What I find so amazing about this (national pride aside) is that the budget is so low, and yet the science done on this mission is allegedly more complex and thorough, quoting from the Yahoo news story I just read "It will be far cheaper and contain far more science than either of the two U.S. Martian rovers that will be landed from Mars Odyssey in January."
How is this so? Why are the US projects so much more expensive?
Well I kind of agree, but I don't think you have to be too savvy - in Morocco, there was a massive industry of pirated movies, smartcards, mod chips... and those guys were just self taught entrepreneurs. With basic intelligence and some trial and error it's not that hard to get set up.
This film flirts with greatness, but the unsatisfying second half leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.
That you are amused by other people being scared by 28 Days Later says a lot about you. However your comment that the movie didn't end well is something that I sort of moan about too : films in general don't end well. I would give you a link to a rant about that but it's no longer on my comments page.
You are right. Psychologically, that film just gets to you. I had trouble sleeping after watching it, and I felt like really strange the next day too.
Empty London, emtpy motorways (an effect that seems simple today, but is incredibly complex when you think about it) were amazing - you could not have done that in the seventies. Vanilla Sky had already done it for New York, but this was like the whole city, and whole motorways which the UK viewers would especially appreciate.
I just need to get hold of the DVD for the alternate ending, I left the cinema (doh!) before the end of the credits.
First of all, encryption built in to Windows is not what we're talking about when it comes to filesharing. The article is saying the RIAA are succeeding in doing something which hasn't happened, to my knowledge. The author would seem to suggest everyone in P2P land is already encrypting their communications, but that's not the case. All the popular clients are still totally open - any random person can pull down a file for any other; there is no chain of trust between sharers.
I'd love to know if anyone actually buys those mod points. I mean, apart from trolls who are desperate to be seen, who else cares? We can all write good posts, and post early, to get modded up...
What the article is basically saying is that because people are now losing their anonymity in a more obvious way, because they're getting sued... then they are more likely to turn to crypto.
However it's a rather tenuous link to say that the RIAA succeeded where Cypherpunks failed. Advocates are one thing, but really the rise of P2P applications and the growing Internet user base are what have caused P2P to become a real PITA for the RIAA. Therefore they make high profile legal cases to grab media attention. However, they could not realistically target piracy any more than the police raids on weekend markets in London will stop home-burned DVDs from being sold on a stall.
So, some people will use encryption just like Del Boy and Rodney (UK reference to Only Fools and Horses) used a suitcase for their wares and ran whenever the Police came close by. But massive public adoption of cryptography will only be because it will be built in for a reason (rather than optional) and because processors are fast enough to encrypt/decrypt on the fly with long keys... and still, it's a prediction. It's not mainstream yet - and the main thing this guy is forgetting is that the RIAA will bait and trap users with or without encryption on the wires.
If there were beings out there who had the capacity for interstellar travel (and that's the only kind that would matter because anything less than that would make communication impossible) they would have already found this noisy planet
Beings out there capable of interstellar travel may exist. Some of them may be too far from here to come and find this "noisy planet".
Communication does not rely on travel. Being able to send messages via signalling on good frequencies provides near light-speed communications. This may have long delays, but be nothing like the time it would take to travel interstellar distances, save wormholes and other things which break current known physical laws. Your concept of impossible is too restricted. Indeed, how would messages from the travellers get back to the earth in reasonable time if communication is impossible over such distances?
If other intelligent beings thought like you do, then they wouldn't have already found this planet in spite of the noise. Precisely for the reasons you think we shouldn't look.
Thankfully, we don't all think like you, and sometimes allow far-reaching ideas with no definite goal to lead us to scientific discovery. If nothing else, SETI has already undeniably advanced distributed computing.
All French releases I've bought here in Paris aren't encrypted either, I think that harks back to the old import restrictions on any encrypted data which can be a maximum of 56 bit keys, or something like that.
I might be wrong about that, but for sure the DVD rips I've tested as part of reasonable scientific and amateur journalistic pursuits have shown no encryption at all. Which is cool, because they rip faster than encrypted DVDs (not a lot, but a little). They also always have original English and French, whereas in my native UK the DVDs are often just English only, or maybe English and Spanish for some reason.
You're right you know. Ceuta goes to Algeciras - I just though a bit more about it - and we had to cross the border to Gib. There's nowhere big enough for a ferry port in Gib anyway (although you've got a bloody airport on Gib!)
Ferries also run several days a week from Gibraltar to Tangiers (not to Ceuta, I dont' think.. Spain hates Gib)
You lived in Gib and you didn't notice that the fastest route across the Strait of Gibraltar is the ferry that runs from Gib to Ceuta? I did it a few times to get to Gib and it took 45 minutes.
As a load of expats have houses in Spain and love going to Gibraltar, the tunnel seems to make good sense (although most want to take their cars, so it will have to be a Eurostar style service to work).
They're not stopping the photon. They're simply storing it in several atoms quantum spin. Then they hit it again with a laser and get the earlier pulse back out of the quantum spin stored in the atoms. It's rather limited because, quoting from Science News
So far, Hau and her team report the longest storage time for pulses--about a millisecond. By then, random atomic motion had washed out most pulse information, the researchers suspect. The Harvard-Smithsonian team reports that its pulses' information is erased partly because atoms escape from the region lit by the coupling laser.
However your post should be modded funny, because it's a witty, clever response rather than the usual worn jokes which somehow seem to get modded up all too frequently.
Reminds me of a childrens story I read once about a time machine, which was based on a nutty inventor who managed to build a car that got progressively faster. First of all it took a minute to get a specific distance, then 30 seconds, then 1 second, until in fact it took no time at all and then less than no time to get there until it ended up travelling backwards in time...
While the concept is somewhat interesting at first glance, the people who run spamholes might end up with it costing them a lot of bandwidth and system resources.
While they are not relaying mail outbound, they are targeting their IP for blacklisting by allowing tests through
The spammers that do think their relay is valid will then proceed to send thousands of emails via this spamhole, leading to incoming connections peaking very high and a lot of incoming bandwidth being saturated. Outgoing bandwidth will be used in all the ACK packets.
Most spammers will have some kind of bounce statistics processing, and the really good ones might even seed bad addresses deliberately. So they'll know quite quickly when they get no bounces back at all
The machines are going to be targetted not just on port 25, as they likely get port scanned, and so be very very vulnerable to other attacks. Running a half-baked spamhole on port 25 is one thing (see above reasons why I disagree with the idea) but then all your other ports had better be locked down...
unless of course you're running a honeypot.
But then, once a honeypot has been attacked once or twice, you better have some time to do serious forensics on it before leaving it open to more and more exploits, you'll find that it's been hacked to run a REAL open relay on some other port!!!
In short, this idea might only work if somehow you could get more spamholes on the net than open relays, and even then it would have to be coordinated by real sysadmins who know their stuff. Clueless admins are (probably) in the majority and whether or not you agree with that little flippant comment, they will surely outnumber the people who have enough time, a spare machine, and bandwidth to run a spamhole.
This guy says that he has 'holed' over 50,000 spam messages. Well, not really. They will be retransmitted. Spending the energy on blocking spam from your users completely is a better bet, I think. Educating people and advocacy is a better bet. Spamholes will be just another 5 minute net curio.
You're more precise than I was, you sound like you know your US history better than me (I'm not an American, but I've read a few US history books, it's a fascinating country to study).
One point I'd take you up on though, is that "deliberate creation" is what revolution is all about. Expansion west, creation of towns, for me that's still a revolution. Maybe those towns were purpose built as rail stops, just like coaching stops were key towns in England; the difference, as you rightly point out, is that they were deliberately created and planned similarly.
The revolution of railway was not carrying people around and back again; rather, the construction of track itself, with the teams that did the work setting up towns at regular intervals along the tracks as they sought to give up laying track and settling down in large areas of open land.
The "rail revolution" as I referred to it was already over before passenger services were scheduled across the whole country. I'm thinking of the great engineering feats of building tracks out westward. So many towns were at junction points of the railway in the midwest to begin with. Now, of course, a lot those towns are ghost towns, disappeared or barely habited. The major turnpikes on interstates and so on is where the population centers all moved to, and of course the coasts...
Leading up to my visit, the students were asked to write an essay on "Why I Am a Nanogeek." Hundreds responded, and I had the privilege of reading the top 30 essays, picking my favorite five. Of the essays I read, nearly half assumed that self-replicating nanobots were possible, and most were deeply worried about what would happen in their future as these nanobots spread around the world. [...]
You and people around you have scared our children. (emphasis mine)
So there, Smalley wins, he got scared children into the debate. Only thing likely to win debates better are beautiful women's tears, knockout punches, and defaulting by just leaving the room in a huff.
Bad example. OSS is more prevalent in the Linux / FreeBSD world, where the kernel itself follows the same model. Porting to Windows is another kettle of fish. The source being open means that you can port if you want to, but you could have run it on a linux server very quickly indeed, and then used something like PuTTY to allow everyone to use it from a central point. Sure, it's complex because it's not Windows, but those people who go for Linux reap benefits of cost of licences to offset the time lost getting to know it
Things really will be different when a critical mass of IT geeks know Linux well enough for it to really take hold of the corporate world. Windows popularity is so important to MS because once it loses market share it also loses the argument 'but windows is well known and easy to use' - because sooner or later Linux will be easier to use just because more people know it well...
Webmin is just as easy as some of the Win32 GUI config tools. Exchange is not easy, I've seen people pick up Postfix (with webmin) very much more quickly. Samba is not so bad either, compared to a proper Active Directory setup... and so on and so on.
The problem I've faced the most often is lack of knowledge. "What happens if you leave, who will know how to run your server"... etc... what most of those people asking that question FAIL to realise is that a high percentage of Windows 2000 setups are badly misconfigured and hopelessly insecure because people don't know what they're doing any more than they would with Linux. But, because the desktop environment is familiar to the boss, and so the ignorant techie can click about and show him stuff he recognises, well they think that it's properly configured. This is often the true misconception when it comes to OSS.vs. Windows.
most products are insanely complex and it'll take you several months to truely understand how it works, how it's put together, how the pieces interract and how you should go about working with it
Oh the irony... because the more insanely complex it is, the more likely it is to be either badly coded, or badly commented. I was looking at a popular webmail component recently, and saw that the variables weren't particularly well named, there were nowhere near enough comments, and certainly not enough good introduction in the header of each file to explain what it did.
However, take a look at some other less esoteric works like Postfix, and you'll see that documentation, comments, and introductions to the files are *much* easier to follow.
The bigger an open source project, the wider the audience, the more likely it is to have worked out some process which makes it better commented because of the sheer amount of collaboration. A few pet projects that have become big have done so in a disorganised manner. Indeed apart from the original dev clique, for these it is no help that the source is open because it's impossible to read. Those that are outstanding follow better coding practices - and hence are unlikely to be as "insanely complex" as you posit.
Too bad most places don't invest in more trains. However, investment usually implies a return, and most train companies lose money. The more captalistic a country is, the worse this becomes... note in the article " Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) and the government-affiliated Railway Technical Research Institute." that it's a state sponsored initiative getting these things going.
The French TGV is one good example of a system that works, but it's not easy to replicate economically in a country like the UK where there is public outcry at any possible addition of rail links or something close to where they live (and population density is three times higher than France, so routing around people isn't as easy). The Eurostar now has high speed track for part of the link in the UK, shaving 20 minutes off total journey time, but the route is incredibly inefficient and could have been much more direct. Also, it was way off schedule!
The US gave up on trains long ago. Flights and cars are all there is, Amtrak is a joke. Ironic that the rail revolution made the US what it is today, and it has to be the major economy that has turned its back on rail the most. High speed services coast to coast would undoubtedly be too expensive though. I think there must be a magic ratio between average distance travelled by passengers, total country size, train running cost and so on which the TGV manages to get close to. The TGV rocks.
Re:UNIX is generic, there are hundreds of versions
on
On The Death Of Unix
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· Score: 1
Sure, good point, Apple. They could make it run on non Apple hardware and they'd be there. I haven't seen it deployed consistently in big iron server farms like RHEL might be.
UNIX is generic, there are hundreds of versions
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
UNIX... FreeBSD... Linux... Hurd... HPUX... Solaris... OSX... I could keep on going a long time
Because Microsoft dominates so much in "the Windows Operating System" it has caused this kind of thing to become the norm in the press. That's what is so sickening.
Microsoft Windows XP is what most non geek people understand as an "operating system". If they even get as far as having operating system in their vocabulary. Most non geeks I talk to think that Office is part of Windows. MS Windows 2003 server by default is :
A multitasking kernel including many low level device drivers as standard
A windowing system with an API used by millions of software developers
A collection of standard software (file manager, web browser, text editor, media player, movie maker, email reader, instant messenger, plus a host of system tools and easy to play, fairly addictive simple games - yes even in the server version)
A set of user management tools, active directory tra la la, free web server etc etc
etc etc - I could mention the hardware abstraction layer, print spooler and all that
UNIX is really the foundation for a system which does not compete with Windows directly anyway, which is why there are so many vendors and flavours. Each has their own approach to one or many of the software options included but within the Windows Kernel, but within userspace and API territory. Especially stuff like file managers, browser integration, and multimedia.
Linux is just a kernel. You need another set of tools before you have anything half decent to run. Most people have GNU stuff, plus some other random addons from here, there and everywhere, plus for desktop use at least a window manager from KDE, Gnome or something a bit more minimal.
So UNIX cannot die, as an abstract concept. Maybe vendors who sell mostly UNIX will lose revenue or market share, but they all have Linux solutions too. HP, Sun (remember Cobalt...), IBM...
Microsoft, in their entire domination, have got everyone where it hurts - because they supply a COMPLETE system that, while each of the parts is not the best technically, is a package that nobody else is even pretending to supply, except maybe Red Hat, and the other big distros. The press just don't know how to explain that to the public each time so they come up with utter crap like 'UNIX is dying'...
Slashdot Mirror
How is this so? Why are the US projects so much more expensive?
Well I kind of agree, but I don't think you have to be too savvy - in Morocco, there was a massive industry of pirated movies, smartcards, mod chips... and those guys were just self taught entrepreneurs. With basic intelligence and some trial and error it's not that hard to get set up.
That you are amused by other people being scared by 28 Days Later says a lot about you. However your comment that the movie didn't end well is something that I sort of moan about too : films in general don't end well. I would give you a link to a rant about that but it's no longer on my comments page.
I haven't seen the Quiet Earth. So explain why it was so 'pathetic' in 28 Days Later
Empty London, emtpy motorways (an effect that seems simple today, but is incredibly complex when you think about it) were amazing - you could not have done that in the seventies. Vanilla Sky had already done it for New York, but this was like the whole city, and whole motorways which the UK viewers would especially appreciate.
I just need to get hold of the DVD for the alternate ending, I left the cinema (doh!) before the end of the credits.
First of all, encryption built in to Windows is not what we're talking about when it comes to filesharing. The article is saying the RIAA are succeeding in doing something which hasn't happened, to my knowledge. The author would seem to suggest everyone in P2P land is already encrypting their communications, but that's not the case. All the popular clients are still totally open - any random person can pull down a file for any other; there is no chain of trust between sharers.
I'd love to know if anyone actually buys those mod points. I mean, apart from trolls who are desperate to be seen, who else cares? We can all write good posts, and post early, to get modded up...
However it's a rather tenuous link to say that the RIAA succeeded where Cypherpunks failed. Advocates are one thing, but really the rise of P2P applications and the growing Internet user base are what have caused P2P to become a real PITA for the RIAA. Therefore they make high profile legal cases to grab media attention. However, they could not realistically target piracy any more than the police raids on weekend markets in London will stop home-burned DVDs from being sold on a stall.
So, some people will use encryption just like Del Boy and Rodney (UK reference to Only Fools and Horses) used a suitcase for their wares and ran whenever the Police came close by. But massive public adoption of cryptography will only be because it will be built in for a reason (rather than optional) and because processors are fast enough to encrypt/decrypt on the fly with long keys... and still, it's a prediction. It's not mainstream yet - and the main thing this guy is forgetting is that the RIAA will bait and trap users with or without encryption on the wires.
Are the enemies impregnators? We'll end up sending terminators against impregnators... sounds like a good film title "Terminator vs Impregnator"
Or else you could see this as some kind of enemy whorehouse tracking? Gotta keep dem arabs out of dem harams, dammit!
Thankfully, we don't all think like you, and sometimes allow far-reaching ideas with no definite goal to lead us to scientific discovery. If nothing else, SETI has already undeniably advanced distributed computing.
I might be wrong about that, but for sure the DVD rips I've tested as part of reasonable scientific and amateur journalistic pursuits have shown no encryption at all. Which is cool, because they rip faster than encrypted DVDs (not a lot, but a little). They also always have original English and French, whereas in my native UK the DVDs are often just English only, or maybe English and Spanish for some reason.
You're right you know. Ceuta goes to Algeciras - I just though a bit more about it - and we had to cross the border to Gib. There's nowhere big enough for a ferry port in Gib anyway (although you've got a bloody airport on Gib!)
You lived in Gib and you didn't notice that the fastest route across the Strait of Gibraltar is the ferry that runs from Gib to Ceuta? I did it a few times to get to Gib and it took 45 minutes.
As a load of expats have houses in Spain and love going to Gibraltar, the tunnel seems to make good sense (although most want to take their cars, so it will have to be a Eurostar style service to work).
Firebird is at release 0.7, which I'm using under Windows, and the exploit doesn't work.
They're not stopping the photon. They're simply storing it in several atoms quantum spin. Then they hit it again with a laser and get the earlier pulse back out of the quantum spin stored in the atoms. It's rather limited because, quoting from Science News
However your post should be modded funny, because it's a witty, clever response rather than the usual worn jokes which somehow seem to get modded up all too frequently.
Reminds me of a childrens story I read once about a time machine, which was based on a nutty inventor who managed to build a car that got progressively faster. First of all it took a minute to get a specific distance, then 30 seconds, then 1 second, until in fact it took no time at all and then less than no time to get there until it ended up travelling backwards in time...
I have an ATI All in Wonder and MythTV says it doesn't work. What did your friend use?
While the concept is somewhat interesting at first glance, the people who run spamholes might end up with it costing them a lot of bandwidth and system resources.
In short, this idea might only work if somehow you could get more spamholes on the net than open relays, and even then it would have to be coordinated by real sysadmins who know their stuff. Clueless admins are (probably) in the majority and whether or not you agree with that little flippant comment, they will surely outnumber the people who have enough time, a spare machine, and bandwidth to run a spamhole.
This guy says that he has 'holed' over 50,000 spam messages. Well, not really. They will be retransmitted. Spending the energy on blocking spam from your users completely is a better bet, I think. Educating people and advocacy is a better bet. Spamholes will be just another 5 minute net curio.
One point I'd take you up on though, is that "deliberate creation" is what revolution is all about. Expansion west, creation of towns, for me that's still a revolution. Maybe those towns were purpose built as rail stops, just like coaching stops were key towns in England; the difference, as you rightly point out, is that they were deliberately created and planned similarly.
Interesting discussion. Thanks.
The revolution of railway was not carrying people around and back again; rather, the construction of track itself, with the teams that did the work setting up towns at regular intervals along the tracks as they sought to give up laying track and settling down in large areas of open land.
The "rail revolution" as I referred to it was already over before passenger services were scheduled across the whole country. I'm thinking of the great engineering feats of building tracks out westward. So many towns were at junction points of the railway in the midwest to begin with. Now, of course, a lot those towns are ghost towns, disappeared or barely habited. The major turnpikes on interstates and so on is where the population centers all moved to, and of course the coasts...
So there, Smalley wins, he got scared children into the debate. Only thing likely to win debates better are beautiful women's tears, knockout punches, and defaulting by just leaving the room in a huff.
Things really will be different when a critical mass of IT geeks know Linux well enough for it to really take hold of the corporate world. Windows popularity is so important to MS because once it loses market share it also loses the argument 'but windows is well known and easy to use' - because sooner or later Linux will be easier to use just because more people know it well...
Webmin is just as easy as some of the Win32 GUI config tools. Exchange is not easy, I've seen people pick up Postfix (with webmin) very much more quickly. Samba is not so bad either, compared to a proper Active Directory setup... and so on and so on.
The problem I've faced the most often is lack of knowledge. "What happens if you leave, who will know how to run your server"... etc... what most of those people asking that question FAIL to realise is that a high percentage of Windows 2000 setups are badly misconfigured and hopelessly insecure because people don't know what they're doing any more than they would with Linux. But, because the desktop environment is familiar to the boss, and so the ignorant techie can click about and show him stuff he recognises, well they think that it's properly configured. This is often the true misconception when it comes to OSS .vs. Windows.
Oh the irony... because the more insanely complex it is, the more likely it is to be either badly coded, or badly commented. I was looking at a popular webmail component recently, and saw that the variables weren't particularly well named, there were nowhere near enough comments, and certainly not enough good introduction in the header of each file to explain what it did.
However, take a look at some other less esoteric works like Postfix, and you'll see that documentation, comments, and introductions to the files are *much* easier to follow.
The bigger an open source project, the wider the audience, the more likely it is to have worked out some process which makes it better commented because of the sheer amount of collaboration. A few pet projects that have become big have done so in a disorganised manner. Indeed apart from the original dev clique, for these it is no help that the source is open because it's impossible to read. Those that are outstanding follow better coding practices - and hence are unlikely to be as "insanely complex" as you posit.
Too bad most places don't invest in more trains. However, investment usually implies a return, and most train companies lose money. The more captalistic a country is, the worse this becomes... note in the article " Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) and the government-affiliated Railway Technical Research Institute." that it's a state sponsored initiative getting these things going.
The French TGV is one good example of a system that works, but it's not easy to replicate economically in a country like the UK where there is public outcry at any possible addition of rail links or something close to where they live (and population density is three times higher than France, so routing around people isn't as easy). The Eurostar now has high speed track for part of the link in the UK, shaving 20 minutes off total journey time, but the route is incredibly inefficient and could have been much more direct. Also, it was way off schedule!
The US gave up on trains long ago. Flights and cars are all there is, Amtrak is a joke. Ironic that the rail revolution made the US what it is today, and it has to be the major economy that has turned its back on rail the most. High speed services coast to coast would undoubtedly be too expensive though. I think there must be a magic ratio between average distance travelled by passengers, total country size, train running cost and so on which the TGV manages to get close to. The TGV rocks.
Sure, good point, Apple. They could make it run on non Apple hardware and they'd be there. I haven't seen it deployed consistently in big iron server farms like RHEL might be.
Because Microsoft dominates so much in "the Windows Operating System" it has caused this kind of thing to become the norm in the press. That's what is so sickening.
Microsoft Windows XP is what most non geek people understand as an "operating system". If they even get as far as having operating system in their vocabulary. Most non geeks I talk to think that Office is part of Windows. MS Windows 2003 server by default is :
UNIX is really the foundation for a system which does not compete with Windows directly anyway, which is why there are so many vendors and flavours. Each has their own approach to one or many of the software options included but within the Windows Kernel, but within userspace and API territory. Especially stuff like file managers, browser integration, and multimedia.
Linux is just a kernel. You need another set of tools before you have anything half decent to run. Most people have GNU stuff, plus some other random addons from here, there and everywhere, plus for desktop use at least a window manager from KDE, Gnome or something a bit more minimal.
So UNIX cannot die, as an abstract concept. Maybe vendors who sell mostly UNIX will lose revenue or market share, but they all have Linux solutions too. HP, Sun (remember Cobalt...), IBM...
Microsoft, in their entire domination, have got everyone where it hurts - because they supply a COMPLETE system that, while each of the parts is not the best technically, is a package that nobody else is even pretending to supply, except maybe Red Hat, and the other big distros. The press just don't know how to explain that to the public each time so they come up with utter crap like 'UNIX is dying'...