being a gov't is that you get to set the standards. If you want to deal with the gov't you've got to follow their rules. No Words attachments allowed!
At home I've gotten so annoyed with every piece of SPAM that want's to load web pages over my slow modem, that I now read all my mail on Linux using balsa. It doesn't load HTML by default. I use Netscape and Opera for surfing, and occasionally will run IE of some page won't work right on Netscape. That doesn't happen very often.
For 99% of work place users Linux would be just fine in my opinion. A few will need to run apps that don't have good enough Linux analogs. But that would be few.
Home is a different story. People want to be able to buy, install, and run shrink-wrapped software. People don't wan't to have to hire a UNIX guru to administer their home PCs.
I just can't buy it.
I don't believe that this simputer effort even makes sense. Their are a lot of people here in USA that could afford a computer if they needed or wanted one, but don't have one, because they are not necessary.
It is hoped that the villagers who would use a shared simputer could afford to buy their own $2 smart card. How will those same villagers be able to afford the $5 worth of batteries that this thing is going to burn through 2 or 3 times a week, or even daily under heavy use?
What problem is the the the simputer going to solve for the poor Indian? Balance his checkbook? address book? Notepad? calculator? calendar? Surf the net on a QVGA screen? ( is their a phone? ) spreadsheet? database? email?
I can't see it..
]
A while back someone wrote to Linux Journal asking for help getting FTP server working. The editors printed the letter with an answer from some Shmuck who said basically "You don't want FTP, you want SSH, so you can use SCP to move files. SCP is way better. Just go download SSH and install it."
How very arrogant.
How does the Shmuck know that this guy has a client that can run SSH? I agree the SSH is nice, and probably better, and I agree with advocating it. But he should have answered the question about FTP at least.
Good Catch.
For those who aren't familure with marks, that last command should have been c'd not c'm as I wrote.
This reminds me of a bug I found once in a homegrown toolkit I was helping to maintain. It had had a class which could log and printout everything there was to know about the program it was created in. It printed out the link date, the size of the binary, and the explicit full path to the binary, arguments, run date and a bunch of other stuff.
.cshrc to be sourced. Interestingly, had anyone executed a program from .cshrc that used this feature, there would have been an infinite recursive system() call loop.
.cshrc file that it took 20 seconds to start a new shell! But that was back when 20 people with "X terminals" ( not xterms.. ) were sharing a Sparc 10 that had 128 megs of RAM.
I noticed one day that whenever we turned on this object, the programs that used it would get slow. For some people they would start really slowly, adding 20 - 30 seconds on to a 5 second runtime. Come to find out, the guy who wrote the code was using system() to call the the shell "which" command. And this caused a new shell to be created and even cause
Some of these people had so much crap in their