I do enjoy carcassonne. Apparently there's a Windows PC version available in Germany.
The reviews I read didn't like it, because of two reasons:
- Cluttered screen, no good overview as you would have on your table top (well, it's a lot of cards you have to fit in 17")
- AI too good. Computer has exact knowledge of the cards that are in play, makes it seems more as a psychic than as an opponent.
Indeed, and Doke Pelleboer who is on BoF's Comite van aanbeveling (Recommendation Board) is director of XS4ALL. If you don't buy this kind of research from Microsoft, you shouldn't buy it from Xs4all as well.
Just for the record: I am a XS4ALL customer who lets XS4ALL donate part my ISP fee to BoF.
Re:Thank goodness 10.4 will work with rsync
on
EMC Buying Dantz
·
· Score: 1
After reading this, and generally being a little let down by MacOS backup solutions, I'm very glad 10.4 will give proper support for rsync.
Rsync is not a proper backup solution. Yes, you can make a back-up with it, and yes, it will only backup the modified files, but it won't give you a history, you will just have the latest snapshot of your drive. Good for disaster recovery (crash, fire, you name it), but that's about it.
At my work we have Retrospect doing daily incremental backups, and we keep all the tapes. Which means that, when I find out that that file from a year ago was accidentely overwritten six monts ago, I can still retrieve the original file. Rsync won't be able to do that, it will gladly replace the original with the corrupted file. (There are people however that use cvs to make incremental backups.)
If I had mod points I'd mod you up. Limburger is one of the few decent cheeses to be had in the Netherlands. And it is not even that smelly. Ever been close (or not so close) to a Munster or Corsican cheese?
If you like this stuff, and especially if you like it explained, be sure to pick up a copy of Visual Intelligence by Donald Hoffman. By far the most interesting scientific prose I've read in years.
I second that: possibility related to an old Windows 95 bug
This is pure speculation of the editor. Nowhere in the article the blame is put on the OS. Linking the failure to an error in a previous version of the OS just doesn't make sense.
To quote the article a bit more: A major breakdown in Southern California's air traffic control system last week was partly due to a "design anomaly" in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system
The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers
So the failure is due to a "design anomaly" in the integration of the Windows servers or a design glitch in the Windows servers, not a design anomaly in Windows or a design glitch in the Windows OS
Since/. is US centric, and this appears to be an EU matter, why would they give a rat's ass what most of us have to say on the matter?
Well, I thought the tag line was News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Nothing about the US in there.
Technology is trans-national. What happens in Taiwan will influence the prices of equipment in the US.
The Internet and its legal framework are even more trans-national. When European sites store their visitors data, they will store US visitors too. When the US strengthens its anti-piracy rules, Australians take heed. Limiting/. to the US, what a silly idea.
Yeah, I mentioned this below. Sun had this type of optical mouse, and the mouse pads kicked ass!
Silicon Graphics had them too. At the time I was working in IT, and our department had to maintain an outrageous expensive Silicon Graphics workstation. Biggest maintenance problem: stolen mousepads, because they were so cool.
In the end people had to use the machine with a xerox of the pad, which worked more or less as well.
Requires Microsoft Windows 98/98SE/2000/Me/XP, Macintosh OS 8.6+, or Linux Kernel 2.4+, available USB Port (To achieve USB 2.0 speeds, your computer must be USB 2.0 enabled), CD-ROM Drive for driver installation or internet connection for driver installation download
Portable drives should not need drivers. Oh so handy when you arrive with your portable drive at some friend or client and find you can' connect the thing out the box. And you forgot to bring the install CD (Hey, just copy it onto the Pockey!), and their Internet connection is down. Or their sysadmin won't let them install drivers. Or they won't let you install drivers.
NAME
Changes - razor-agents
2.61 (July 06, 2004)
*
Introduced the Whiplash signature scheme. Whiplash signatures are based on canonical domain names present in URLs embedded in spam messages. A Whiplash signature is also a function of the length of the spam message. It's important to note that not all whiplashes are used as classifiers. The Whiplash engine is augmented by sophesticated logic on the Razor2 backend to select the Whiplashes that are used to filter spam.
Seriously, greylisting implemented on all the ISPs MTAs would overnight block 99% of the spam being sent. Most spam at the moment is being sent from
armies of bots run on unsuspecting users systems connected to cable and DSL service. The programs used are unsophisticated, they churn through a
list of addresses spewing messages out by the thousands. They do not queue messages or retry them if they get an error. Greylisting uses this to
great effect and blocks spam while letting legitimate MTAs deliver messages.
And how much time will it take for the spammers to write their programs around greylisting? A matter of weeks, if not days.
Do you ever look at your server logs? I have seen coordinated spam-attacks from different servers for well over a year now. When a spam gets rejected because of an IP block, it is a matter of seconds before I see the same or similar spam submitted from an entirely different IP address, which could get blocked again. Sometimes this technique uses ten different servers befor they give up or hit a non-blacklisted machine (which means that the mail does reach my server).
I don't seen any reason why the people that wrote this spam software can't write something overnight to bypass greylisting.
personally I'd prefer a much better set of filter tools e.g. being able to say "I only speak English, I NEVER use this account for commerce, and the people I email are professionals so score spelling mistakes much higher as probable spam".
can someone point me in the direction of such a filter?
How about spamassassin?
Just add the following to/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf:
ok_languages en
And increase the score for BIZ_TLD and other tests you find more important than others. Scoring per test is fully configurable, complete list of tests here.
I have built up a nice record collection of +30000 vinyl records and +2000 cd's.
2 - 5 cd's a month = 24 - 60 cd's a year.
This means it would take 33 to 83 years to build up a collection of 2000 cd's. If you rant, please try to get your numbers straight.
We look at the dozens of different media and formats from the past and notice that only two have been successful: the upgrade from wax cylinders to circular records and the subsequent upgrade from vinyl records to CDs: and there are STILL some who think LPs are better.
Make that three, please. You are omitting cassette tapes, which were a big hit worldwide (except in Europe where they were only used for copying, not for selling music), and that are still very much in use in non-western countries. I do not know what the exact situation is today (I haven't left Europe in five years) but cassette tapes used to be the prevalent form of audio distribution in the Middle East and Africa, because they were cheap and easy to reproduce (no copyright payments - no censorship). Of course audio quality was horrible.
And, as a little chauvisnitic note, two of those three successfull format were developed
by Phillips.
It does for Bluetooth enabled phones. Sure works with my T68i, I even can send SMS messages through Address Book. Oh, and you get caller-ID on your Mac as well.
That radio was distributed in war zones and refugee camps.
Yes, but they don't mention the special make that was distributed: from CBC News
Hand-cranked transistor radios that don't need batteries to operate are a part of the humanitarian aid campaign, American officials say. It has been reported, however, that the radios are fixed-frequency models that automatically tune into broadcasts issued by the U.S. military
Dutch designer Dick van Hoff recently designed beautiful hand-powered kitchen utensils. To quote:
Dick van Hoff's Tyranny of the Plug series of kitchen machines chop, churn and blend, but don't require electricity. They are powered by human energy-- by pulling on them, turning them or moving them to and fro... and they function beautifully.
Van Hoff is calling into question the fact that members of contemporary society readily accept new objects that are powered by electricity, yet rarely contemplate where the power is coming from. Instead, his products make people invest their human energy into powering them.
Sleekly yet simply designed of cast iron, chrome, glass, and wood, these machines run smoothly and with efficiency, while fostering awareness and contemplation.
Not so long ago, we had a story here in the Netherlands where a shop was able to locate people who bought a certain item, which was poluted by someone wanting to damage a company, because these people had used a bonus card, with a unique number identifying them, and because the shop did register who sold what.
They shop only did this after getting permission from the 'Openbaar Ministerie' (more or less the District Attorney's office), because even beneficial actions like these are forbidden by Dutch and European law.
The rest of the story is interesting for people with privacy concerns as well: the blackmailer made the blackmailed company (a dairy factory) post a message on a second-hand-car website, encrypted in a picture of a car. Of course, the police checked the site's logfiles, and found the picture to be referenced through surfola.com, an American anonymizer. They contacted surfola, through the FBI, and got all the details of the user they wanted.
So, this silly blackmailer would probably have been better of using a regular Dutch ISP, so (A) his IP in the weblogs would not have stood out from the rest and (B) the visitors details would have been harder to retrieve (Some ISPs here only give out user's details on judges orders, not because law enforcement politely asks for them. Jurisdiction so far backs them up).
(And of course he shouldn't have used a logged website in the first place, Usenet would be the place to be to read anonymously)
Which was also stated in the NY Times article, if you had cared to read it before posting a comment.
The results were bundled in handy paperback books, called 'Documents from the US Den of Espionage', a series of about 8. I've got one of them.Reading it is a hell of a sight, but besides that not very informing or even entertaining.
The hurt-back part of the project is not new. Theo de Raadt is working on just that, in connection with an IP number list (much faster, so suitable for busy servers):
Very simply, this hangs the full list of ~12,000 spam-sending IP/mask
entries listed at www.spews.org off a pf(4) rdr-anchor (which is only
entered for port 25). When connections from these spammers arrive they
are redirected to a daemon which minimally fakes the SMTP protocol
with very low overhead -- for multiple connections at the same time --
and then the message is left on the sender's queue by providing a 550
return code.
The theory here is that most spam still comes in via open relays, and
the only way we are going to convince them to clean up their act is to
waste _their_ disk space, their time, and their network bandwidth more
than they waste ours. For those spammers who drop messages when they
received a 550, well, we have not wasted any further time or network
bandwidth, and even in that situation I think some of the might remove
an address if they receive a 550.
Well, at least Philips did the right thing in 1998 when they sold of their music divison Polygram. The reason they did this were exactly the kind of problems mentioned in this article, they foresaw conflicts between their CD-recorders/copiers and their record company (so now they can focus on copiers that do read copy-protected pseudo-cd's).
The time that hardware builders needed their own content providers to sell their equipment has long gone. Welcome to the 21st century, Kimura San.
It's a really nice scene too, this 'first flight'. You've got these fuzzy shakey images of men doodling with the aeroplane, and then a voice-over says something like "with the newest digital picture ehancement techniques". Then the camera zoomes in on one person in the picture, to the newspaper in his backpocket, and reads the exact date.
So, you're called Nick de Plume and you're the Publisher and Editor in Chief of a site called "ThinkSecret". All fine by me. But why do you post messages about your own news/rumour site on/.? Will we get daily postings now, all CCed from ThinkSecret? Reeks like shameless pluggin to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I do enjoy carcassonne. Apparently there's a Windows PC version available in Germany.
The reviews I read didn't like it, because of two reasons:
- Cluttered screen, no good overview as you would have on your table top (well, it's a lot of cards you have to fit in 17")
- AI too good. Computer has exact knowledge of the cards that are in play, makes it seems more as a psychic than as an opponent.
It works perfectly for me (and if you can play it on Linux, you can likely play it on anything).
I never got it to work under MacOSX. 8-(
I would have loved to play Puerto Rico on-line.
Indeed, and Doke Pelleboer who is on BoF's Comite van aanbeveling (Recommendation Board) is director of XS4ALL. If you don't buy this kind of research from Microsoft, you shouldn't buy it from Xs4all as well.
Just for the record: I am a XS4ALL customer who lets XS4ALL donate part my ISP fee to BoF.
After reading this, and generally being a little let down by MacOS backup solutions, I'm very glad 10.4 will give proper support for rsync.
Rsync is not a proper backup solution. Yes, you can make a back-up with it, and yes, it will only backup the modified files, but it won't give you a history, you will just have the latest snapshot of your drive. Good for disaster recovery (crash, fire, you name it), but that's about it.
At my work we have Retrospect doing daily incremental backups, and we keep all the tapes. Which means that, when I find out that that file from a year ago was accidentely overwritten six monts ago, I can still retrieve the original file.
Rsync won't be able to do that, it will gladly replace the original with the corrupted file. (There are people however that use cvs to make incremental backups.)
If I had mod points I'd mod you up. Limburger is one of the few decent cheeses to be had in the Netherlands. And it is not even that smelly. Ever been close (or not so close) to a Munster or Corsican cheese?
If you like this stuff, and especially if you like it explained, be sure to pick up a copy of Visual Intelligence by Donald Hoffman. By far the most interesting scientific prose I've read in years.
I second that:
possibility related to an old Windows 95 bug
This is pure speculation of the editor. Nowhere in the article the blame is put on the OS. Linking the failure to an error in a previous version of the OS just doesn't make sense.
To quote the article a bit more:
A major breakdown in Southern California's air traffic control system last week was partly due to a "design anomaly" in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system
The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers
So the failure is due to a "design anomaly" in the integration of the Windows servers or a design glitch in the Windows servers, not a design anomaly in Windows or a design glitch in the Windows OS
Since /. is US centric, and this appears to be an EU matter, why would they give a rat's ass what most of us have to say on the matter?
Well, I thought the tag line was News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Nothing about the US in there.
Technology is trans-national. What happens in Taiwan will influence the prices of equipment in the US. /. to the US, what a silly idea.
The Internet and its legal framework are even more trans-national. When European sites store their visitors data, they will store US visitors too. When the US strengthens its anti-piracy rules, Australians take heed.
Limiting
Yeah, I mentioned this below. Sun had this type of optical mouse, and the mouse pads kicked ass!
Silicon Graphics had them too. At the time I was working in IT, and our department had to maintain an outrageous expensive Silicon Graphics workstation. Biggest maintenance problem: stolen mousepads, because they were so cool.
In the end people had to use the machine with a xerox of the pad, which worked more or less as well.
And do read the small print:
Requires Microsoft Windows 98/98SE/2000/Me/XP, Macintosh OS 8.6+, or Linux Kernel 2.4+, available USB Port (To achieve USB 2.0 speeds, your computer must be USB 2.0 enabled), CD-ROM Drive for driver installation or internet connection for driver installation download
Portable drives should not need drivers. Oh so handy when you arrive with your portable drive at some friend or client and find you can' connect the thing out the box. And you forgot to bring the install CD (Hey, just copy it onto the Pockey!), and their Internet connection is down. Or their sysadmin won't let them install drivers. Or they won't let you install drivers.
Also available in Vipul's Razor:
NAME Changes - razor-agents 2.61 (July 06, 2004) * Introduced the Whiplash signature scheme. Whiplash signatures are based on canonical domain names present in URLs embedded in spam messages. A Whiplash signature is also a function of the length of the spam message. It's important to note that not all whiplashes are used as classifiers. The Whiplash engine is augmented by sophesticated logic on the Razor2 backend to select the Whiplashes that are used to filter spam.Seriously, greylisting implemented on all the ISPs MTAs would overnight block 99% of the spam being sent. Most spam at the moment is being sent from
armies of bots run on unsuspecting users systems connected to cable and DSL service. The programs used are unsophisticated, they churn through a
list of addresses spewing messages out by the thousands. They do not queue messages or retry them if they get an error. Greylisting uses this to
great effect and blocks spam while letting legitimate MTAs deliver messages.
And how much time will it take for the spammers to write their programs around greylisting? A matter of weeks, if not days.
Do you ever look at your server logs? I have seen coordinated spam-attacks from different servers for well over a year now. When a spam gets rejected because of an IP block, it is a matter of seconds before I see the same or similar spam submitted from an entirely different IP address, which could get blocked again. Sometimes this technique uses ten different servers befor they give up or hit a non-blacklisted machine (which means that the mail does reach my server).
I don't seen any reason why the people that wrote this spam software can't write something overnight to bypass greylisting.
personally I'd prefer a much better set of filter tools e.g. being able to say "I only speak English, I NEVER use this account for commerce, and the people I email are professionals so score spelling mistakes much higher as probable spam".
can someone point me in the direction of such a filter?
How about spamassassin? /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf:
ok_languages enJust add the following to
And increase the score for BIZ_TLD and other tests you find more important than others. Scoring per test is fully configurable, complete list of tests here.
I used to buy 2 to 5 cd's a month
[snip]
I have built up a nice record collection of +30000 vinyl records and +2000 cd's.
2 - 5 cd's a month = 24 - 60 cd's a year.
This means it would take 33 to 83 years to build up a collection of 2000 cd's. If you rant, please try to get your numbers straight.
We look at the dozens of different media and formats from the past and notice that only two have been successful: the upgrade from wax cylinders to circular records and the subsequent upgrade from vinyl records to CDs: and there are STILL some who think LPs are better.
Make that three, please. You are omitting cassette tapes, which were a big hit worldwide (except in Europe where they were only used for copying, not for selling music), and that are still very much in use in non-western countries.
I do not know what the exact situation is today (I haven't left Europe in five years) but cassette tapes used to be the prevalent form of audio distribution in the Middle East and Africa, because they were cheap and easy to reproduce (no copyright payments - no censorship). Of course audio quality was horrible.
And, as a little chauvisnitic note, two of those three successfull format were developed by Phillips.
It does for Bluetooth enabled phones. Sure works with my T68i, I even can send SMS messages through Address Book. Oh, and you get caller-ID on your Mac as well.
That radio was distributed in war zones and refugee camps.
Yes, but they don't mention the special make that was distributed: from CBC News
Hand-cranked transistor radios that don't need batteries to operate are a part of the humanitarian aid campaign, American officials say. It has been reported, however, that the radios are fixed-frequency models that automatically tune into broadcasts issued by the U.S. military
Still, it says 'reported'. Confirmation anyone?
Dutch designer Dick van Hoff recently designed beautiful hand-powered kitchen utensils. To quote:
Dick van Hoff's Tyranny of the Plug series of kitchen machines chop, churn and blend, but don't require electricity. They are powered by human energy-- by pulling on them, turning them or moving them to and fro... and they function beautifully.
Pictures on Designboom and Slowlab.Van Hoff is calling into question the fact that members of contemporary society readily accept new objects that are powered by electricity, yet rarely contemplate where the power is coming from. Instead, his products make people invest their human energy into powering them.
Sleekly yet simply designed of cast iron, chrome, glass, and wood, these machines run smoothly and with efficiency, while fostering awareness and contemplation.
Not so long ago, we had a story here in the Netherlands where a shop was able to locate people who bought a certain item, which was poluted by someone wanting to damage a company, because these people had used a bonus card, with a unique number identifying them, and because the shop did register who sold what.
They shop only did this after getting permission from the 'Openbaar Ministerie' (more or less the District Attorney's office), because even beneficial actions like these are forbidden by Dutch and European law.
The rest of the story is interesting for people with privacy concerns as well: the blackmailer made the blackmailed company (a dairy factory) post a message on a second-hand-car website, encrypted in a picture of a car. Of course, the police checked the site's logfiles, and found the picture to be referenced through surfola.com, an American anonymizer. They contacted surfola, through the FBI, and got all the details of the user they wanted.
So, this silly blackmailer would probably have been better of using a regular Dutch ISP, so (A) his IP in the weblogs would not have stood out from the rest and (B) the visitors details would have been harder to retrieve (Some ISPs here only give out user's details on judges orders, not because law enforcement politely asks for them. Jurisdiction so far backs them up).
(And of course he shouldn't have used a logged website in the first place, Usenet would be the place to be to read anonymously)
Which was also stated in the NY Times article, if you had cared to read it before posting a comment.
The results were bundled in handy paperback books, called 'Documents from the US Den of Espionage', a series of about 8. I've got one of them.Reading it is a hell of a sight, but besides that not very informing or even entertaining.
The hurt-back part of the project is not new. Theo de Raadt is working on just that, in connection with an IP number list (much faster, so suitable for busy servers):
Very simply, this hangs the full list of ~12,000 spam-sending IP/mask entries listed at www.spews.org off a pf(4) rdr-anchor (which is only entered for port 25). When connections from these spammers arrive they are redirected to a daemon which minimally fakes the SMTP protocol with very low overhead -- for multiple connections at the same time -- and then the message is left on the sender's queue by providing a 550 return code.
The theory here is that most spam still comes in via open relays, and the only way we are going to convince them to clean up their act is to waste _their_ disk space, their time, and their network bandwidth more than they waste ours. For those spammers who drop messages when they received a 550, well, we have not wasted any further time or network bandwidth, and even in that situation I think some of the might remove an address if they receive a 550.
Well, at least Philips did the right thing in 1998 when they sold of their music divison Polygram. The reason they did this were exactly the kind of problems mentioned in this article, they foresaw conflicts between their CD-recorders/copiers and their record company (so now they can focus on copiers that do read copy-protected pseudo-cd's). The time that hardware builders needed their own content providers to sell their equipment has long gone. Welcome to the 21st century, Kimura San.
It's a really nice scene too, this 'first flight'. You've got these fuzzy shakey images of men doodling with the aeroplane, and then a voice-over says something like "with the newest digital picture ehancement techniques". Then the camera zoomes in on one person in the picture, to the newspaper in his backpocket, and reads the exact date.
So, you're called Nick de Plume and you're the Publisher and Editor in Chief of a site called "ThinkSecret". All fine by me. But why do you post messages about your own news/rumour site on /.? Will we get daily postings now, all CCed from ThinkSecret? Reeks like shameless pluggin to me.
whois macthis.org
Domain Name: MACTHIS.ORG
Registrar: DOTSTER, INC.
Whois Server: whois.dotster.com
Referral URL: http://www.dotster.com/help/whois
Name Server: NS1.LUGGAGEPLANET.COM
Name Server: NS1.KNITE.NET
Updated Date: 05-nov-2001
Yes, the do exist. My guess is they are sooo tiny that even their name servers got /.ed
Also, Google is not the end to all queries. Don't forget alltheweb.