Is there any indication that spammers are actually looking at what is happening to their mail?
It does not seem like they care. 95% of spam is sent in ways that is easily bitbucketed, yet it continues to be sent.
Of course they care, how else are they going to enlarge your penis for those hot teens wating for you that you'll surely be able to get with your cash from Nigeria.
Seriously though, spammers spam because it costs them almost nothing to do and even if their response rate is very small, they still make money. They would, of course, like a higher response rate, and to reach as people many as possible since it means more money for them. Logic dictates that they will try and stop all their mail from going into a black hole, because that would mean they wouldn't get any money at all.
Also: Why do you think so much spam is in HTML format? That way they can add image hyperlinks to the source of the message that will be accessed when their spam has been read, informing them that they have a live email address to keep spamming. I would bet at least some spammers do this, since it lets them really conectrate on the people who aren't filtering their spam out immediately. Or by sending their spam to the same set of people different ways, they can test the best ways to get by spam filters.
He even had a great idea for anti-spam software/blocking. Set up these honeypots in different geographical locations, but don't publish the addresses; let the spammers find them. Have them accept mail as if they would route it, but do not actually send it out. We can assume any e-mails received are spam.
This is trivial for the spammers to work around. All they have to do is try to send email to themselves along with the bunch of spam emails they're sending. If they can't email themselves, they'll move on quickly.
There are other problems with this too, but that's the simplest to point out.
I still remember the first time I installed mplayer. Read thriugh the FAQ I came across an entry of the form:
How do I.....?
You don't know how to install a libary? What are you doing on Linux? Run ldconfig....
What an ass! Maybe he was born knowing that but I certainly wasn't.
His lousy attitude actually manaaged to get mplayer called "The project from hell". onlinuxworld.com.
Maybe now the project will become more friendly and quit scaring users and developers away.
But I used one of such machines. Nowadays they are absolutely, unconditionally useless.
Not true. I have also used such machines. They are actually very useful. Yeah you can't make a new motherboard for your PC with them, but for making quick prototypes they are great. You get your board the same day, and if you made any mistakes, you can fix them the same day and make another board, you don't have to spend time waiting for someone else to do things, the mail, etc.
As far as SMT goes, they can handle everything but the smallest of SMT parts. I built a prototype that had one such part, and afterwards I had to sit there under a stereomicroscope with an exacto knife cutting the traces in a half dozen places, but it really wasn't that bad. No one said my prototype had to use parts in packages that small anyways.
They are also killer for making quick interface boards, extender boards, etc. No you can't make anything you want with them, but just because they didn't work for your application doesn't mean they're useless. You're not getting four-layer boards with silkscreening for $30 anyways. If you want a board with a few connectors and minimal circuitry on it, you can have the finished thing in your hand by the end of the day and go back to doing your tests.
Since I've been able to get some use from one, they are clearly not "absolutely, unconditionally useless." Hell, there are still companies out there that use through-hole parts and phenolic PCBs in their final products. You don't need that dense of a circuit board when all you're doing is controlling a toaster.
There is a bug where if you reset the Zaurus twice in a row without suspending it in between, it will crash and require a total reset.
Perhaps this was the cause of your 10% of failed reboots?
Once I head about this I've been sure to follow it and haven't had a reboot trast everything yet (knock on wood).
Actually, I have/had a Psion Revo+ and a Sharp Zaurus.
the Word/Sheet programs on the Revo handle Word and Excel files about a hundred times better than Hancom Word/Sheet on the Zaurus
You're not being fair here. The programs on the Revo did not handle actual MS Word or Excel files. They were converted into a special format for the Psion to handle. I did really like that the spreadsheet on the revo could do graphs though, and it's stupid that the Zaurus does not have spellcheck.
It's funny, but the Revo+ runs at about 1/6 the speed of the Zaurus, but Opera seems to render pages just as fast.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here too. The Revo was not very fast, and I'm pretty sure your claim wouldn't stand up to a head-to-head comparison.
The Revo had some great things going for it. The OS was really polished. The keyboard was great, but overall, it was too crippled. How were you supposed to surf the net with it? The only way to connect with it was via serial or infrared. Contrast that with the 11Mbps I get with my wifi card and the Zaurus and then tell me which lets you surf the net faster.
As for never hitting the space limitation, you must have not done that much with it. I was up against that wall all the time, an unlike that Zaurus there was no way to move it back. Besides the Revo had no freaking backlight, which drove me crazy trying to read ebooks on it.
Finally, the Revo being the perfect PDA? Hardly. Psion failed to implement the IROBEX standard, making it a real bitch to beam contacts and appointments to and from anything besides another Psion. I had to install 3rd party software just so I could get it to share info. Contrast this with the Zaurus, where I've never had a problem in that area.
Use CF for stoarage yes, but you need the SD card for running (most) programs. Installing a program to the CF card will in most cases not work. For Swap you can use SD but there is a speed / number of Writes penalty.
This is just blatantly wrong.
I have an SL-5500. You don't HAVE to have either card to install apps. You can install to SD or CF and either one is going to work as well (although CF is faster).
You do not need an SD card just to be able to run must programs. The only program I need an SD card to run is X and I still don't need to create a swapfile. If I wanted to I could have put X on a CF card instead, there is not problem doing that.
yeah true, but processor id tags last forever. rfid tags are so susceptible to environmental dangers, who would spend the money to do anything important with it?
Who's going to use the same processor forever? May the chip will last but that doesn't matter if it's not being used anymore.
It doesnt seem like it can be that hard to make and rfid tag last. Just encase it in a good enough layer of plastic, that should protect it from anything besides being microwaved. Is there some unique thing about rfid tags that makes them so flimsy? They seem like they should just be some solid state electronics in a small package.
When the whole processor id thing was introduced way back when, people threw a big fit about it. Now what average Joe these days even know about it?
That's because the stopped doing it. Motherboard manufacturers even started shipping boards where the default setting was to disable the # in case your chip did have it.
Since it's stopped, it's not a very big issue anymore.
On the other hand we've got linux, the do it yourself operating system. You've got to set up, tweak, fiddle, configure, code and compile everything. Nothing is done for you. But of course, it's secure out of the box.
What a bunch of b.s. If you've really used Mandrake, you'd know you don't have to write any code to make anything work. I've been using RH7.3 as my desktop OS exclusively for a year now, and I haven't had to write any code.
I'm not saying Linux is perfect, but saying you need to write code to get Linux to even work is just a damn lie. Everything your average joe wants is usually on your distro's install cds in rpm or whatever format. Put in the disc, click on the RPM and tell it to install. How hard is that? Yes, if you WANT to be on the bleeding edge you can compile things youself. I do sometimes, but it is not a necessity.
windows guy: "You're operating system isn't anything by default!"
Linux does work by default, it just doesn't set up a bunch of network services that leave your ass out in the breeze. After using KDE, gaim, mozilla, etc for so long, using a windows box can be just frustrating. I don't think your agrument makes sense at all, all these thing as installed and work by default.
Windows, is a very secure operating system, but not out of the box.
Care to back this up? OpenBSD is a very secure operating system. I would say an updated RH6.X box is, by now, a very secure OS. Windows? Some GUI toolbox type stuff is actually run in "protection ring 0" or whatever it's called. How is that secure? How are you going to fix that without access to the kernel source?
Yeah you can tweak things to fix other problems like default administrative shares but how is an OS "very secure" if it has a flawed security model and you have to cover it with band-aids?
What proof do you have that windows can be very secure? Over the last two years:
What's the mean time between root exploits being availible and unpatched for a win2k/IIS combination?
What's the mean time that these exploits exist and are not fixed?
What's the average number of days in a year that a win2K/IIS box must be taken down or is availible for a remote root exploit?
Get an idea what those numbers are, then compare them to the other operating systems I mentioned. Maybe you'll change your mind.
Finally, even if you think you can secure windows by doing a bunch of work, how is this better than all that work you claim it takes to get a linux system going?
If you want to hide your source, you can easily obfuscate. For example, I would suggest applying "gzip" to the final build. Then you can run the program by invoking "gcat" on it, and piping it to "/usr/bin/perl".
If someone can read perl they can probably read a shell script too. After all, which is easier to read?
"Did you ever think of what would happen if a cracker found out about such a backdoor? Just because you do your best to keep it a secret doesn't mean that crackers can't find out about it."
If the backdoor is implemented by using a hard to reverse checksum function, then it doesn't really matter if the cracker knows there is a backdoor but can't get the key.
If a cracker manged to get the key....probably the same thing that would happen if a cracker found out about a buffer overflow would happen.
It actually runs quite well. It's totally usable, although I haven't tried to do anything with really large matrices yet.
The Zaurus SL-5500 that I have has a 206MHz ARM processor, which is basically an order of magnitude faster than that inside a graphing calculator/older palm device. The Zaurus coming out soon (SL-5600) will have a 400Mhz Xscale processor.
The HP48G runs at 4MHz and has a 4-bit datapath. I imagine it is pretty slow. My TI-89 isn't very fast either. I think it runs at around 12MHz.
As far as a real benchmark goes, post an m-file and I'll tell you how fast it runs.
I just got Octave & Gnuplot running on my Sharp Zaurus. I can do my DSP type calculations, anywhere!
Someone is currently porting gtktiemu, at which point I'll have a TI-89 emulator, which will let me handle just abount any engineering math type stuff I need to do with one pocket-sized deivce.
Now if my fold-up keyboard would just show up.....
There's no reasonable expectation of privacy using someone else's network.
Yes there is. Just like there is if you're living in someone else's house, aka, an apartment. At my school students have to pay for their internet access. This makes the school an ISP. As a business providing a service and can't just "do whatever they want".
Do you own your phonelines? Is it okay with you if the phone company records every conversation you make to check for illegal activities? They are their phone lines you know, you have no easonable expectation of privacy using them. Too bad, I guess you should have encrypted all your phone calls.
One of these days, an ISP or school will get sued for pulling this shit. Network traffic can contain some very personal information. AFAIK I have never signed anything that would let my isp monitor ALL my traffic continuously. Most service contracts suggest that the may be some montioring to ensure network performance, but it would be pretty damn easy to prove that this was not what they we doing if they were continuously monitoring my traffic for an extended period of time.
Of course, the real solution is to encrypt your traffic. Then you get to have your ISP prosecued for a serious crime (at least much more serious than copyright violation) if they do manage to break the encryption.
Yeah right I'm as likely to die by an asteroid as in a plane crash.
How many people were killed by asteroids in the last 20 years?
How many people were killed in pane crashes?
Oh what's that you say this isn't a fair assessment? Okay, let's do a real one:
My odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 500,000. But this isn't quite right because it's assuming I fly 100,000 miles a year, which I don't neither does most of the world. So this number should be lower.
So assume this killer asteriod kills everyone: 6313622537 people. Since only 20 people died in the year 2000, we would need one asteriod to kill everyone on the planet every 315 million years. Maybe that's a reasonable time frame but, it's still a bullshit comparison because it assumes I'm going to live forever, unless killed by an asteroid. One must factor in the odds of me being alive when this asteriod actually hits, otherwise I'm not being killed by it am I? Say I live for 150 years (much longer than the average lifespan). If one factors in my limited lifespan, I am suddenly 4.8 x 10^-7 less likely to be killed by an asteriod, than to die in a plane crash.
The odds are so low that I may as well start getting worried about being run over by a Porsche driven by a zebra. Since:
My odds of being run over are 1 in 588.
Let's say one in every 5,000 cars is a porsche.
There are around 132,000,000 cars on the road.
Let's say there are 300,000 zebra on the face of the earth.
Finally, lets say only ten of them (circus zebra) know how to drive (10 in 300,000 odds). Making a totally bullshit analysis, I find out that my odds are 2.58e-14 while my odds of being killed by an asteriod are 9.52e-13. Okay, so I'm a hundred or so times more likely to be killed by the asteriod, but what if I included all those bears that drive cars too? Surely the results would be terrifying.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by my unwillingness to write my DSP paper. Good night.
Buletooth does work with the zaurus.
Check out the forums at: www.zaurus.com/dev/board
People seem to have been pretty successful at connecting to bluetooth APs using bluetooth CF cards in the zaurus.
Well put. I was once for gun control, way back in 7th grade. Then I tried to do a report on it and cound find any real statistics to back it up, just a bunch of stories or mock-studies that I could see through even back then. I had to change my opinion. Maybe if the grandparent does a little more reading on the subject, he will too.
The handwaving the the grandparent was trying to pull is just b.s. Japan doesn't have guns, but they have a higher suicide rate. Does that mean that if we got rid of all the guns our suicide rate would go up? Of course not.
Re:The predicted chain of events according to me
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
What you so glibly term "Lowest Bidder" is called competition. It drives the country's economy. It's why the US is so successful. Pick up an Econ 101 book, maybe you'll learn something.
And "Competition" has always worked perfectly hasn't? It says that right there in you Econ 101 book doesn't it? Our economy has never faltered.
I think you need a little review.
Do me a favor: Take out your econ book. Open it to the index and look up "depression".
Once you get done reading about that, look up the concept of "externalities" and you'll learn why competion needs to be controlled.
Economics is a science, not a religion. The message you should have got from Econ 101 is not "Capitalism is perfect."
This story supposes that Microsoft should somehow be a paragon of network infrastructure.
You know what: I think they should.
After all, they have a fuckload (If they took the cash they have on hand out of the bank as 20's it would weigh more than my car!) of money that they could throw into making their software/network the best around if they wanted to. Instead it always seems at or below average. It's ridiculous.
Microsoft should be able to do a decent job with their software. They have more resources than just about anybody else.
I'm not saying it should never have any flaws, but their record on security issues is pretty sad. It should be better. I believe that they could do better almost instantly if they were actually committed to it. Instead they seem content with embarassing themselves quite often.
Re:It's nice
on
Immortal Code
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· Score: 2, Informative
They did announce that change- it was part of (I think) the transition from ODBC 2.x to ODBC 3. If the Devstudio docs still say the length is in bytes that's a documentation error since the API was changed and announced years ago.
Now I call BS:
If it's not in the API documentation, then it's undocumented.
Maybe there's a note about it somewhere else, but things like changelogs are not an API reference. Documentation is meaningless unless it's in the right place. I'm not saying MS did this on purpose, but you've got to concede that he gave a valid example. You were just setting yourself up anyways. Did you really think that no one on/. would have a single example of an undocumented API change?
Is it really that hard to believe that large software projects can have mistakes in their API documentation? It seems rather obvious to me. Whenever a project gets big enough, there are going to be a few bugs. OSS makes it easier to trace these bugs, because you don't have to blindly rely on documentation (which may be flawed). If something seems awry, you can look at the source. Then you know what you are actually calling.
First and foremost, the Zaurus uses a non-standard connector.
As opposed to your palm which had a standard DB9 and USB connector taking up a huge amount of space at the bottom? I'd much rather have the zaurus be the size it is and pay for a cable then make it huge by adding standard sized connectors. I do wish the connector on the bottom wasn't as super-rare and it is, but is necessary to use small connectors if you want a small device. I wouldn't mind a USB host controller, but I don't think I would have wanted to pay more for it. I bet it would have cost significantly more too. Adding a USB host isn't simply a matter of adding a bigger battery. They also would have had to beef up the step-up circuitry the brings the battery voltage up a a higher voltage. To be a standard USB host the device must be able to source 5V 500mA (minimum). That's 2.5 watts. Flip over your Zaurus and read the wattage: 2.5W (Battery). They would have needed to double the power supply!
Or, I can get an IRDA keyboard. Which practically doesn't exist.
Read here for info about getting a folding IRDA keyboard for a good price. (It's not quite ready yet, but it should be within a couple weeks.)
Finally, the Zaurus' handwriting recognition stinks.
It's handwriting recognition is just not that great until either:
(a) You learn the default way to make all the characters.
or
(b) You teach it your handwriting.
You took the time to learn graffiti, so it's not fair to make a comparison if you're not willing to learn the Zaurus' input method. I personally almost always use the keyboard. I find single character handwriting recognition very inefficient becuase you always have to move backwards after each chacter entered.
Then, the Zaurus' use of an obscure ethernet-over-USB protocol gave me quite a headache.
This is a legitimite gripe, but it has supposedly been fixed on the sl-5600 model.
You did leave out one other problem though: the battery size. It's just too small. They gave the sl-5600 a much bigger battery but I don't think it will work with my 5500:(
TCPA/DRM makes all this irrelevant though. Given the choice between the possibility of undefeatable (basically) DRM and none, the choice seems pretty simple to me. Too bad they shot themselves in the foot like that, since having an FPGA to play with sounds cool.
It's a good thing they're handling this, otherwise "first person shooter" games might start being produced, and all our kids would be turned into mass-murdering psychos.
Just don't ask me how somebody that doesn't know anybody else with an e-mail account gets somebody else to vouch for him. (Maybe your ISP will vouch for you if you verify yourself with a CC or something?). Any thoughts?
You hit the nail right on the head. I want a web of trust based system for my email to verify the authenticity of the send and to block spam. Those who are not part of my web of trust will have to log onto my site (or some sompany which handles it for me) to purchase a 1 message key for $.25 Anyone with a legitimite reason to contact me will pay the $.25, but spammers will not (not enough chance that I'd buy their crap.)
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any indication that spammers are actually looking at what is happening to their mail? It does not seem like they care. 95% of spam is sent in ways that is easily bitbucketed, yet it continues to be sent.
Of course they care, how else are they going to enlarge your penis for those hot teens wating for you that you'll surely be able to get with your cash from Nigeria.
Seriously though, spammers spam because it costs them almost nothing to do and even if their response rate is very small, they still make money. They would, of course, like a higher response rate, and to reach as people many as possible since it means more money for them. Logic dictates that they will try and stop all their mail from going into a black hole, because that would mean they wouldn't get any money at all.
Also: Why do you think so much spam is in HTML format? That way they can add image hyperlinks to the source of the message that will be accessed when their spam has been read, informing them that they have a live email address to keep spamming. I would bet at least some spammers do this, since it lets them really conectrate on the people who aren't filtering their spam out immediately. Or by sending their spam to the same set of people different ways, they can test the best ways to get by spam filters.
He even had a great idea for anti-spam software/blocking. Set up these honeypots in different geographical locations, but don't publish the addresses; let the spammers find them. Have them accept mail as if they would route it, but do not actually send it out. We can assume any e-mails received are spam.
This is trivial for the spammers to work around. All they have to do is try to send email to themselves along with the bunch of spam emails they're sending. If they can't email themselves, they'll move on quickly.
There are other problems with this too, but that's the simplest to point out.
I still remember the first time I installed mplayer. Read thriugh the FAQ I came across an entry of the form:
.....?
How do I
You don't know how to install a libary? What are you doing on Linux? Run ldconfig....
What an ass! Maybe he was born knowing that but I certainly wasn't.
His lousy attitude actually manaaged to get mplayer called "The project from hell". onlinuxworld.com.
Maybe now the project will become more friendly and quit scaring users and developers away.
But I used one of such machines. Nowadays they are absolutely, unconditionally useless.
Not true. I have also used such machines. They are actually very useful. Yeah you can't make a new motherboard for your PC with them, but for making quick prototypes they are great. You get your board the same day, and if you made any mistakes, you can fix them the same day and make another board, you don't have to spend time waiting for someone else to do things, the mail, etc.
As far as SMT goes, they can handle everything but the smallest of SMT parts. I built a prototype that had one such part, and afterwards I had to sit there under a stereomicroscope with an exacto knife cutting the traces in a half dozen places, but it really wasn't that bad. No one said my prototype had to use parts in packages that small anyways.
They are also killer for making quick interface boards, extender boards, etc. No you can't make anything you want with them, but just because they didn't work for your application doesn't mean they're useless. You're not getting four-layer boards with silkscreening for $30 anyways. If you want a board with a few connectors and minimal circuitry on it, you can have the finished thing in your hand by the end of the day and go back to doing your tests.
Since I've been able to get some use from one, they are clearly not "absolutely, unconditionally useless." Hell, there are still companies out there that use through-hole parts and phenolic PCBs in their final products. You don't need that dense of a circuit board when all you're doing is controlling a toaster.
There is a bug where if you reset the Zaurus twice in a row without suspending it in between, it will crash and require a total reset.
Perhaps this was the cause of your 10% of failed reboots?
Once I head about this I've been sure to follow it and haven't had a reboot trast everything yet (knock on wood).
Actually, I have/had a Psion Revo+ and a Sharp Zaurus.
the Word/Sheet programs on the Revo handle Word and Excel files about a hundred times better than Hancom Word/Sheet on the Zaurus
You're not being fair here. The programs on the Revo did not handle actual MS Word or Excel files. They were converted into a special format for the Psion to handle. I did really like that the spreadsheet on the revo could do graphs though, and it's stupid that the Zaurus does not have spellcheck.
It's funny, but the Revo+ runs at about 1/6 the speed of the Zaurus, but Opera seems to render pages just as fast.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here too. The Revo was not very fast, and I'm pretty sure your claim wouldn't stand up to a head-to-head comparison.
The Revo had some great things going for it. The OS was really polished. The keyboard was great, but overall, it was too crippled. How were you supposed to surf the net with it? The only way to connect with it was via serial or infrared. Contrast that with the 11Mbps I get with my wifi card and the Zaurus and then tell me which lets you surf the net faster.
As for never hitting the space limitation, you must have not done that much with it. I was up against that wall all the time, an unlike that Zaurus there was no way to move it back. Besides the Revo had no freaking backlight, which drove me crazy trying to read ebooks on it.
Finally, the Revo being the perfect PDA? Hardly. Psion failed to implement the IROBEX standard, making it a real bitch to beam contacts and appointments to and from anything besides another Psion. I had to install 3rd party software just so I could get it to share info. Contrast this with the Zaurus, where I've never had a problem in that area.
Use CF for stoarage yes, but you need the SD card for running (most) programs. Installing a program to the CF card will in most cases not work. For Swap you can use SD but there is a speed / number of Writes penalty.
This is just blatantly wrong.
I have an SL-5500. You don't HAVE to have either card to install apps. You can install to SD or CF and either one is going to work as well (although CF is faster).
You do not need an SD card just to be able to run must programs. The only program I need an SD card to run is X and I still don't need to create a swapfile. If I wanted to I could have put X on a CF card instead, there is not problem doing that.
yeah true, but processor id tags last forever. rfid tags are so susceptible to environmental dangers, who would spend the money to do anything important with it?
Who's going to use the same processor forever? May the chip will last but that doesn't matter if it's not being used anymore.
It doesnt seem like it can be that hard to make and rfid tag last. Just encase it in a good enough layer of plastic, that should protect it from anything besides being microwaved. Is there some unique thing about rfid tags that makes them so flimsy? They seem like they should just be some solid state electronics in a small package.
When the whole processor id thing was introduced way back when, people threw a big fit about it. Now what average Joe these days even know about it?
That's because the stopped doing it. Motherboard manufacturers even started shipping boards where the default setting was to disable the # in case your chip did have it. Since it's stopped, it's not a very big issue anymore.
What a bunch of b.s. If you've really used Mandrake, you'd know you don't have to write any code to make anything work. I've been using RH7.3 as my desktop OS exclusively for a year now, and I haven't had to write any code.
I'm not saying Linux is perfect, but saying you need to write code to get Linux to even work is just a damn lie. Everything your average joe wants is usually on your distro's install cds in rpm or whatever format. Put in the disc, click on the RPM and tell it to install. How hard is that? Yes, if you WANT to be on the bleeding edge you can compile things youself. I do sometimes, but it is not a necessity.
windows guy: "You're operating system isn't anything by default!"
Linux does work by default, it just doesn't set up a bunch of network services that leave your ass out in the breeze. After using KDE, gaim, mozilla, etc for so long, using a windows box can be just frustrating. I don't think your agrument makes sense at all, all these thing as installed and work by default.
Windows, is a very secure operating system, but not out of the box.
Care to back this up? OpenBSD is a very secure operating system. I would say an updated RH6.X box is, by now, a very secure OS. Windows? Some GUI toolbox type stuff is actually run in "protection ring 0" or whatever it's called. How is that secure? How are you going to fix that without access to the kernel source?
Yeah you can tweak things to fix other problems like default administrative shares but how is an OS "very secure" if it has a flawed security model and you have to cover it with band-aids?
What proof do you have that windows can be very secure? Over the last two years:
Get an idea what those numbers are, then compare them to the other operating systems I mentioned. Maybe you'll change your mind.
Finally, even if you think you can secure windows by doing a bunch of work, how is this better than all that work you claim it takes to get a linux system going?
If you want to hide your source, you can easily obfuscate. For example, I would suggest applying "gzip" to the final build. Then you can run the program by invoking "gcat" on it, and piping it to "/usr/bin/perl".
If someone can read perl they can probably read a shell script too. After all, which is easier to read?
"Did you ever think of what would happen if a cracker found out about such a backdoor? Just because you do your best to keep it a secret doesn't mean that crackers can't find out about it."
If the backdoor is implemented by using a hard to reverse checksum function, then it doesn't really matter if the cracker knows there is a backdoor but can't get the key.
If a cracker manged to get the key....probably the same thing that would happen if a cracker found out about a buffer overflow would happen.
It actually runs quite well. It's totally usable, although I haven't tried to do anything with really large matrices yet.
The Zaurus SL-5500 that I have has a 206MHz ARM processor, which is basically an order of magnitude faster than that inside a graphing calculator/older palm device. The Zaurus coming out soon (SL-5600) will have a 400Mhz Xscale processor.
The HP48G runs at 4MHz and has a 4-bit datapath. I imagine it is pretty slow. My TI-89 isn't very fast either. I think it runs at around 12MHz.
As far as a real benchmark goes, post an m-file and I'll tell you how fast it runs.
Wanna hear something cool?
I just got Octave & Gnuplot running on my Sharp Zaurus. I can do my DSP type calculations, anywhere!
Someone is currently porting gtktiemu, at which point I'll have a TI-89 emulator, which will let me handle just abount any engineering math type stuff I need to do with one pocket-sized deivce.
Now if my fold-up keyboard would just show up.....
OK then boy-genius. What crime is that then? There are no laws against cracking encryption systems.
Ever hear of the DMCA. You should try and get a clue what you're talking about before you start insulting people.
There are also other laws that this would fall under too. There is a specfic NYS computer crime law that would fit the bill quite nicely.
There's no reasonable expectation of privacy using someone else's network.
Yes there is. Just like there is if you're living in someone else's house, aka, an apartment. At my school students have to pay for their internet access. This makes the school an ISP. As a business providing a service and can't just "do whatever they want".
Do you own your phonelines? Is it okay with you if the phone company records every conversation you make to check for illegal activities? They are their phone lines you know, you have no easonable expectation of privacy using them. Too bad, I guess you should have encrypted all your phone calls.
One of these days, an ISP or school will get sued for pulling this shit. Network traffic can contain some very personal information. AFAIK I have never signed anything that would let my isp monitor ALL my traffic continuously. Most service contracts suggest that the may be some montioring to ensure network performance, but it would be pretty damn easy to prove that this was not what they we doing if they were continuously monitoring my traffic for an extended period of time.
Of course, the real solution is to encrypt your traffic. Then you get to have your ISP prosecued for a serious crime (at least much more serious than copyright violation) if they do manage to break the encryption.
Yeah right I'm as likely to die by an asteroid as in a plane crash.
How many people were killed by asteroids in the last 20 years?
How many people were killed in pane crashes?
Oh what's that you say this isn't a fair assessment? Okay, let's do a real one:
My odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 500,000. But this isn't quite right because it's assuming I fly 100,000 miles a year, which I don't neither does most of the world. So this number should be lower. So assume this killer asteriod kills everyone: 6313622537 people. Since only 20 people died in the year 2000, we would need one asteriod to kill everyone on the planet every 315 million years. Maybe that's a reasonable time frame but, it's still a bullshit comparison because it assumes I'm going to live forever, unless killed by an asteroid. One must factor in the odds of me being alive when this asteriod actually hits, otherwise I'm not being killed by it am I? Say I live for 150 years (much longer than the average lifespan). If one factors in my limited lifespan, I am suddenly 4.8 x 10^-7 less likely to be killed by an asteriod, than to die in a plane crash.
The odds are so low that I may as well start getting worried about being run over by a Porsche driven by a zebra. Since:
My odds of being run over are 1 in 588.
Let's say one in every 5,000 cars is a porsche.
There are around 132,000,000 cars on the road.
Let's say there are 300,000 zebra on the face of the earth.
Finally, lets say only ten of them (circus zebra) know how to drive (10 in 300,000 odds).
Making a totally bullshit analysis, I find out that my odds are 2.58e-14 while my odds of being killed by an asteriod are 9.52e-13. Okay, so I'm a hundred or so times more likely to be killed by the asteriod, but what if I included all those bears that drive cars too? Surely the results would be terrifying.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by my unwillingness to write my DSP paper. Good night.
Buletooth does work with the zaurus.
Check out the forums at:
www.zaurus.com/dev/board
People seem to have been pretty successful at connecting to bluetooth APs using bluetooth CF cards in the zaurus.
Well put. I was once for gun control, way back in 7th grade. Then I tried to do a report on it and cound find any real statistics to back it up, just a bunch of stories or mock-studies that I could see through even back then. I had to change my opinion. Maybe if the grandparent does a little more reading on the subject, he will too.
The handwaving the the grandparent was trying to pull is just b.s. Japan doesn't have guns, but they have a higher suicide rate. Does that mean that if we got rid of all the guns our suicide rate would go up? Of course not.
What you so glibly term "Lowest Bidder" is called competition. It drives the country's economy. It's why the US is so successful. Pick up an Econ 101 book, maybe you'll learn something.
And "Competition" has always worked perfectly hasn't? It says that right there in you Econ 101 book doesn't it? Our economy has never faltered.
I think you need a little review.
Do me a favor: Take out your econ book. Open it to the index and look up "depression".
Once you get done reading about that, look up the concept of "externalities" and you'll learn why competion needs to be controlled.
Economics is a science, not a religion. The message you should have got from Econ 101 is not "Capitalism is perfect."
This story supposes that Microsoft should somehow be a paragon of network infrastructure.
You know what: I think they should.
After all, they have a fuckload (If they took the cash they have on hand out of the bank as 20's it would weigh more than my car!) of money that they could throw into making their software/network the best around if they wanted to. Instead it always seems at or below average. It's ridiculous.
Microsoft should be able to do a decent job with their software. They have more resources than just about anybody else.
I'm not saying it should never have any flaws, but their record on security issues is pretty sad. It should be better. I believe that they could do better almost instantly if they were actually committed to it. Instead they seem content with embarassing themselves quite often.
They did announce that change- it was part of (I think) the transition from ODBC 2.x to ODBC 3. If the Devstudio docs still say the length is in bytes that's a documentation error since the API was changed and announced years ago.
/. would have a single example of an undocumented API change?
Now I call BS:
If it's not in the API documentation, then it's undocumented.
Maybe there's a note about it somewhere else, but things like changelogs are not an API reference. Documentation is meaningless unless it's in the right place. I'm not saying MS did this on purpose, but you've got to concede that he gave a valid example. You were just setting yourself up anyways. Did you really think that no one on
Is it really that hard to believe that large software projects can have mistakes in their API documentation? It seems rather obvious to me. Whenever a project gets big enough, there are going to be a few bugs. OSS makes it easier to trace these bugs, because you don't have to blindly rely on documentation (which may be flawed). If something seems awry, you can look at the source. Then you know what you are actually calling.
I have a Zaurus too.
:(
First and foremost, the Zaurus uses a non-standard connector.
As opposed to your palm which had a standard DB9 and USB connector taking up a huge amount of space at the bottom? I'd much rather have the zaurus be the size it is and pay for a cable then make it huge by adding standard sized connectors. I do wish the connector on the bottom wasn't as super-rare and it is, but is necessary to use small connectors if you want a small device. I wouldn't mind a USB host controller, but I don't think I would have wanted to pay more for it. I bet it would have cost significantly more too. Adding a USB host isn't simply a matter of adding a bigger battery. They also would have had to beef up the step-up circuitry the brings the battery voltage up a a higher voltage. To be a standard USB host the device must be able to source 5V 500mA (minimum). That's 2.5 watts. Flip over your Zaurus and read the wattage: 2.5W (Battery). They would have needed to double the power supply!
Or, I can get an IRDA keyboard. Which practically doesn't exist.
Read here for info about getting a folding IRDA keyboard for a good price. (It's not quite ready yet, but it should be within a couple weeks.)
Finally, the Zaurus' handwriting recognition stinks.
It's handwriting recognition is just not that great until either:
(a) You learn the default way to make all the characters.
or
(b) You teach it your handwriting.
You took the time to learn graffiti, so it's not fair to make a comparison if you're not willing to learn the Zaurus' input method. I personally almost always use the keyboard. I find single character handwriting recognition very inefficient becuase you always have to move backwards after each chacter entered.
Then, the Zaurus' use of an obscure ethernet-over-USB protocol gave me quite a headache.
This is a legitimite gripe, but it has supposedly been fixed on the sl-5600 model.
You did leave out one other problem though: the battery size. It's just too small. They gave the sl-5600 a much bigger battery but I don't think it will work with my 5500
TCPA/DRM makes all this irrelevant though. Given the choice between the possibility of undefeatable (basically) DRM and none, the choice seems pretty simple to me. Too bad they shot themselves in the foot like that, since having an FPGA to play with sounds cool.
Here's a short summary of the debate that lead up to this bill:
Here.
It's a good thing they're handling this, otherwise "first person shooter" games might start being produced, and all our kids would be turned into mass-murdering psychos.
Just don't ask me how somebody that doesn't know anybody else with an e-mail account gets somebody else to vouch for him. (Maybe your ISP will vouch for you if you verify yourself with a CC or something?). Any thoughts?
You hit the nail right on the head. I want a web of trust based system for my email to verify the authenticity of the send and to block spam. Those who are not part of my web of trust will have to log onto my site (or some sompany which handles it for me) to purchase a 1 message key for $.25 Anyone with a legitimite reason to contact me will pay the $.25, but spammers will not (not enough chance that I'd buy their crap.)