Nah, iso's are inevitably outdated before you even get them. I just did a fresh install of Fedora Core 6 this past weekend. Guess what, the kernel was buggy (cifs filesystem fails on directories with > 100 entries). Better to do a network install so instead of downloading 5 gig DVD, you only download the packages when you need, and get the latest versions. Bandwidth being what it is these days, packages download so fast it's not even worth caching rpm's on your hard drive. At 6Mb/s, firefox downloads in like 15 seconds.
simply counting bits would indicate that a 100,000x100,000 pixel scanner would be required to even satisfy the condition that everyone has a unique pattern
I really do not follow your math. Even the lower example of a 400x400 bitmap yeilds 2^(400^2), approx 10^159997 combinations which is an enormous number. There are only 10^68 atoms in the universe.
(Not that you'd ever do direct image-to-image template matching for fingerprints anyways...)
I thought the point of "software radio" was to be much more intelligent in e.g. adaptively moduluating transmit power or switching protocols in real time, which could reduce power (or improve service).
Of course, if it were very successful you could always take that software and implement it in hardware (just as you could cook up a hardware implementation of MS word).
If that's true then I stand corrected. They're going to release Hollywood movies with no protection but a watermark? I'll believe it when I see it. If I could download movies for a few bucks and play them in mplayer, I would do it.
I hope we do have a spirit that makes us innately different from machines, but I'll just point out that an AI that can exhibit human-level intelligence would revolutionize the world, whether "weak" or "strong." In fact I'd prefer they were "weak" so we wouldn't have to give them rights or feel guilty about making them work for us.
I sure as hell hope that this approach fails miserably, because I can guarantee you that the next development will be the bot-based modification of all articles in the Wikipedia. There might be some development after that of captcha interstitials before posting or modifying anything, combined with some attempt at developing a more permanent community around posters.
What this argument boils down to is "I don't want computers to get smarter because I don't like some of the applications." Of course there's some truth to that; we're not going to make software that "understands" Wikipedia (in a slightly less weak sense than before) without also making spambots smarter, it's all the same. But focusing on Spam is very shortsighted. Different parties have always had an interest in skewing information sources to their own ends. The whole essence of Wikipedia is coping with that through mass participation. So now AI is fighting over the same info territory as people? Sounds like progress to me, the AI must be getting smarter.
You say this with what evidence?... You know you're on Slashdot when a product that isn't even out yet has already been relegated to the insecure/unsafe/junk software category.
Such optimism!
Truth is, every new piece of software is insecure junk until proven otherwise. Almost always, that takes time and exposure, and patches. Certainly that's been the case with past MS OS's, and Vista has a lot of new code. Sorry, nobody gets tens of millions of lines of new code exactly right the first time. You'd be insane to throw out XP for Vista on security grounds right now.
The notion that hard-working immigrants can be kept out "to preserve [my] way of life" is little more than saying "I have more than you by an accident of birth and am willing to use force to ensure that I don't have to share."
I hear you, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment; do you feel the same way about your own home? Is it everybody's right to come on in?
Odd. Personally, I find it morally repugnant for the state to make it illegal to work for less than some fixed hourly rate.
Minimum rate isn't really the issue. The problem is without illegal immigration, there would be nobody to pick strawberries (etc) for anything close to minimum wage, because it is very hard work. Many conclude that means Americans just don't want those jobs. I look at it differently; maybe hard work should pay well, even if it doesn't require a lot of skills. That's what the market is trying to tell us, anyways. But instead we circumvent that using illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration also exploits the system because illegal immigrants don't pay any taxes for the govt services they use (other than sales tax). In this respect it's just a way to funnel money from taxpayers to business owners.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 5, Funny
CLI will always have it's place... much like my half-retarded nephew who lives under the stairs... however as I for one can't wait for the day that intuitive interfaces rule the computing landscape with a soft, friendly fist!!!
Why are you using a text editor at all? Shouldn't you be doing all your programming via drag and drop? And why does your post use text instead of more user-friendly pictograms? Maybe you can find yourself a nice keboard-free computer.
Significant recent developments on the web: (1) the rise of video, (2) the fall of http's transaction-based processing model, (3) a huge increase in user-authored websites (myspace, youtube...)
Those that are so resistant to change will eventually be filtered out of the gene pool, having been replaced by those who can look at alternatives to what they are doing, do some research, and make a choice as to which is better. That is what Evolution does. I know the creationists don't like to hear that, but, they too will soon be gone.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. Do you think evolution began only when Darwin described it? "Now that evolution is in charge, things will be a lot different around here!" The world you see around you is the result of evolution. If chasing fads were the best evolutionary strategy, obviously more people would do so. Your assertion that evolution spells the doom of those who dislike Microsoft re-organizing their little toolbars ("The Ribbon Interface (TM)") is just.... ugh. (And those who modded him up, and think that slamming creationists automatically makes inane statements true, please, please mod me down... it's a compliment coming from you).
So don't use swap. It's pointless, especially in a system with a flash drive, where the mass storage isn't much cheaper than the RAM. Here's my laptop memory right now, with about 20 applications running on XP under VMWare, RAM-wasting Netbeans (java), 20 tabs open in Firefox, etc:
Oh yeah, I wake up covered in sweat thinking about how badly Saddam suffered.
You are utterly missing the point. It's not about Saddam's feelings.
It's about the legitimacy of the Iraqi government. Is it the rule of
law, or a Shiite mafia? How can Sunnis live under police whose
alliegance is to Muqtada al-Sadr rather than the law and the government? I'm not saying the Sunnis are blameless, either; both sides are horrible to each other.
Why are the teachers mad about the video? Shouldn't they be more mad about the broken window?
I feel the same way over all the consternation about video from Saddam's execution being leaked. "Who leaked the video? Why were they allowed to record it?" Perhaps that's an important question, but what about what the video reveals - that Iraq's "justice system" is actually a sectarian mob? That the executioners themselves saw it as Shiite on Sunni reprisal? Once again, as in Abu Ghraib, the footage is infinitely more revealing than the press accounts.
You can see some real world applications the 75 references in his paper, ie. [41] "Ottawa firm rescues data from Swissair black box", Pauline Tam, The Ottowa Citizen, 21 March 2000.
I'd settle for just one good and reasonably recent example, along the lines of "I overwrote the data in my PC, then challenged Mr X to recover my images from it and he did!"
I can't find your cite online. It would seem strange that important data on an airplane data recorder would be overwritten in the first place. Was it? Anyways, I don't know anything about the technologies used in flight data recorders. I'd be surprised if they use off-then-shelf PC hard drives.
That was my system boot partition, you insensitive clod!
As for erasing solid state media, I'd feel perfectly safe simply overwriting it with zeroes, one time over.
I realize years ago magnetic media were written sparsely (inefficiently) with sloppy positioning mechanisms, but those days are long gone. I'd be really impressed to see somebody recover overwritten data on a hard drive instead of just talking about it.
As for flash memory, I'll believe it when I see it.
As for leaking information through discarded camera memory cards in the first, place, it's about the 1000th thing down my list of privacy concerns, way down below "binoculars." If you want to see pictures of random people's snapshots of each other, they're all over the web. How many of us really use our digicams to capture super-secret info? I just can't bring myself to care when I know databases of thousands of credit card numbers and SSNs are being bought and sold on the black market.
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Nah, iso's are inevitably outdated before you even get them. I just did a fresh install of Fedora Core 6 this past weekend. Guess what, the kernel was buggy (cifs filesystem fails on directories with > 100 entries). Better to do a network install so instead of downloading 5 gig DVD, you only download the packages when you need, and get the latest versions. Bandwidth being what it is these days, packages download so fast it's not even worth caching rpm's on your hard drive. At 6Mb/s, firefox downloads in like 15 seconds.
I thought the point of "software radio" was to be much more intelligent in e.g. adaptively moduluating transmit power or switching protocols in real time, which could reduce power (or improve service). Of course, if it were very successful you could always take that software and implement it in hardware (just as you could cook up a hardware implementation of MS word).
Then again, personal email solutions are a dime a dozen. At most.
If that's true then I stand corrected. They're going to release Hollywood movies with no protection but a watermark? I'll believe it when I see it. If I could download movies for a few bucks and play them in mplayer, I would do it.
Nice spin. Yes it is DRM. It could be worse, but since it intentionally prevents some uses of the video, it is certainly DRM.
Maybe creative people just detect more abstract patterns (e.g. lower S/N ratio) than others?
I hope we do have a spirit that makes us innately different from machines, but I'll just point out that an AI that can exhibit human-level intelligence would revolutionize the world, whether "weak" or "strong." In fact I'd prefer they were "weak" so we wouldn't have to give them rights or feel guilty about making them work for us.
Truth is, every new piece of software is insecure junk until proven otherwise. Almost always, that takes time and exposure, and patches. Certainly that's been the case with past MS OS's, and Vista has a lot of new code. Sorry, nobody gets tens of millions of lines of new code exactly right the first time. You'd be insane to throw out XP for Vista on security grounds right now.
Illegal immigration also exploits the system because illegal immigrants don't pay any taxes for the govt services they use (other than sales tax). In this respect it's just a way to funnel money from taxpayers to business owners.
Do these add up to "Web 2.0"? I don't care.
So don't use swap. It's pointless, especially in a system with a flash drive, where the mass storage isn't much cheaper than the RAM. Here's my laptop memory right now, with about 20 applications running on XP under VMWare, RAM-wasting Netbeans (java), 20 tabs open in Firefox, etc:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2074016 1934168 139848 0 21564 1292736
-/+ buffers/cache: 619868 1454148
Swap: 0 0 0
Never leave home and you'll never catch a cold or get run over by a car. Join the fight against leaving home now!
I can't find your cite online. It would seem strange that important data on an airplane data recorder would be overwritten in the first place. Was it? Anyways, I don't know anything about the technologies used in flight data recorders. I'd be surprised if they use off-then-shelf PC hard drives.
So where does he actually do an experiment and prove he can recover a significant amount of overwritten information?
As for erasing solid state media, I'd feel perfectly safe simply overwriting it with zeroes, one time over.
I realize years ago magnetic media were written sparsely (inefficiently) with sloppy positioning mechanisms, but those days are long gone. I'd be really impressed to see somebody recover overwritten data on a hard drive instead of just talking about it.
As for flash memory, I'll believe it when I see it.
As for leaking information through discarded camera memory cards in the first, place, it's about the 1000th thing down my list of privacy concerns, way down below "binoculars." If you want to see pictures of random people's snapshots of each other, they're all over the web. How many of us really use our digicams to capture super-secret info? I just can't bring myself to care when I know databases of thousands of credit card numbers and SSNs are being bought and sold on the black market.