Real phones also pick up that kind of interference - you can hear the mobile of the person on the other end of a phone line (perhaps in a different country) before it rings. Spooky for the other person if they don't realise what the diddly-dit-dit-dit noise is and you tell them their mobile is about to ring:)
Over Christmas a friend gave me a cheap tacky little reindeer hat thingy that you stick on top of anything nearby. The reindeer nose (led) lights red whenever there's significant radio activity from nearby mobiles. Sold as a cheap piece of Christmas fun that light up when _your_ mobile phone rings, of course it actually lights when any nearby phone rings, sends or receives an sms, etc.
Another friend has a similar circuit built into his car air freshener, which similarly flashes whenever there's mobile phone activity nearby.
Incidentally, I'm not sure measuring distance would be all that accurate, just based on signal strength. The latter depends on the power of the mobile phone's transmissions, which depend on how good a signal the phone gets from the base station...
Personally, I'd recommend allowing NI a referendum on joining Ireland, as that would solve the whole problem.
I doubt it would solve anything; NI is not such a trivial problem. A referendum would simply affirm that most people in NI wish to be part of the UK (since most are unionist). However this ignores the republican minority, always a problem with referendums, especially given the historical reasons why that population is a minority.
Some Irish-Americans, perhaps, acting as private citizens. That's like blaming Germany because Muslims living in Germany contributed heavily to Al-Queda. That doesn't fly
The point is that its money came from US Americans, perfectly legally. The terrorists operating out of Germany were doing so illegally - i.e. the German government in no way condoned their activities. That funding for NorAid et. al. was legal in the US indicated that the US government tacitly accepted the IRA as a legitimate organisation. Funding terrorist organisations is, of course, a crime in the US; however the definition of a terrorist organisation is often a matter of perspective, so such organisations have to be identified specifically by legislators. The IRA have maintained a cease-fire for many years now; a considerable factor in the existance of the cease-fire is surely the overdue but welcome ban on fundraising on its behalf in the US.
However, the disinterested skeptic might conclude that Britain's tactics against the Irish strongly resemble Israel's against the Palestinians, and as long as that's the case, the US won't get involved as Britain certainly isn't the clear-cut "good guy" there.
Ah; we see your colours - mod +1 flamebait. Oh well, I've bitten so may as well finish off. I won't bother countering your outrageous hyperbole, however I will say "good guy" is a ridiculous concept to introduce to such an issue - these things are never so black and white. Is George Bush a "good guy"? (that's rhetorical btw - answer, "depends who you ask").
For what its worth, you may want to research what the US' interests might have been in Somalia and Bosnia. Basically diversity and security of oil supply has to be a significant factor (not the only one, to be sure, but significant nonetheless). A quick search on Google finds several arguments along those lines; ranging as always from whackily paranoid to credibly well-researched.
The patent claims were the first thing that caught my attention. However, I thought that if you have a patent on something, then you must put the patent number clearly on the product. Microsoft haven't listed the relevant patents - so how can you know whether you need to license the patents or not? The same goes for all Microsoft products, which carry the same claim without listing the relevant patents. Compare and contrast Word's splash screen, for example, with Adobe Acrobat's splash screen which clearly lists the patents Adobe claim to have on Acrobat.
This is exactly the sort of nebulous hand-waving that muddies the waters. If there are relevant patents, and the specs are published, the patents should be listed. At the very least, they should be listed on the Office product itself.
It seems a simple thing to me - if Microsoft have patents on their products, surely they know what these patents are and can list them.
On tests of file retrieval, archive unpacking etc - I suggest the biggest factor is the filesystem.
I have recently been mucking about with the freedb database archive (over 1GB, 1 million small files), on a new 1.2GHz 40GB (IBM, 8MB cache) Dell Latitude running Windows NT and a venerable Sun Sparc20 (2x66MHz, 9GB) running Solaris 2.7. The differences are substantial and not necessarily obvious:
Uncompress is faster on the Dell - no surprise there, really; task was cpu-bound
A little app I wrote to scan through the uncompressed tar archive is perhaps twice as fast on the Sun than on the Dell - indicating the superior disk subsystem on the Sun is a help here; task was disk-bound on both machines
Unpacking the tar archive takes a few hours on the Dell (using GNU tar on Cygwin) - I tried it on the Sun but it was less than a third of the way through aftet three days! Observing the unpack made it obvious that UFS is the culprit; adding a file to a directory seems exponential with respect to directory size. However accessing a known filename is near instantaneous on the Sun no matter how many files there are in the directory - which shows the filesystem is optimised for retrieving files from highly populated directories
Hmm; might be interesting to try it with Linux on the laptop, which is using ReiserFS. I also noticed that unsorted 'ls' is slower than 'dir' - however I suspect 'ls' was retrieving the whole directory contents before displaying anything, whereas 'dir' just reads and displays the directory contents as it goes. However it could also be a feature of the Cygwin port.
I thought the "under God" bit was an Amendment - and a relatively recent one at that. If so, how can it possibly have been an original assumption?
It is freedom OF religion not freedom FROM religion.
I also thought the US constitution specifically provides for atheism? Of have I misunderstood your point?
I'm happy for everyone to have religious freedom, however I object stongly to the idea that the state can tell me that I must have a religion. Of course such a mandate fails in any case, you can't force someone to believe something they don't believe (you might convince someone, but you can't force them) - which makes such a mandate rather pointless.
For example, if I were to go to the US and become a US citizen, I can be forced to recite the pledge (presumably a requirement of citizenship). However you can't force me to believe it.
Indicentally we're having a similar argument for real in Europe; the Vatican is doing all it can to get Christianity referred to in the European Constitution (as currently drafted there's no such reference).
In what way does your flaccid flame relate to my message? You obviously didn't read it - hey what's new on/. At least you're not AC - credit for that.
The road accident statistics are against you. Dialling is not really an issue - voice dialling is easy enough. The problem is the lack of attention paid to the road whilst concentrating on a phone call. The fact remains that driving a half-ton lump of metal at 30mph in town requires full attention in order to be safe. A fraction of a second's difference in reaction time can make the difference between life and death. It's not a video game. I don't know what the US law enforcement view on this is, but the UK police consider it to be "driving without due care and attention", whether you have hands-free or not. They take this view as a result of numerous studies on road safety and the collection of facts from accidents they attend, not out of petulance or bloody-mindedness.
Anyway, I don't know why I'm bothering. You won't change your dangerous behaviour in response to anything I say. People who hold other people's lives in such low esteem aren't going to be swayed by mere reasoned argument. And no-one else is reading this thread now, surely...
A report I saw on UK tv news (sorry, don't remember exactly which) said that the reason it was being done now, after 57 years languishing, is that if Disney don't finish the film soon, they lose the rights to the work Dali did on it in the first place.
It seems perfectly obvious to me that Disney are just trying to lock in their copyright; any artistic reasons being given by Disney are obviously secondary to the copyright issue - otherwise it would have been done years ago.
Garbage. You do not _need_ to use your phone while driving. You _choose_ to do so, you don't _need_ to. If your travelling time is so valuable you need to do other stuff, take the train, take a taxi, or get a driver (depending on how valuable your time really is).
You say you're on the phone for less than 5 minutes - how many junctions do you go through in that time? Do you pay full attention to the junction (rhetorical)? Sensible driving takes a lot of brain power - you need to think and react fast to rapidly changing situations; you're not taking a walk in the park.
In my experience, one of the easiest things to spot on the road is a car where the driver is on their mobile phone. Invariably they're all over the shop - indeed they often drive as if they're drunk. Maybe that's why you're still alive - people see you driving erratically and give you a wide berth...
What kind of suicidal moderators modded the parent up as "insightful" - perhaps we could have a new moderation counter, "homicidal". Bet those responsible for the "insightful"s all use their mobile phones whilst driving...
They say they're sort of looking at buying companies in the 4-5 million dollar (up to maybe 10 million dollars) range. Apparently their stock is doing pretty well.
If a case could be made that SCO's suit was without basis, and simply an attempt to pump their stock to enable purchase of other companies, would that be something SEC should consider?
Someone mentioned that SEC like to chase whoever sells pumped stock; well perhaps the execs aren't considering selling stock exactly, but are thinking of using pumped stock to fund purchases. To me that sounds like straightforward fraud. Obviously, if SCO stock value has gone from $20mil to $100mil, they can afford to spend $10mil of stock at todays prices, while effectively only spending $2mil of stock at April's prices. If the stock subsequently plummets back to the previous level, they will have made a bit of a killing.
Another way of looking at it, is that SCO could buy a company valued at $10mil with 10% of SCO's total stock today. In a few months the SCO stock may well plummet back to April's levels again (after all, their fundamentals haven't changed, and it's more than likely their suit agains IBM will fail), in which case they will have bought a $10mil concern for the equivalent of $2mil.
Does this make sense? Or is it all just ignorant hogwash?
It is perfectly possible to reverse-engineer a meaningful source from a given binary. It's certainly not easy, and of course you won't end up with the same variable names etc (unless the author kindly left in heaps of debug symbols etc), but that hardly matters. The point is that it is possible. Even templates are possible to decompile, given enough incentive; after all it's just fancy pattern matching.
With regards the original article - well, that was a bunch of obvious guff really; what you'd expect from high-school geeks of the type I was, some number of years ago. Of note, is that it claimed to decompile C++, when actually it talked only of rather trivial C constructs, something that is a well understood practice already.
Some relatively recent classic decompilation work was done by Cristina Cifuentes who put together a C decompiler that worked to a significant degree for common DOS-based compilers of the time. Effectively the job of "decompilation" can be thought of as "compilation" - instead of compiling C into ASM, you think of compiling ASM into C. Not as daft as it sounds, honest. You can download "dcc" from the above site to investigate further.
Boomerang is a sourceforge project attempting to create a decompiler. Worth a look, as well.
It's worth noting, that there are a number of ways to "cheat". For example, it's often trivial to discover what compiler was used to generate a given object code, and there are usually masses of common library-type code that gives you a leg up. Add to that, the fact that a piece of code was generated by a compiler, and the problem of discovering what a given piece of object code does is drastically simplified - compilers add huge amounts of structure and predictability to the generated object code that can be absent in free-form handwritten assembler (and few people do that anymore!), and much can be made of this.
On the code/data issue mentioned by others in this thread - although separating code/data in general from mixed binaries can be considered hard, in reality it's often quite feasible and even simple. After all, the CPU manages to work it out. Again, the fact that there are so many short-cuts you can take really helps.
Of course, a quick cruise around the cracking community will turn up all sorts of ways and means to shortcut this sort of problem...
Cost : Ever price out DVDRs? They're hella expensive. Compare that to, say, a 100 pack of CDRs after rebate
Blank recordable DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs are selling for 1 euro 59 cents at my local supermarket (er, in Europe, obviously!). Singly, with slim-line CD jewel case, in a high-street supermarket, not the cheapest way to buy stuff like this. Given that a DVD recordable has 7x the capacity of a CDR, that comes out at 20 cents per CDR - cheaper than the cheapest CDRs I've been able to find in the high street (~30 cents).
If you want cheap prices, a quick rummage turned up a US retailer listing decent prices - much lower for quantity, lowest at time of posting 72cents each (US) for DVD-R. They even have authoring blanks at 10$, for what that's worth.
Anyway, the point is that DVD recordables are no longer significantly more expensive than CDRs - in fact if you measure by storage quantity, they come out cheaper.
Another point is that DiVX compressed movies in practice rarely fit into one CDR, without compromising video quality too much. DVD-/+R on the other hand could easily store a number of movies on one disk (perhaps 4 or 5), at decent quality. Useful for watching your movies when on the move; if only it was possible to get a portable DiVX player...
I have yet to see it reach over 30% processor utilization, a testament to the efficency of the kernel.
As I see it, the point of these scheduler patches is that 30% processor utilisation is in some sense a testament to the inefficiency of the kernel scheduling - perhaps the 30% means that it is spending 70% sleeping (i.e. waiting). One reason for the 30% processor utilitisation could be that many processes are sleeping, waiting for other stuff that has low priority. This is what the scheduler modifications are trying to attack - if enough interactive tasks are waiting on a non-interactive task, that non-interactive task gets a boost.
If your processor utilitisation went up from 30% to (say) 60% as a result of these changes to the kernel scheduling, your users would see a marked improvement in responsiveness at their end. It could be argued that you should be able to see your server running at much higher usage, as otherwise you are wasting the investment in the server. For example, instead of a dual-processor machine at 30% load you could have had a cheaper single-processor machine at 60% load.
Having said all that, in your case you are more likely to be network bound anyway, especially if you are really running 100 KDE X servers on your server machine, so it might be cheaper to put in a second network card, and put your 100 client machines on two subnets.
BTW are you really running 100 instances of KDE on the server? Usually it's a lot more efficient to have cheap client PCs running KDE on their local X server, and take that load off the network server. Then the server only runs X clients, not X servers (except perhaps for the console desktop).
Take a look at Rational's Apex. This _does_ allow you to do development on large systems with connections to the core that are not permanent (i.e. test your changes locally, integrate with other's changes when you reconnect etc). CVS offers this as well, of course. It's not difficult; essentially you need a copy of the stuff under development locally, whilst retaining information regarding where it came from (what version, etc).
So what's missing? URL rewriting, as far as I can tell, and this is already done by loads of stuff, most obviously the GNU wget.
It would be trivial to knock up a script or two to add URL re-writing on the back of Apex or CVS, so the patent is not reasonable, IMHO.
I'm not saying Interwoven's product is not useful - on the contrary, it may be extremely useful. However the patent is obviously trying to stop other SCM products from adding this sort of functionality.
For example, the CVS people could easily add URL re-writing on.html/whatever files as a switch; could be a neat idea. If this patent is viable, then they can't do this without shelling out to Interwoven, who may chose not to have GPL software competing with theirs.
Having followed the quoted link to FSF financial data just to see what could possibly be on the end of the worlds longest context tag, I then looked up those of the EFF. The FSF shows half a million turnover, 1 million "assets - liabilities", whereas the EFF shows 2.5 million turnover, half a million "assets - liabilities".
I am not an accountant (IANAA?), so perhaps someone could explain why sitting on the best part of $1m cash is a good way to operate a non-profit whose turnover is half that? How do these figures compare with for-profit organisations? As the site says, if assets significantly outstrip liabilities (presumably a difference that has to be considered in relation to annual cash flow to determine if it is a "big" difference or not) then the organisation may not be putting its resources to best use.
Indeed - the default assumption has to be that the 'invention' is a load of garbage. Anyway, to answer the original question, the modern approach to making money out of this sort of thing would be:
Make outrageous claims about new unbreakable encryption system, publish on a web site. Patent it, to give an air of credibility
Write to Bruce Schneier asking him to check it for you
See yourself publicly humiliated in Bruce's Doghouse for peddling snake-oil
Sue Counterpane for defamation
It helps if you actually sell your oil to a big company somehow; then hopefully they'll be so embarrassed about buying your stuff that they'll sue Counterpane for you.
All of this is likely to change at the European convention on human rights -- which does have a provision guaranteeing some privacy -- is incorporated into British law
Well, if things carry on getting incorporated the way they are, the ECHR will make little or no difference, especially with regards to invasions of privacy by the state. Essentially it makes a whole raft of privacy-invading activities illegal by default, which were previously (in the UK) legal unless explicitly legislated against. However, the government is busy doing its best to side-step around that by enacting legislation that permits anyone they want to be able to bypass the convention. See FIPR and Stand for details. The most prominent relevant legislation is the RIP act, and the sneaky "statutory instruments" that allow the Home Secretary to do what he likes unless people keep their eyes peeled.
Use FreeBSD with Soft Updates
on
fsck-less Booting?
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· Score: 3, Informative
That'd be my first shot - FreeBSD implements "Soft Updates" (as on OpenBSD) which practically eliminates the need for fsck'ing.
Soft Updates ensure that the filesystem is always in a consistent state. Updates are effectively not marked as complete until they have actually all gotten to disk. This ensures that after a re-boot, the system is consistent, maybe with the disk state as that of a some seconds earlier. The Soft Updates technique is also much faster than journalling, which is your other option (reiserfs, ext3fs etc in Linux).
I said above that fscking is practically eliminated - in fact a fsck task still needs to run to recover sectors that are 'dirty' but the system is stable without it - critically the system boots up without it, and in the background at some point when the system finds time to do so it recovers the sectors marked 'dirty'; the soft update people call this a "background fsck".
Note that this won't stop loss of data - but then nothing will stop loss of data. fsck certainly won't even if it is run properly, because that's not what it does. What it does do is ensure the filesystem metadata is always consistent (i.e. whether a file has been created/deleted, contents of directories etc).
If you want to get the same kind of disk flushing that you get with DOS, then you can only really do that with a single-tasking operating system (if that's not a contradiction in terms!) which can therefore ensure a minimum of delay between the application generating data and it being flushed to disk. Note this is never perfect, but can be close enough that you'd only notice one in a million power-offs.
The article made claims that the whole "diamond invention" thing would collapse pretty soon, and it was written in 1982. Obviously that hasn't happened, some 20 years on. Where did all the Australian diamonds go? What about Zambia et. al. that the article mentions? Presumably the South African government today still leaves DeBeers doing their thing much as DeBeers did during the apartheid era (yet another triumph of financial convenience over moral consistency). What about the Soviet diamonds? Are they still piped through DeBeers?
On the other hand, if it's supposed to be a surprise, why not buy her a cubic zirconia instead of a diamond. Keeps its value (er, 'coz it doesn't have much to start with!), and I bet most people can't tell the difference without looking closely (when was the last time you examined someone-elses engagement ring?):) Buy her a car with the difference, and she'll join in the subterfuge quite happily.
Well, the best option is surely to wait until they make "The Hobbit", and buy the digitally-remastered Lord Of The Rings set along with The Hobbit in 2008:>
People who bought the box set early, in 2005, will be really annoyed.
Whilst I don't lose any sleep over the "FBI warnings" (which are pretty pointless, it has to be said, but are only a few seconds and are usually gone by the time I've fetched a beer from the fridge), here's a related problem that US users may not have come across.
I spend a fair amount of time in Italy, and since I'm a native English speaker, the ability to buy DVDs in Italy that have the English soundtrack alongside the Italian one means that I actually buy DVDs in Italy, whereas I would never have bought Italian VHS films (well, maybe one or two to help learn Italian but not more).
However, a couple of DVDs I've bought recently (Lake Placid, which is on some local European label under license from Warner, and The Cell, which is on Warner direct - neither film is particularly good, I have to say, but that's beside the point), offer the following:
Film in Italian, no subtitles
Film in Italian, Italian subtitles
Film in Italian, English subtitles
Film in English, Italian subtitles
Which means I can't watch it in English, without subtitles. Trying to switch subtitles is inhibited by the disk - up pops the same 'not allowed' symbol that you get when trying anything whilst the copyright infringement warning (obviously outside the US it's not an "FBI warning" but the effect is much the same). Incidentally, reading the back of Lake Placid, it could be construed as saying that the English track forces subtitles, but it's not clear. Where The Cell is concerned, there is no indication whatsoever on the back of the DVD that it's been "crippled" in this fashion.
I mean, what jerk thought that one up? It seems that Warner employ people just to think up new ways to alienate any minority customer base. The DVDs were in the "bargain bin" - at a price of 12 euro (er, = $12 give or take:) ), so presumably they're trying to stop people buying up bargain stock in other countries for black-market resale in the UK (where presumably the same films are at the not-so-bargain price of UKP25 - $40 give or take). Like that has any effect on the black market, of course - presumably black marketeers use a DVD copier or even a DVD mastering facility somewhere where the long arm of Hollywood and US influence is weak.
Whilst I'm at it - another gripe:) Why oh why oh why can't they indicate clearly on all DVDs whether they're anamorphic or not? Perhaps they do in the US but in Europe we get landed with bizarre phrases like "16:9 - adapted for all types of television" which could mean anything, and frequently means "letterbox" which kind of defeats the video quality enhancement we were supposed to get from DVD in the first place (PAL letterbox DVD has a resolution of 480x430 approx by my calculations, whereas anamorphic 16:9 is 640x576 - SVHS full frame is 480 x 576, widescreen is 480x430). The fact they make the labelling inconsistent and unclear can only mean they deliberately want to confuse the consumer. It seems we're not allowed to diddle them, but they're quite within their rights to shaft us any amusing way they can think up.
It's yet another attempt to use the technology to enforce stuff that is perfectly well enforceable in law. All they need to do is prohibit distribution of the "bargain" DVDs in countries for which they are not licensed, and get law enforcement to deal with violations. The same could be said for Region coding.
It is perfectly possible to write the VirusScan thing properly in Windows. Microsoft even tell you how to do so, if you read all the stuff they've written about writing services, desktop apps and the like. Which you could reasonably expect a security software vendor to have done.
a high privilege program should be able to safely interact with a user through any means, be it command line, GUI, network, or otherwise
I disagree. It is unreasonable to expect the operating system to protect you from all possible types of badly written application. A high privilege program should restrict all means of interaction to a strict set that it can control and verify. In the case of VirusScan, the service should not be opening windows. By all means write unprivileged command line, gui, network etc applications which can use the single strictly controlled interface that the service handles, but don't expect to write the service to cope with any kind of input channel and demand that the OS protect you.
The simple (and obvious) way to write such software, is to write the privileged bit as a service (somewhat analogous to a daemon in Unix), and the GUI as a separate unprivileged user-land app. The service runs with whatever privileges are granted it, independent of the priviledge of the user logged in. The separate GUI application, running in the user space, communicates with the service by whatever method is convenient (defined strictly by the service). The service then checks all communications it receives for validity etc before processing any of it. This means that as long as the service checks its inputs properly, no malicious GUI app can force it to do things it shouldn't be doing.
The point is, Windows NT does not make this impossible. It does make it possible to write crap software that compromises security, but hey that's the case with any operating system. It's quite possible to write a 'su' replacement that doesn't check passwords, for example - there's a command line app idea that the OS won't protect you against, and it'd be handful of lines of C code.
It takes administrative rights to install the software; that's when it gets its privileges. In this case, it takes admin rights to install VirusScan, and that's when the security got compromised - the installation gave privileged rights to an application which opens windows on the user's desktop. I'm also not convinced that X isn't susceptible to the same issue; as far as I'm aware X uses a message queue to communicate between windows, the user etc - there's nothing in X to say you can't cause a buffer overflow in an application by sending it a malicious message, it's up to the application to check its inputs, and that includes its messages.
One thing this does show, is that closed-source software can't be trusted in the same way that open source can. It's a lot harder to perform a useful security audit on your system if you don't have the source code to the privileged applications you want to install. How would you determine that VirusScan violates the design guidelines for secure services, short of cracking it (which presumably violates the DMCA of course)?
Of interest, I wonder if the McAfee stuff has the same basic design flaw...
We used to take 100K 5.25" floppies (so yeah, old-ish but not paper-tape old:) ), cut a mirror-image notch in the other side of the disc case, then flip them up-side down to get double-sided disk capacity out of a single-sided disk drive.
When the teacher caught us at it, he threw a fit. It turned out the cloth on the inside of the floppy case (which really was floppy) was a kind of 'j' cloth, designed to offer minimal resistance when the platter was spun in one direction. By doing what we did, we simply over-stressed the spindle motor as spinning the disk the opposite way to that designed had more friction. Mostly this would reduce the life of the disk drive, more than anything else.
It may have had other effects, possibly on the stability of the platter when spinning - I think at that stage the heads were actually in contact with the platter; certainly they were close enough to collect contamination. So if the platter is spinning with more vibration due to the friction effects, it might also reduce the life of the heads, or at least meant they needed cleaning more often. And as I recall, cleaning the heads was a controversial business anyway; some would claim that the cleaners actually did damage to the drive.
The point, as has been made by others already, that 'overclocking' your CD burner is short-sighted - presumably like other hardware the badge is the result of testing, MTBF predictions and the like, not the list of components that go into the drive.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in the UK and probably most of Europe, oil is taxed according to its use. So if you take vegetable oil, waste from your local chippy, and put it in your car, you are liable for the tax on that as fuel - in the UK that's about 80% of the pump price, but remember the tax is absolute, not a percentage so even if the oil is free, the tax is the same
Carbon
With regards the environmental issue, we should consider where the carbon goes. If you burn veg. oil you effectively convert it to greenhouse gases. These eventually return to solid matter through the various carbon sinks around the world (e.g. the Amazon rainforest). If you simply land-fill your used veg. oil (BTW something I'm not sure that we do), there's much less release of greenhouse gases (a good thing, certainly in the near term), but whilst the carbon is fixed, it's in a fairly useless state for the near future at least.
Certainly with regards burning veg oil vs. diesel, there appears to be little difference, if any, to the volume of greenhouse gases.
Many point to veg. oil as being renewable, and it may well be, but the real reason we're trying (well, some of us, anyway) to wean ourselves off fossil fuels is not so much that we're running out (although that may be a factor in the long term - however the date seems to continually shift to the right), but that burning them may cause a catastrophic change in climate.
Anyway, I guess the point is that using second-hand veg. oil in place of diesel is not a solution to problems with our wallets or our environment.
Another interesting fact - we get the base 60 stuff (sexagesimal) from the Sumerians, around 3500BC in Mesopotamia - arguably the first civilisation (depending on how you define civilisation...). So the 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour stuff is pretty much the oldest artifact of civilisation that is still in use today. It also highlights perhaps how resistant we are to changing the way we think of time:)
Slashdot Mirror
Real phones also pick up that kind of interference - you can hear the mobile of the person on the other end of a phone line (perhaps in a different country) before it rings. Spooky for the other person if they don't realise what the diddly-dit-dit-dit noise is and you tell them their mobile is about to ring :)
Over Christmas a friend gave me a cheap tacky little reindeer hat thingy that you stick on top of anything nearby. The reindeer nose (led) lights red whenever there's significant radio activity from nearby mobiles. Sold as a cheap piece of Christmas fun that light up when _your_ mobile phone rings, of course it actually lights when any nearby phone rings, sends or receives an sms, etc.
Another friend has a similar circuit built into his car air freshener, which similarly flashes whenever there's mobile phone activity nearby.
Incidentally, I'm not sure measuring distance would be all that accurate, just based on signal strength. The latter depends on the power of the mobile phone's transmissions, which depend on how good a signal the phone gets from the base station...
The point is that its money came from US Americans, perfectly legally. The terrorists operating out of Germany were doing so illegally - i.e. the German government in no way condoned their activities. That funding for NorAid et. al. was legal in the US indicated that the US government tacitly accepted the IRA as a legitimate organisation. Funding terrorist organisations is, of course, a crime in the US; however the definition of a terrorist organisation is often a matter of perspective, so such organisations have to be identified specifically by legislators. The IRA have maintained a cease-fire for many years now; a considerable factor in the existance of the cease-fire is surely the overdue but welcome ban on fundraising on its behalf in the US.
Ah; we see your colours - mod +1 flamebait. Oh well, I've bitten so may as well finish off. I won't bother countering your outrageous hyperbole, however I will say "good guy" is a ridiculous concept to introduce to such an issue - these things are never so black and white. Is George Bush a "good guy"? (that's rhetorical btw - answer, "depends who you ask").
For what its worth, you may want to research what the US' interests might have been in Somalia and Bosnia. Basically diversity and security of oil supply has to be a significant factor (not the only one, to be sure, but significant nonetheless). A quick search on Google finds several arguments along those lines; ranging as always from whackily paranoid to credibly well-researched.
This is exactly the sort of nebulous hand-waving that muddies the waters. If there are relevant patents, and the specs are published, the patents should be listed. At the very least, they should be listed on the Office product itself.
It seems a simple thing to me - if Microsoft have patents on their products, surely they know what these patents are and can list them.
I have recently been mucking about with the freedb database archive (over 1GB, 1 million small files), on a new 1.2GHz 40GB (IBM, 8MB cache) Dell Latitude running Windows NT and a venerable Sun Sparc20 (2x66MHz, 9GB) running Solaris 2.7. The differences are substantial and not necessarily obvious:
- Uncompress is faster on the Dell - no surprise there, really; task was cpu-bound
- A little app I wrote to scan through the uncompressed tar archive is perhaps twice as fast on the Sun than on the Dell - indicating the superior disk subsystem on the Sun is a help here; task was disk-bound on both machines
- Unpacking the tar archive takes a few hours on the Dell (using GNU tar on Cygwin) - I tried it on the Sun but it was less than a third of the way through aftet three days! Observing the unpack made it obvious that UFS is the culprit; adding a file to a directory seems exponential with respect to directory size. However accessing a known filename is near instantaneous on the Sun no matter how many files there are in the directory - which shows the filesystem is optimised for retrieving files from highly populated directories
Hmm; might be interesting to try it with Linux on the laptop, which is using ReiserFS. I also noticed that unsorted 'ls' is slower than 'dir' - however I suspect 'ls' was retrieving the whole directory contents before displaying anything, whereas 'dir' just reads and displays the directory contents as it goes. However it could also be a feature of the Cygwin port.I'm happy for everyone to have religious freedom, however I object stongly to the idea that the state can tell me that I must have a religion. Of course such a mandate fails in any case, you can't force someone to believe something they don't believe (you might convince someone, but you can't force them) - which makes such a mandate rather pointless.
For example, if I were to go to the US and become a US citizen, I can be forced to recite the pledge (presumably a requirement of citizenship). However you can't force me to believe it.
Indicentally we're having a similar argument for real in Europe; the Vatican is doing all it can to get Christianity referred to in the European Constitution (as currently drafted there's no such reference).
Great fun. A little tweaking and it works again.
In what way does your flaccid flame relate to my message? You obviously didn't read it - hey what's new on /. At least you're not AC - credit for that.
The road accident statistics are against you. Dialling is not really an issue - voice dialling is easy enough. The problem is the lack of attention paid to the road whilst concentrating on a phone call. The fact remains that driving a half-ton lump of metal at 30mph in town requires full attention in order to be safe. A fraction of a second's difference in reaction time can make the difference between life and death. It's not a video game. I don't know what the US law enforcement view on this is, but the UK police consider it to be "driving without due care and attention", whether you have hands-free or not. They take this view as a result of numerous studies on road safety and the collection of facts from accidents they attend, not out of petulance or bloody-mindedness.
Anyway, I don't know why I'm bothering. You won't change your dangerous behaviour in response to anything I say. People who hold other people's lives in such low esteem aren't going to be swayed by mere reasoned argument. And no-one else is reading this thread now, surely...
A report I saw on UK tv news (sorry, don't remember exactly which) said that the reason it was being done now, after 57 years languishing, is that if Disney don't finish the film soon, they lose the rights to the work Dali did on it in the first place.
It seems perfectly obvious to me that Disney are just trying to lock in their copyright; any artistic reasons being given by Disney are obviously secondary to the copyright issue - otherwise it would have been done years ago.
Plus ca change...
Garbage. You do not _need_ to use your phone while driving. You _choose_ to do so, you don't _need_ to. If your travelling time is so valuable you need to do other stuff, take the train, take a taxi, or get a driver (depending on how valuable your time really is).
You say you're on the phone for less than 5 minutes - how many junctions do you go through in that time? Do you pay full attention to the junction (rhetorical)? Sensible driving takes a lot of brain power - you need to think and react fast to rapidly changing situations; you're not taking a walk in the park.
In my experience, one of the easiest things to spot on the road is a car where the driver is on their mobile phone. Invariably they're all over the shop - indeed they often drive as if they're drunk. Maybe that's why you're still alive - people see you driving erratically and give you a wide berth...
What kind of suicidal moderators modded the parent up as "insightful" - perhaps we could have a new moderation counter, "homicidal". Bet those responsible for the "insightful"s all use their mobile phones whilst driving...
If a case could be made that SCO's suit was without basis, and simply an attempt to pump their stock to enable purchase of other companies, would that be something SEC should consider?
Someone mentioned that SEC like to chase whoever sells pumped stock; well perhaps the execs aren't considering selling stock exactly, but are thinking of using pumped stock to fund purchases. To me that sounds like straightforward fraud. Obviously, if SCO stock value has gone from $20mil to $100mil, they can afford to spend $10mil of stock at todays prices, while effectively only spending $2mil of stock at April's prices. If the stock subsequently plummets back to the previous level, they will have made a bit of a killing.
Another way of looking at it, is that SCO could buy a company valued at $10mil with 10% of SCO's total stock today. In a few months the SCO stock may well plummet back to April's levels again (after all, their fundamentals haven't changed, and it's more than likely their suit agains IBM will fail), in which case they will have bought a $10mil concern for the equivalent of $2mil.
Does this make sense? Or is it all just ignorant hogwash?
With regards the original article - well, that was a bunch of obvious guff really; what you'd expect from high-school geeks of the type I was, some number of years ago. Of note, is that it claimed to decompile C++, when actually it talked only of rather trivial C constructs, something that is a well understood practice already.
Some relatively recent classic decompilation work was done by Cristina Cifuentes who put together a C decompiler that worked to a significant degree for common DOS-based compilers of the time. Effectively the job of "decompilation" can be thought of as "compilation" - instead of compiling C into ASM, you think of compiling ASM into C. Not as daft as it sounds, honest. You can download "dcc" from the above site to investigate further.
Boomerang is a sourceforge project attempting to create a decompiler. Worth a look, as well.
It's worth noting, that there are a number of ways to "cheat". For example, it's often trivial to discover what compiler was used to generate a given object code, and there are usually masses of common library-type code that gives you a leg up. Add to that, the fact that a piece of code was generated by a compiler, and the problem of discovering what a given piece of object code does is drastically simplified - compilers add huge amounts of structure and predictability to the generated object code that can be absent in free-form handwritten assembler (and few people do that anymore!), and much can be made of this.
On the code/data issue mentioned by others in this thread - although separating code/data in general from mixed binaries can be considered hard, in reality it's often quite feasible and even simple. After all, the CPU manages to work it out. Again, the fact that there are so many short-cuts you can take really helps.
Of course, a quick cruise around the cracking community will turn up all sorts of ways and means to shortcut this sort of problem...
Here are the results of a quick googling:
Blank recordable DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs are selling for 1 euro 59 cents at my local supermarket (er, in Europe, obviously!). Singly, with slim-line CD jewel case, in a high-street supermarket, not the cheapest way to buy stuff like this. Given that a DVD recordable has 7x the capacity of a CDR, that comes out at 20 cents per CDR - cheaper than the cheapest CDRs I've been able to find in the high street (~30 cents).
If you want cheap prices, a quick rummage turned up a US retailer listing decent prices - much lower for quantity, lowest at time of posting 72cents each (US) for DVD-R. They even have authoring blanks at 10$, for what that's worth.
Anyway, the point is that DVD recordables are no longer significantly more expensive than CDRs - in fact if you measure by storage quantity, they come out cheaper.
Another point is that DiVX compressed movies in practice rarely fit into one CDR, without compromising video quality too much. DVD-/+R on the other hand could easily store a number of movies on one disk (perhaps 4 or 5), at decent quality. Useful for watching your movies when on the move; if only it was possible to get a portable DiVX player...
As I see it, the point of these scheduler patches is that 30% processor utilisation is in some sense a testament to the inefficiency of the kernel scheduling - perhaps the 30% means that it is spending 70% sleeping (i.e. waiting). One reason for the 30% processor utilitisation could be that many processes are sleeping, waiting for other stuff that has low priority. This is what the scheduler modifications are trying to attack - if enough interactive tasks are waiting on a non-interactive task, that non-interactive task gets a boost.
If your processor utilitisation went up from 30% to (say) 60% as a result of these changes to the kernel scheduling, your users would see a marked improvement in responsiveness at their end. It could be argued that you should be able to see your server running at much higher usage, as otherwise you are wasting the investment in the server. For example, instead of a dual-processor machine at 30% load you could have had a cheaper single-processor machine at 60% load.
Having said all that, in your case you are more likely to be network bound anyway, especially if you are really running 100 KDE X servers on your server machine, so it might be cheaper to put in a second network card, and put your 100 client machines on two subnets.
BTW are you really running 100 instances of KDE on the server? Usually it's a lot more efficient to have cheap client PCs running KDE on their local X server, and take that load off the network server. Then the server only runs X clients, not X servers (except perhaps for the console desktop).
So what's missing? URL rewriting, as far as I can tell, and this is already done by loads of stuff, most obviously the GNU wget.
It would be trivial to knock up a script or two to add URL re-writing on the back of Apex or CVS, so the patent is not reasonable, IMHO.
I'm not saying Interwoven's product is not useful - on the contrary, it may be extremely useful. However the patent is obviously trying to stop other SCM products from adding this sort of functionality.
For example, the CVS people could easily add URL re-writing on .html/whatever files as a switch; could be a neat idea. If this patent is viable, then they can't do this without shelling out to Interwoven, who may chose not to have GPL software competing with theirs.
I am not an accountant (IANAA?), so perhaps someone could explain why sitting on the best part of $1m cash is a good way to operate a non-profit whose turnover is half that? How do these figures compare with for-profit organisations? As the site says, if assets significantly outstrip liabilities (presumably a difference that has to be considered in relation to annual cash flow to determine if it is a "big" difference or not) then the organisation may not be putting its resources to best use.
- Make outrageous claims about new unbreakable encryption system, publish on a web site. Patent it, to give an air of credibility
- Write to Bruce Schneier asking him to check it for you
- See yourself publicly humiliated in Bruce's Doghouse for peddling snake-oil
- Sue Counterpane for defamation
It helps if you actually sell your oil to a big company somehow; then hopefully they'll be so embarrassed about buying your stuff that they'll sue Counterpane for you.Well, if things carry on getting incorporated the way they are, the ECHR will make little or no difference, especially with regards to invasions of privacy by the state. Essentially it makes a whole raft of privacy-invading activities illegal by default, which were previously (in the UK) legal unless explicitly legislated against. However, the government is busy doing its best to side-step around that by enacting legislation that permits anyone they want to be able to bypass the convention. See FIPR and Stand for details. The most prominent relevant legislation is the RIP act, and the sneaky "statutory instruments" that allow the Home Secretary to do what he likes unless people keep their eyes peeled.
Soft Updates ensure that the filesystem is always in a consistent state. Updates are effectively not marked as complete until they have actually all gotten to disk. This ensures that after a re-boot, the system is consistent, maybe with the disk state as that of a some seconds earlier. The Soft Updates technique is also much faster than journalling, which is your other option (reiserfs, ext3fs etc in Linux).
I said above that fscking is practically eliminated - in fact a fsck task still needs to run to recover sectors that are 'dirty' but the system is stable without it - critically the system boots up without it, and in the background at some point when the system finds time to do so it recovers the sectors marked 'dirty'; the soft update people call this a "background fsck".
Note that this won't stop loss of data - but then nothing will stop loss of data. fsck certainly won't even if it is run properly, because that's not what it does. What it does do is ensure the filesystem metadata is always consistent (i.e. whether a file has been created/deleted, contents of directories etc).
More details on soft updates can be found in the OpenBSD FAQ and also in the FreeBSD handbookFreeBSD handbook.
If you want to get the same kind of disk flushing that you get with DOS, then you can only really do that with a single-tasking operating system (if that's not a contradiction in terms!) which can therefore ensure a minimum of delay between the application generating data and it being flushed to disk. Note this is never perfect, but can be close enough that you'd only notice one in a million power-offs.
On the other hand, if it's supposed to be a surprise, why not buy her a cubic zirconia instead of a diamond. Keeps its value (er, 'coz it doesn't have much to start with!), and I bet most people can't tell the difference without looking closely (when was the last time you examined someone-elses engagement ring?) :) Buy her a car with the difference, and she'll join in the subterfuge quite happily.
People who bought the box set early, in 2005, will be really annoyed.
I spend a fair amount of time in Italy, and since I'm a native English speaker, the ability to buy DVDs in Italy that have the English soundtrack alongside the Italian one means that I actually buy DVDs in Italy, whereas I would never have bought Italian VHS films (well, maybe one or two to help learn Italian but not more).
However, a couple of DVDs I've bought recently (Lake Placid, which is on some local European label under license from Warner, and The Cell, which is on Warner direct - neither film is particularly good, I have to say, but that's beside the point), offer the following:
Which means I can't watch it in English, without subtitles. Trying to switch subtitles is inhibited by the disk - up pops the same 'not allowed' symbol that you get when trying anything whilst the copyright infringement warning (obviously outside the US it's not an "FBI warning" but the effect is much the same). Incidentally, reading the back of Lake Placid, it could be construed as saying that the English track forces subtitles, but it's not clear. Where The Cell is concerned, there is no indication whatsoever on the back of the DVD that it's been "crippled" in this fashion.
I mean, what jerk thought that one up? It seems that Warner employ people just to think up new ways to alienate any minority customer base. The DVDs were in the "bargain bin" - at a price of 12 euro (er, = $12 give or take :) ), so presumably they're trying to stop people buying up bargain stock in other countries for black-market resale in the UK (where presumably the same films are at the not-so-bargain price of UKP25 - $40 give or take). Like that has any effect on the black market, of course - presumably black marketeers use a DVD copier or even a DVD mastering facility somewhere where the long arm of Hollywood and US influence is weak.
Whilst I'm at it - another gripe :) Why oh why oh why can't they indicate clearly on all DVDs whether they're anamorphic or not? Perhaps they do in the US but in Europe we get landed with bizarre phrases like "16:9 - adapted for all types of television" which could mean anything, and frequently means "letterbox" which kind of defeats the video quality enhancement we were supposed to get from DVD in the first place (PAL letterbox DVD has a resolution of 480x430 approx by my calculations, whereas anamorphic 16:9 is 640x576 - SVHS full frame is 480 x 576, widescreen is 480x430). The fact they make the labelling inconsistent and unclear can only mean they deliberately want to confuse the consumer. It seems we're not allowed to diddle them, but they're quite within their rights to shaft us any amusing way they can think up.
It's yet another attempt to use the technology to enforce stuff that is perfectly well enforceable in law. All they need to do is prohibit distribution of the "bargain" DVDs in countries for which they are not licensed, and get law enforcement to deal with violations. The same could be said for Region coding.
The simple (and obvious) way to write such software, is to write the privileged bit as a service (somewhat analogous to a daemon in Unix), and the GUI as a separate unprivileged user-land app. The service runs with whatever privileges are granted it, independent of the priviledge of the user logged in. The separate GUI application, running in the user space, communicates with the service by whatever method is convenient (defined strictly by the service). The service then checks all communications it receives for validity etc before processing any of it. This means that as long as the service checks its inputs properly, no malicious GUI app can force it to do things it shouldn't be doing.
The point is, Windows NT does not make this impossible. It does make it possible to write crap software that compromises security, but hey that's the case with any operating system. It's quite possible to write a 'su' replacement that doesn't check passwords, for example - there's a command line app idea that the OS won't protect you against, and it'd be handful of lines of C code.
It takes administrative rights to install the software; that's when it gets its privileges. In this case, it takes admin rights to install VirusScan, and that's when the security got compromised - the installation gave privileged rights to an application which opens windows on the user's desktop. I'm also not convinced that X isn't susceptible to the same issue; as far as I'm aware X uses a message queue to communicate between windows, the user etc - there's nothing in X to say you can't cause a buffer overflow in an application by sending it a malicious message, it's up to the application to check its inputs, and that includes its messages.
One thing this does show, is that closed-source software can't be trusted in the same way that open source can. It's a lot harder to perform a useful security audit on your system if you don't have the source code to the privileged applications you want to install. How would you determine that VirusScan violates the design guidelines for secure services, short of cracking it (which presumably violates the DMCA of course)?
Of interest, I wonder if the McAfee stuff has the same basic design flaw...
When the teacher caught us at it, he threw a fit. It turned out the cloth on the inside of the floppy case (which really was floppy) was a kind of 'j' cloth, designed to offer minimal resistance when the platter was spun in one direction. By doing what we did, we simply over-stressed the spindle motor as spinning the disk the opposite way to that designed had more friction. Mostly this would reduce the life of the disk drive, more than anything else.
It may have had other effects, possibly on the stability of the platter when spinning - I think at that stage the heads were actually in contact with the platter; certainly they were close enough to collect contamination. So if the platter is spinning with more vibration due to the friction effects, it might also reduce the life of the heads, or at least meant they needed cleaning more often. And as I recall, cleaning the heads was a controversial business anyway; some would claim that the cleaners actually did damage to the drive.
The point, as has been made by others already, that 'overclocking' your CD burner is short-sighted - presumably like other hardware the badge is the result of testing, MTBF predictions and the like, not the list of components that go into the drive.
- Tax
- Carbon
Anyway, I guess the point is that using second-hand veg. oil in place of diesel is not a solution to problems with our wallets or our environment.I don't know about elsewhere, but in the UK and probably most of Europe, oil is taxed according to its use. So if you take vegetable oil, waste from your local chippy, and put it in your car, you are liable for the tax on that as fuel - in the UK that's about 80% of the pump price, but remember the tax is absolute, not a percentage so even if the oil is free, the tax is the same
With regards the environmental issue, we should consider where the carbon goes. If you burn veg. oil you effectively convert it to greenhouse gases. These eventually return to solid matter through the various carbon sinks around the world (e.g. the Amazon rainforest). If you simply land-fill your used veg. oil (BTW something I'm not sure that we do), there's much less release of greenhouse gases (a good thing, certainly in the near term), but whilst the carbon is fixed, it's in a fairly useless state for the near future at least.
Certainly with regards burning veg oil vs. diesel, there appears to be little difference, if any, to the volume of greenhouse gases.
Many point to veg. oil as being renewable, and it may well be, but the real reason we're trying (well, some of us, anyway) to wean ourselves off fossil fuels is not so much that we're running out (although that may be a factor in the long term - however the date seems to continually shift to the right), but that burning them may cause a catastrophic change in climate.
Another interesting fact - we get the base 60 stuff (sexagesimal) from the Sumerians, around 3500BC in Mesopotamia - arguably the first civilisation (depending on how you define civilisation...). So the 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour stuff is pretty much the oldest artifact of civilisation that is still in use today. It also highlights perhaps how resistant we are to changing the way we think of time :)