For those of us born without evil twins, cloning is the best way to protect ourself against conviction based on DNA evidence. It musta been my clone.....
Yea, it's an insane stipulation. I ran a computer lab at a large university in a past life. I found that some people were calling in on the land lines with "emergencies" and wasting the operator's time trying to track down the people they were calling for. In one case I stayed on the line and found the emergency was "has the cat been fed yet?. I started informing callers that we didn't accept emergency calls and that if they had a real emergency they should go through the "public safety" (campus police) number. One irate caller even responded to me that the campus library accepts his "emergency calls" all the time. I don't think he even realized the irony in that statement.
The overview tells us nothing
on
Hibernate in Action
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Another lame/. article; what supposedly is an "overview" tells us nothing and is so full of TLA and such that you have to know what they are talking about to even make any sense of it. Clue for timothy: If you're introducing something new in a lead page/. article, it would be nice to actually tell people what it is, cutting through three letter acronyms and other buzzwords that can only be understood in context, which is missing when the reader has no reasonable expecation of knowing what the hell you are talking about!!!
You're absolutely correct. This article seems to claim that low prices on 32 bit cpu's will drive dedicated logic designers to abandon 8 bit cpu's. But even if CPU's were free (they almost are), other cost factors come in. A 32 bit processor is more complex; it generally needs more data lines (I'll ignore adress lines because a good design can usually work around this). It may also need more power and other complexity that a simple project just doesn't need.
Sure, if a dedicate imbedded processor needs an embedded Linux OS then a 32 bit system might be a good choice. But often 8 bit CPU's are used in simple systems (sometimes where they replace dedicated logic that would be more complex and more costly), and in many of the applications the 8 bit micro is more than enough. In such cases there is no reason to move to a 32 bit processor and complicate both the support logic and the coding needed to drive it, when an 8 or 12 bit solution is right for the task.
largely because several of the 9/11 hijackers were licensed there
More direct attacks on privacy and tracking all Americans, in the name of 9/11, with something that would have had absolutely no effect on preventing the 9/11 attack at all.
Perhaps a better idea would be to not give terrorists drivers licenses at all, or maybe not to give illegal alliens drivers licenses at all. Instead many states (including mine) have gone out of their way to make it easy for known illegal alliens to obtain drivers licenses! But somehow at the same time this is being used to justify making people cary one more thing that will make it extremely easy to track them.
Kind of makes you think that all those crackpots who question how and why World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed when it wasn't even hit by planes, the only skyscraper to ever collapse from such a fire before or since, might be on to something.
And you really shouldn't either, because it won't be pleasant
What you "should" do is highly dependent on the application. As a general desktop this might be true, although I doubt that there is any reason I can't use a display at 640x480 under WinXP that was quite suitable at 640x480 under Win 3.1 (heck, XP even has more colors, so the display will look better, not worse. But that asside, there are many times when the computer isn't a desktop computer, it's away in a corner somewhere as a server, or is running some dedicated application where 640x480 would be just fine. Yet I had been lead to believe that I could not even install WinXP unless it had at least an 800x600 monitor (and maybe I can't since I would need to get it installed before I could get at these advanced adapter settings). What a disservice to the paying customer, just because some Microsoft geek has unlimited resources and a fancy 23 inch monitor.
Answering my own question, I found a working link. But the screen resolution is 800x480, when my copy of XP tells me that it needs at a minimum 800x600. Something sure as hell stinks! Is this little outfit getting a special build of XP (seems unlikely)? Why does the retail, full price version of XP insist on a minimum 800x600 display if XP can really run on less (obviously it can, there is no reason an OS needs a larger display, but it really stinks if MS put a limitation in the retail version that obsoleetes your hardware that they will wave for certain OEMs.)
I'm at the site now, but it seems slashdotted. I want the specs, particularly the screen resolution. (I'm wondering what the screen res is for this "smallest handtop device", particularly since it can run XP and XP made a lot of VGA monitors obsolete when it insisted on greater than VGA as it's lowest supported resolution.)
DMS has a lot of problems (IMHO). It needs to be manually reset (doesn't have an option to sense keyboard and mouse movement to figure out that you might still be alive). It can be false triggered by something as simple as temporarly looking at a future date in the windows time/date properities without even doing an OK or apply, just looking at a future date and then hitting cancel is enough to trigger it. If you disable it and then restart it later it can send out the message (and delete files) as well as if you should have any problem that keeps your computer down past the deadline. The most serious problem in my opnion is that there is not even any warning that it is about to send the e-mail and do whatever local deletes you have set up; it just does these (even if it and or windows have just started) and then it informs you that the dead man switch has been activated. It would make a heck of a lot more sense to pop up a message and/or play a warning sound a fixed or user settable time before actually going through with it and give you a last chance to abort rather than rushing to do those drastic actions and then informing someone who should be dead that it has done so.
I tried to use it, but had to give it up. Too bad really, it's a good concept, but a very flawed implimentation.
Voice analysis gets a lot easier when you're trying to analyze a source designed to be clear and distinct, and you only have to pick out the informstion from a very iimited subset of words, in this case the tem posiable digits.
If America did the same* then they properly would..:)
*NEVER gona happen
On the other hand, if America (and maybe the E.U. too) passed a simple law stating that customers would not be responsiable for international long distance premium charges and that the government would no longer side with the telcos in giving them the weight of law to enforce these fees coming from a flawed business model against it's own citizens, then the problem would go away fast.
It might even go away faster if the government recognized that this was a well know fraud based on a flawed concept that the telcos set up and that the telcos take a cut from each time the scam gets a victim, and charged them with rackettering for letting the problem continue.
NO! It's the scammers that are taking over your computers that are really doing the dialing. Don't you think they would quickly add a pause and this extra dialing in? There may be ways to beat them (but don't bet on it - many modems do voice and a good hack might even voice-id a challange of numbers to be dialed back), but the far better solution would be to flatly outlaw this flawed telco business model of charginging special premium fees for some numbers, particularly for International calls (where the scammer is much harder to track down).
So why not pass a law against any "automatic" payments on a telephone bill going outside the country? The end user shouldn't be responsible for this type of fraud at all, and if the telcos had to resolve any such charges themselves rather than making their cut when the end user was hijacked and scammed, you can bet they would be more motivated to clean up the system as well.
Of course, you might still need to block some popular scam countries, if only to protect the citizens from running up not insignificant long distance time charges (and you certainly can't stop the telcos from charging from long distance time, but you can stop them from charging the extra fees that motivate this problem in the first place). If enough countries got around to saying flat out that we know this is a scam and we are going to legally protect our citizens from the "fees" they are being scammed out of, then eventually the problem would go away and there would be no need to block numbers. But as long as the government sides with the crooks and their telco accomplices and allows the telcos to go after the victim in this scam, the problem will not only continue but will grow; this article is the proof of that.
What little, if any, valid charges one incurrs while calling another party by long distance could certainly be covered by other and better means than allowing it to be directly billed to a telephone number (credit card, for example). Enforcing this would be far better than exposing all of your citizens to a scam based on a flawed telco business model and blocking whole countries from your long distance system.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing this type of billing go away completely, even for calls within a country. But at least there is a good argument that any scammers operating this way inside a country can be caught and taken to court; which is often not the case when they are on the other side of the globe. A few simple changes to the law, such as forcing the telcos to hold any payments for several innitial months to be sure victims have time to complain about scam sites and block those payments, should be adequate to stop hit and run scammers from seting up shop in the country they plan to run their scam in. And, of course, a law should block incoming international long distance telco "special fees", not just outgoing ones.
The sad thing is that the original Start Wars, in it's original form, was one of the best sci-fi films made. It stood on it's own fine, and certainly didn't need the digital make over it got for it's release a few years ago. Sure, a good high quality copy on DVD would be great, a HD DVD someday might be even better. But if Lucas continues to destroy waht he did in the first movie, who needs it? I would rather have a VHS tape of the movie in it's original form that shows what he acomplished in the 70's than a DVD that does a makeover of a great film that didn't need one.
This is a somewhat biased point of view from someone who saw the first film on the Friday of the week it opened, and several times in the same theater after that, where it ran for a full year! And I compare it with seeing "episode 1", which made such an impression that I refuse to ever watch episodes 2 or 3.
It seems to me that anyone who would pay a certain amount of money for a gift card or gift certificate worth the same amount, and give a gift that can only be used at a certain place and might expire, in this way shows even less thought than giving money, and deserves this.
Alternative 1: Want airconditioning? Just use the cold water to do the cooling.
As a wise man once said, Ahem.
Just use the cold water to do the cooling is hardly as simple as it sounds. Look at how many times the cold water goes through a heat exchanger before it is ever really used to cool a building, each time with a loss. Then look at building all of that piping to get the intermediate cooling fluid around an entire city of buildings and back again (This ain't exactly like laying fiber.) And consider the mass and resistance of all that fluid that has to be pumped around the city to get it to the buildings to be cooled. The losses in that (which end up heating the cooling fluid) will make the exiting power lines in Toronto look like super conductors in comparison. And then any building using this has to be completely refitted to use this cooling system, when existing buildings already have normal electricity driven HVAC.
No, just use the cold water to do the cooling isn't as trivial as you make it sound. While the valves may have been turned on, it's far from proven that enough users will really adopt this to make it fly.
Actually, it's unlikely that the city was drawing it's drinking water from this deep before. They were almost certainly taking it from a point higher up and warmer. So the city drinking water may not be warmer at all as a result of this; it might even be cooler. And, since the lower water can hold more CO2, it might be slightly carbonated! (Look for the interesting side effects when somewhat more acidic carbonated water is flowing through old pipes.)
On the other hand, since the cold water is being taken from the lake now rather than warmer water, the thermal barrier between the warmer top water and the lower cold water may slowly lower (and it is a very sharp layer, not the gradual drop in temperature you might expect). This may indeed have some effect, but that doesn't seem very likely.
They could have gone the simpler and more direct route of just building a power plant that used the difference in tempersture between the cold bottom water and the top water to pump up that water and generate electricity. Such plants have been proven to work with ocean water, and should be even simpler in an environment without salt water's effects. I'm assuming they didn't because in Toranto that top water would also get pretty cold in the winter. Still, I don't expect they will need much air conditioning in the winter anyway, so a seasonal power plant might have been as good or better of an idea.
OK, I've read the article, and I still can't determine just what they are talking about. They use the term "address book" like there was some sort of one size fits all address book that all e-mail clients use. Such is certainly not the case; I use several e-mail clients and each has it's own address book (a sad fact that is even delaying my switch to Thunderbird on my desktop). What address book or address books does this thing use? What client(s) does it support?
While IM was never mentioned in the article, my fear is that something like this is more likely aimed at IM users than others; quite an oximoron for an application designed to promote privacy and security. Also, since it seems to be based on a friend-of-friend approach, it would have to support the address book format of every friend that I excahange e-mail with, would it not? This all seems to be ignored in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us born without evil twins, cloning is the best way to protect ourself against conviction based on DNA evidence. It musta been my clone.....
Yea, it's an insane stipulation. I ran a computer lab at a large university in a past life. I found that some people were calling in on the land lines with "emergencies" and wasting the operator's time trying to track down the people they were calling for. In one case I stayed on the line and found the emergency was "has the cat been fed yet?. I started informing callers that we didn't accept emergency calls and that if they had a real emergency they should go through the "public safety" (campus police) number. One irate caller even responded to me that the campus library accepts his "emergency calls" all the time. I don't think he even realized the irony in that statement.
Another lame /. article; what supposedly is an "overview" tells us nothing and is so full of TLA and such that you have to know what they are talking about to even make any sense of it. Clue for timothy: If you're introducing something new in a lead page /. article, it would be nice to actually tell people what it is, cutting through three letter acronyms and other buzzwords that can only be understood in context , which is missing when the reader has no reasonable expecation of knowing what the hell you are talking about!!!
Sure, if a dedicate imbedded processor needs an embedded Linux OS then a 32 bit system might be a good choice. But often 8 bit CPU's are used in simple systems (sometimes where they replace dedicated logic that would be more complex and more costly), and in many of the applications the 8 bit micro is more than enough. In such cases there is no reason to move to a 32 bit processor and complicate both the support logic and the coding needed to drive it, when an 8 or 12 bit solution is right for the task.
More direct attacks on privacy and tracking all Americans, in the name of 9/11, with something that would have had absolutely no effect on preventing the 9/11 attack at all.
Perhaps a better idea would be to not give terrorists drivers licenses at all, or maybe not to give illegal alliens drivers licenses at all. Instead many states (including mine) have gone out of their way to make it easy for known illegal alliens to obtain drivers licenses! But somehow at the same time this is being used to justify making people cary one more thing that will make it extremely easy to track them.
Kind of makes you think that all those crackpots who question how and why World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed when it wasn't even hit by planes, the only skyscraper to ever collapse from such a fire before or since, might be on to something.
What you "should" do is highly dependent on the application. As a general desktop this might be true, although I doubt that there is any reason I can't use a display at 640x480 under WinXP that was quite suitable at 640x480 under Win 3.1 (heck, XP even has more colors, so the display will look better, not worse. But that asside, there are many times when the computer isn't a desktop computer, it's away in a corner somewhere as a server, or is running some dedicated application where 640x480 would be just fine. Yet I had been lead to believe that I could not even install WinXP unless it had at least an 800x600 monitor (and maybe I can't since I would need to get it installed before I could get at these advanced adapter settings). What a disservice to the paying customer, just because some Microsoft geek has unlimited resources and a fancy 23 inch monitor.
Answering my own question, I found a working link. But the screen resolution is 800x480, when my copy of XP tells me that it needs at a minimum 800x600. Something sure as hell stinks! Is this little outfit getting a special build of XP (seems unlikely)? Why does the retail, full price version of XP insist on a minimum 800x600 display if XP can really run on less (obviously it can, there is no reason an OS needs a larger display, but it really stinks if MS put a limitation in the retail version that obsoleetes your hardware that they will wave for certain OEMs.)
I'm at the site now, but it seems slashdotted. I want the specs, particularly the screen resolution. (I'm wondering what the screen res is for this "smallest handtop device", particularly since it can run XP and XP made a lot of VGA monitors obsolete when it insisted on greater than VGA as it's lowest supported resolution.)
I tried to use it, but had to give it up. Too bad really, it's a good concept, but a very flawed implimentation.
Bastarts! Why in the world include .NET ???
How do you respond to charges that that you'll never win and you're just taking away votes rom Ralph Nader?
Voice analysis gets a lot easier when you're trying to analyze a source designed to be clear and distinct, and you only have to pick out the informstion from a very iimited subset of words, in this case the tem posiable digits.
*NEVER gona happen
On the other hand, if America (and maybe the E.U. too) passed a simple law stating that customers would not be responsiable for international long distance premium charges and that the government would no longer side with the telcos in giving them the weight of law to enforce these fees coming from a flawed business model against it's own citizens, then the problem would go away fast.
It might even go away faster if the government recognized that this was a well know fraud based on a flawed concept that the telcos set up and that the telcos take a cut from each time the scam gets a victim, and charged them with rackettering for letting the problem continue.
NO! It's the scammers that are taking over your computers that are really doing the dialing. Don't you think they would quickly add a pause and this extra dialing in? There may be ways to beat them (but don't bet on it - many modems do voice and a good hack might even voice-id a challange of numbers to be dialed back), but the far better solution would be to flatly outlaw this flawed telco business model of charginging special premium fees for some numbers, particularly for International calls (where the scammer is much harder to track down).
Of course, you might still need to block some popular scam countries, if only to protect the citizens from running up not insignificant long distance time charges (and you certainly can't stop the telcos from charging from long distance time, but you can stop them from charging the extra fees that motivate this problem in the first place). If enough countries got around to saying flat out that we know this is a scam and we are going to legally protect our citizens from the "fees" they are being scammed out of, then eventually the problem would go away and there would be no need to block numbers. But as long as the government sides with the crooks and their telco accomplices and allows the telcos to go after the victim in this scam, the problem will not only continue but will grow; this article is the proof of that.
What little, if any, valid charges one incurrs while calling another party by long distance could certainly be covered by other and better means than allowing it to be directly billed to a telephone number (credit card, for example). Enforcing this would be far better than exposing all of your citizens to a scam based on a flawed telco business model and blocking whole countries from your long distance system.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing this type of billing go away completely, even for calls within a country. But at least there is a good argument that any scammers operating this way inside a country can be caught and taken to court; which is often not the case when they are on the other side of the globe. A few simple changes to the law, such as forcing the telcos to hold any payments for several innitial months to be sure victims have time to complain about scam sites and block those payments, should be adequate to stop hit and run scammers from seting up shop in the country they plan to run their scam in. And, of course, a law should block incoming international long distance telco "special fees", not just outgoing ones.
And in the old analog days, it was "definitely different than solid state amps."
This is a somewhat biased point of view from someone who saw the first film on the Friday of the week it opened, and several times in the same theater after that, where it ran for a full year! And I compare it with seeing "episode 1", which made such an impression that I refuse to ever watch episodes 2 or 3.
Wow! A telephone with a built-in microphone! What will they think of next?
It seems to me that anyone who would pay a certain amount of money for a gift card or gift certificate worth the same amount, and give a gift that can only be used at a certain place and might expire, in this way shows even less thought than giving money, and deserves this.
I remember it from that time period too. But it turned out it was a scam, it bilked a lot of investors and never went anywhere. Just like this time.
gee, that's kind of negative. I looked at it as there are still some places without light polution.
And we want you to give Microsoft a copy of all of your important business documents. Who could think that was not a good idea?
As a wise man once said, Ahem.
Just use the cold water to do the cooling is hardly as simple as it sounds. Look at how many times the cold water goes through a heat exchanger before it is ever really used to cool a building, each time with a loss. Then look at building all of that piping to get the intermediate cooling fluid around an entire city of buildings and back again (This ain't exactly like laying fiber.) And consider the mass and resistance of all that fluid that has to be pumped around the city to get it to the buildings to be cooled. The losses in that (which end up heating the cooling fluid) will make the exiting power lines in Toronto look like super conductors in comparison. And then any building using this has to be completely refitted to use this cooling system, when existing buildings already have normal electricity driven HVAC.
No, just use the cold water to do the cooling isn't as trivial as you make it sound. While the valves may have been turned on, it's far from proven that enough users will really adopt this to make it fly.
On the other hand, since the cold water is being taken from the lake now rather than warmer water, the thermal barrier between the warmer top water and the lower cold water may slowly lower (and it is a very sharp layer, not the gradual drop in temperature you might expect). This may indeed have some effect, but that doesn't seem very likely.
They could have gone the simpler and more direct route of just building a power plant that used the difference in tempersture between the cold bottom water and the top water to pump up that water and generate electricity. Such plants have been proven to work with ocean water, and should be even simpler in an environment without salt water's effects. I'm assuming they didn't because in Toranto that top water would also get pretty cold in the winter. Still, I don't expect they will need much air conditioning in the winter anyway, so a seasonal power plant might have been as good or better of an idea.
While IM was never mentioned in the article, my fear is that something like this is more likely aimed at IM users than others; quite an oximoron for an application designed to promote privacy and security. Also, since it seems to be based on a friend-of-friend approach, it would have to support the address book format of every friend that I excahange e-mail with, would it not? This all seems to be ignored in the article.