When the RIAA started suing P2P users, I predicted that the future of P2P was going to be some encapsulation-type system, where I could share with people *I* trusted.... and they'd share with people *they* trusted, etc. So, you'd get this "six degrees of separation" deal going on.
The principle would end up working kind of like how terrorist cells work, such that the RIAA managing to bust one overly-trusting user wouldn't immediately jeopardize the rest of the users on the network.
It seems like that's kinda where we're headed with a lot of the new P2P apps coming out: Grouper, WASTE, etc. Now, we just need a system where we can actually *get* files from people we don't immediately trust by having the peers that we *do* trust act as relay stations or something. Granted, it increases traffic, but it cuts the risk *way* down.... and I don't really mind having to leave my P2P app running all night provided I can do it with impunity.
I think the biggest danger posed by the CSI series is that laypeople will think that it's perfectly okay to vaporize a few ounces of cyanoacrylate in a plexiglass box and then, once you've found the fingerprints, to just whip the box open with your mouth and nose about 6 inches away from where all of the crazy-glue fumes are coming out.
... can't wait for the next spin-off: "CSI: Pumonary ICU".
Other than that, I think they're getting pretty close to jumping the shark, because they're just re-using all the old tricks. Oooh... DNA from some stray skin cells... Ooooh, luminol to find blood. Oooh, crazy-glue to find fingerprints... oooh, monochromatic light to find semen.... wow, AFIS.... hey, CODIS, neat.
...my point here being that just about each of the things they use to solve the crime(s) in a single episode are used in probably 50%-75% of all of the other episodes.
The name of the killer does change in every episode, though, so I guess it's still riveting.
On the other hand, I want to see Bush-voters who cheered "4 more years" to suffer financial & economical devastation...
I feel you, man.
In Clinton's last year in office, the national debt actually went *down* (when adjusted for inflation) for the first time in ages... probably my lifetime or even longer. Then, during Bush's first term, it has skyrocketed. It has increased by almost 50% (*not* adjusted for inflation... but inflation isn't anywhere *near* 50% per 4 yrs.)!
Every election season, there's a call to reduce the deficit, and it always seems to fall on deaf ears. I think that most Americans have no idea what it really is, but (because they keep hearing politicians mention it so much), tacitly agree that we need to keep it down. However, I think that their level of conviction to that belief ranks right up there with trying to not consume quite so much saturated fat and salt: "Yeah, yeah... I know... I need to cut down one of these days.".
With this latest election, I think I'm finally giving up. So, this is where I agree with you. I think I'm now going to support any legislation or budget that swells the deficit even further. Up until now, I've been telling people that, if the deficit is left unchecked then, someday, the interest on the debt will be more than our total tax revenue... at which point, there will be no way to stop the meltdown. However, they all seem to look at me as though I'm talking about an asteroid hitting the earth. They've never experienced it happening, so they don't really believe that it *can* happen.
Well.... okay. If it can't happen, then I have no qualms about bringing it about as soon as possible. I'll start moving my assets to a country with a sensible fiscal policy, and then we can start doing what we can to make sure that the national debt swells into a runaway freight train as soon as possible.
And.... to be quite honest, I'm sincerely curious to see what *does* happen. Will the gov't default on all of its loans and have the dollar become worthless overseas, or will our own economy (and gov't, too) implode as well?
- Joe
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I just don't care for photos on my iPod.
Part of what makes my iPod so nice is that its interface is really simple. I think that this is due, in part, to the fact that it doesn't do a large variety of things. All it does is play music based on playlist, artist, or album.
I've seen similar cluttering on my TiVo. It used to be just about 4 or 5 menu items on the main screen. Now, it's packed from the top of the screen to the bottom.
My old Symbian phone did tons of stuff. Games, calendar, to-do list, camera, web browser... you could even make phone calls with it.:P Problem was, you had to navigate through 3 pages of icons just to get to the app you needed.
I don't want my iPod to become like my cell phone.
Fortunately, VoIP is young enough such that they could modify the protocols to nip this in the bud.
Cryptographic solutions would probably be the first place to look. For example, suppose my phone will only look at incoming connections which are begun with some certificate signed by the VoIP service provider (Vonage, Skype, whatever). So, in order to be able to call me, your phone first contacts the provider, requests a certificate to connect to me, and the provider gives that to the phone, and then their phone uses that as credentials to get my phone to not ignore it. Then, all the service provider has to do is watch out for excessive numbers of connections coming from one customer.
I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this isn't already built into the VoIP systems. After all, we've been trying for some time now to move email into the domain of cryptographic authentication (SPF is just an intermediate fix) to stop spam. So, we've known for a while that this is "the way to do it right", and we also know from the way e-mail is going that it's a major pain to try to change the system to use it after the system is already in place. So, I'd expect that they might already have this capability.
I pondered this idea over a decade ago and concluded that the less-dumb thing to do would be to encrypt all of the user's documents and then give them a phone number to call to: 1) buy the software and, 2) get all of their files decrypted.
This means nothing. All the article really says is that everybody at ILM has had to sign an agreement not to talk about the possibility of more episodes.
Provided that George Lucas, himself, has had to agree not to discuss the possibility as well, then I have to ask: Isn't this what we've all been hoping for all this time? I, for one, have been praying to my god every night that I wouldn't hear George Lucas talk about any more episodes.
- Joe
You really think it'll take that long? Unless they increase the format size by an order of magnitude, broadband speeds will catch up within the year.
That's if you just look at this particular case.
But basically, the strategy that he seems to advocate here is that of trying to keep the legitimate means of production/distribution less expensive (in time+money) than the illegitimate ones.
This is a bankrupt strategy, and has been for quite some time. Remember when AutoCAD came on a whopping FIVE 5.25" floppy disks? Jeez... it would take forever to download that from your pirate BBS over a 2400 baud modem. Oh, but then US-Robotics came out with the Courier modem which downloaded at 14.4k.
Remember when CD's came out... and nobody could afford a CD burner (or even knew they existed)? If you wanted a digital copy, you had to *buy* one. Oh... but then burners came along.
Remember before photocopiers? If you wanted a copy of a magazine article, you either had to copy it down by hand (too expensive in your time), take photographs of it (too expensive in money), or just buy the damn magazine.
Trying to keep the legit means of distribution a step ahead of the non-legit ones is just insane. Not only does it require a very disruptive transition ("okay, everybody... time to junk your DVD players for the new blu-ray ones.") every time you need to move to a higher-density format, but you'll be doing it more and more often. A couple years ago, DVD recorders were $500. Now, Sony has just rolled out one of the first dual-layer burners and, within a month, it's at BestBuy for $200. Do you think it will be even two years before we see Blu-Ray burners for $200?
- Joe
Re:I think is was said somewhere else...
on
P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If you choose to expose security weaknesses, don't take advantage of them. Tell those who can fix it/do something about it, and no one else. What this person is doing will just give other people ideas.
Unfortunately, most people don't take it seriously unless it really happens to them or if they see it happen to someone else like them.
A great example of this happened at my university about 10 years ago. The campus ran a cluster of unix machines for students to get email, read usenet, compile C programs, run nethack, etc.
The nerds amongst us were fairly concerned that the admins: 1) didn't keep the passwords in a shadow file, and 2) didn't run Crack on the password file to find weak passwords. I guess the reasons were that: 1) the OS (I think it was AIX at the time) didn't support/etc/shadow, and 2) the admins shuddered at the thought of freezing the accounts of and having to talk scores of users through the process of changing their passwords.
So... one of the nerds kinda... "settled" the issue for them. He ran Crack on the entire password table and POSTED all of the cracked login/password combos (a couple thousand out of something like 10,000 users, I think) to the local campus newsgroups.
Of course... this led to only one account being frozen... and you can probably guess whose it was.
But the campus did start to show a newfound interest in password robustness after that.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay. Only been scammed once, out of $75. But reading this dude's e-mail exchange kinda struck me as a little odd... and I think I figured out what it is.
The buyer overnighted (and paid for morning delivery of) a cashier's check to the guy so that the seller could get the laptop in the mail that day to him.
I don't think I've ever paid extra to speed up an ebay transaction. By that, I mean that I've never sent checks in anything more elaborate than a normal USPS envelope and I've never paid for any kind of shipping for the item other than the basic shipping.
The upshot of this is that it keeps me from getting too anxious about getting the deal going... something that might have saved this guy.
In cases where I gotta have the thing *soon*, I just go to the local computer retailer (BestBuy, Fry's, etc.) or buy.com and pay the extra premium to have it "now". The dude in this article ended up essentially paying a $1,000 premium to have his laptop quickly. Oh yeah, but he didn't get his laptop.
What I'm interested to see is if eBay will eventually allow for the sale of downloadable music that is recorded and released without the involvement of record companies. In other words, what if eBay opens the door to taking the record companies out of the loop between the artist and the listener.
In all likelyhood, the RIAA will crap golden twinkies and try to find some legal means to make ebay sorry they went down this road.
266MHZ? The time it would take you to get it
on the USB, dowload the software, configure it it would be a waste of time and money.
Figure labor as your biggest cost. Nobody's time is free. You can get a decent Laptop for less money. Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.
I agree completely. I just *sold* a 266MHz Thinkpad 365 with 500MB drive, external floppy and internal CD on ebay for FOURTY DOLLARS! So, for the cost of gassing up a SUV in California, you could already be well ahead of where you are now.
Now, if you're going through all of this just for bragging rights... to be able to say that you have installed Linux on a doorstop, then okay. But let's just all agree that that's the point. But if your goal is to have a usable Linux system without shelling out a bunch of cash... then a mere $100 would get you a laptop which would put your current one to shame, so it wouldn't be worth wasting your time with the one you've got.
Okay, so when's the GMail middleman getting here?
on
Gmail in the News
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the links in the main story has *another* link to gmail-is-too-creepy.com. One of the things that page mentions is that many people (aside from not wanting a GMail account for themselves) are electing to never *send* mail to GMail, for fear that it will get permanently archived forever.
So, I guess it's inevitable that someone's going to make a site that lets you send to GMail while avoiding it. Imagine checking your GMail and getting a message saying:
You have received a piece of mail which the sender does not want archived by the GMail servers. Click Here to read it...
which would be a link to a web page which held the message for, say, two weeks. The service could be set up as a mail relayer, of sorts, where it would be easy to reply to GMail people. For example, the site could be, say, notgmail.com. Then, when replying to someone at GMail, you just add "not" to the address and the service would handle saving your message (only for two weeks, remember) and sending the real Gmail recipient the notice that they've got mail waiting.
I'm surprised that something like this isn't here already. Just imagine GMail's archives getting flooded with "You have received....".
Oh boy... where to start. I'll try to offer some info that the dude wouldn't be able to find via Google (or, at least, not all in one place)...
Basically, your options are RAID-1 and RAID-5... as hundreds of people here have already pointed out. RAID-1 is just straight mirroring (where all drives in the array contain the same information). Usually, this just involves two drives, but there's no reason why you couldn't have, say, three or four drives all mirrored... and you could lose all but one of them and still be up and running.
RAID-5 is a very cool beast. You bascially have an array of drives with some portion of them set aside for redundancy. Most of the posts I've seen here only describe a scenario where you have three drives with one of those drives for redundancy. This only scratches the surface, however.
For example, you could have an array of, say, 5 10GB drives, with 2 drives' worth of redundancy. With this, your RAID implementation would make available to you, what seemed to be, a single 30GB drive (since 20GB of the total 50GB is used for redundancy). This way, you could have any two drives go bad and you're still okay.
Another example, I guess, is that you could have a two-drive RAID-5 with one drive's worth of redundancy. In this case, you'd have the functionaly equivalent of a RAID-1 mirroring setup. Not very sexy... but you could do it in some implementations, I'm sure.
I'm trying to use the phrase "X drives' worth of redundancy" instead of "X drives set aside for redundancy" because it's important to point out that, in RAID, all of the drives are considered equal. If you have 5 drives with 2-drive redundancy, it's not like you set 3 of them as the "main" drives and 2 as the "backup" ones. There's no preferential treatment like that. All the drives are equivalent and you could lose any of them and the others all move to cover for the one that was lost.
Now, personally, I like RAID-5 because it offers the ability to use more than 50% of the space you paid for. With RAID-1 mirroring, you always only get to use 50% of the space that really exists. This would be necessary if, when you suffered a storage failure, you always lost half of it. But that's not how it happens. Usually, you lose a single drive. So, it would be nice to maximize your space available, while having some insurance against a single drive failure.
This is where RAID-5 really shines, because each successive drive you add, you get all of that space for your usage. You could have, say, four drives, 1 drive of redundancy, and you get 3 drives' worth of space.
Now, there are a few pros and cons for both RAID-1 and RAID-5 regarding recovering/moving data and changing the size of your array, and I'll list them here.
Recovery: Since RAID-1 uses brain-dead mirroring, both drives usually contain the exact same information that the virtual RAID drive does. Because of this, if one of the drives goes bad (or even if the RAID controller goes bad), you can take one of the good drives from the RAID, plug it into a plain SCSI or IDE controller and all of your data is right there. You can even boot from it, if you were booting from your RAID earlier. So, it's brain-dead simple to go back to a non-RAID configuration with RAID-1. With RAID-5, you couldn't do that. Advantage: RAID-1.
Changing array size: If you fill up your RAID-1 mirrored drives and need more space, your only option is to go buy two more bigger drives, put them in the machine, set up a new mirror, and copy everything from one mirror to another. This uses up 4 hard drive connections in your machine. (Although, with RAID-1, you *could* pull out one of the older drives, and put in one of the newer drives, copy one of the old drives to one newer one, then pull out the last remaining old drive, put in the second new one, and rebuild the mirrored array. But you still have to buy TWO biggere drives). With RAID-5, there's no theoretical reason why you couldn't just *add* another drive of th
1) I vote and visually verify that everything looks correct.
2) I receive a receipt with a UID and hash (checksum) of my vote
3) I can confirm after the election via the UID that they received my vote (via the net of course.)
4) If I think there was some hanky-panky I can send the hash to a vote auditor who confirms the state records match my vote.
I'll do you one better...
I was envisioning a system where, after the election, the gov't makes the entire database of hashes freely downloadable to anybody. This would allow for dozens of websites to put up their own "Verify Your Vote" pages, where you could make sure that:
1 - Your hash appears in the database.
2 - Your hash decodes to the votes that you voted.
3 - The votes in the database all add up to *exactly* the same numbers that the government (and everyone else) is coming up with from the database.
This would be pretty much expose any shenanegans that the gov't might try in faking the vote counts since they wouldn't retain control of the receipt verification process. If anyone downloaded the database and came up with a number of votes different from what the gov't was reporting or if a hash didn't appear in the database or decoded to the wrong vote, alarm bells could start being sounded.
However, as several people have pointed out, the ability to get receipts opens up the possibility of vote coercion, since "Vinnie the Hammer" can be waiting outsite to check your receipt and break your legs if you didn't vote "correctly". But the idea of leaving the receipts at the polling place makes it possible for the government to rig the election, since they'd control part of the verification mechanism (the receipts themselves, in this case).
The only solution I can think of off-hand is to have receipts issued randomly (but not in a way that could be known by the voting terminals which are storing the votes in the database. Otherwise, if the terminals knew which votes were getting receipts and which were not, then it would know which ones could be altered). It would need to be something kinda like:
1 - You vote at the terminal.
2 - The terminal issues you a receipt.
3 - At the exit of the polling place, you stop at a table where they roll a die or flip a coin or whatever. If the die/coin comes up a certain way, your receipt goes into the shredder without any of the voting officials seeing it (so they wouldn't be able to go into the database later and delete your vote).
This way, you can go outside and tell "Vinnie the Hammer" that you got unlucky and they shredded your receipt.
I run a few servers on Linux. Every now and then, one of them craps out; the motherboard goes bad, or the ram gets flaky... or sometimes we just buy a whole new faster box to run our server on.
When that happens, I just shutdown the old machine, take the hard drive out, put it in the replacement machine, and boot it and walk away.
Windows ME and earlier versions could do this, but only after about 30 minutes of "New Hardware Detected", and finding drivers and rebooting, etc. On the other hand, I can take any Linux hard disk image and drop it in just about any machine and it boots right up.
Now, keep in mind that X-Windows is probably not going to work on the new box without some tweaking... but all of the services and console-based interactivity is there. Contrast this with Windows XP where, if someone *gave* me a brand new machine that was much faster than the one I use now, I'd still heasitate to switch to the new machine because of all of the hassle involved in migrating my settings, re-installing software, etc.
He used such a pretty script for some of the lettering, I'm surprised he didn't replace all 's's with 'f's like in old documents.
Instead of "Assignegens", we'd have "Affignegenf". If you actually look at the PDF, you can see how cool it would look in the script he chose.:).... and can I get mine on parchement, please?
Unfortunately, I think this only applies when you *don't do it on purpose*. From my point of view, if you design a network solely for the purpose of relieving yourself of responsibility for what traverses your network, you are pretty much screwed once you get to court.
Not only that, but I'm fairly sure that the Supreme Court has ruled that deliberate ignorance equates to knowledge. In other words, if you accept $20,000 in exchange for delivering a suitcase from one crackhouse to another... and you take care not to *look* inside the suitcase, that's not going to help you when the cops find out that the suitcase contains (surprise!) crack.
The court's take on it was that, if it's apparent that you're deliberately staying ignorant of what you're carrying, then that act, itself, demostrates a guilty mind... that you pretty much know that what you're carrying is illegal.
So, I think the court is going to see right through this guy's ruse.
Now, if he were clever he'd write an article like the one he wrote solely to dupe the other readers into turning off their security. Then, he could go wardriving, lanjack someone else's broadband connection, download his warez, mp3z, and kiddie porn from his car through some other dude's IP, and then drive away and let someone else worry about what the courts eventually think.
I wonder how many of the DC sniper's victims would be alive today if there had been cameras trained on the streets there...
...those unwitting fallen soldiers in our war for "privacy in public"... we should speak their names with reverence every time we have a quick boink in a back-alley or are able to litter or speed with impunity.
The dude makes it out of steel pipe. Sheesh... I'm surprised he overlooked the fact that he could have filled the pipe with sand or water or mercury or something.
Seriously, though, there are several sites out there that deal with the topic of home-made steadicams. Most of the others, although a little more expensive and a little more complex, are lighter, easier to use, and they even discuss some of the physics behind the steadicam principle, like static vs. dynamic stability, etc. I guess what I'm getting at is: I'm really not impressed by this.
Well, seeing as how we're also trying to recruit people who
talk like chimps,
the "payload" is being taken care of as we speak.
Of course, the American chimp-speakers will undoubtedly demand too high of a salary, so they'll probably just teach someone from an Indian call center how to speak chimp as well as they speak English and save a bundle.
Slashdot Mirror
When the RIAA started suing P2P users, I predicted that the future of P2P was going to be some encapsulation-type system, where I could share with people *I* trusted.... and they'd share with people *they* trusted, etc. So, you'd get this "six degrees of separation" deal going on.
The principle would end up working kind of like how terrorist cells work, such that the RIAA managing to bust one overly-trusting user wouldn't immediately jeopardize the rest of the users on the network.
It seems like that's kinda where we're headed with a lot of the new P2P apps coming out: Grouper, WASTE, etc. Now, we just need a system where we can actually *get* files from people we don't immediately trust by having the peers that we *do* trust act as relay stations or something. Granted, it increases traffic, but it cuts the risk *way* down.... and I don't really mind having to leave my P2P app running all night provided I can do it with impunity.
I think the biggest danger posed by the CSI series is that laypeople will think that it's perfectly okay to vaporize a few ounces of cyanoacrylate in a plexiglass box and then, once you've found the fingerprints, to just whip the box open with your mouth and nose about 6 inches away from where all of the crazy-glue fumes are coming out.
... can't wait for the next spin-off: "CSI: Pumonary ICU".
...my point here being that just about each of the things they use to solve the crime(s) in a single episode are used in probably 50%-75% of all of the other episodes.
Other than that, I think they're getting pretty close to jumping the shark, because they're just re-using all the old tricks. Oooh... DNA from some stray skin cells... Ooooh, luminol to find blood. Oooh, crazy-glue to find fingerprints... oooh, monochromatic light to find semen.... wow, AFIS.... hey, CODIS, neat.
The name of the killer does change in every episode, though, so I guess it's still riveting.
In Clinton's last year in office, the national debt actually went *down* (when adjusted for inflation) for the first time in ages... probably my lifetime or even longer. Then, during Bush's first term, it has skyrocketed. It has increased by almost 50% (*not* adjusted for inflation... but inflation isn't anywhere *near* 50% per 4 yrs.)!
Every election season, there's a call to reduce the deficit, and it always seems to fall on deaf ears. I think that most Americans have no idea what it really is, but (because they keep hearing politicians mention it so much), tacitly agree that we need to keep it down. However, I think that their level of conviction to that belief ranks right up there with trying to not consume quite so much saturated fat and salt: "Yeah, yeah... I know... I need to cut down one of these days.".
With this latest election, I think I'm finally giving up. So, this is where I agree with you. I think I'm now going to support any legislation or budget that swells the deficit even further. Up until now, I've been telling people that, if the deficit is left unchecked then, someday, the interest on the debt will be more than our total tax revenue... at which point, there will be no way to stop the meltdown. However, they all seem to look at me as though I'm talking about an asteroid hitting the earth. They've never experienced it happening, so they don't really believe that it *can* happen.
Well.... okay. If it can't happen, then I have no qualms about bringing it about as soon as possible. I'll start moving my assets to a country with a sensible fiscal policy, and then we can start doing what we can to make sure that the national debt swells into a runaway freight train as soon as possible.
And.... to be quite honest, I'm sincerely curious to see what *does* happen. Will the gov't default on all of its loans and have the dollar become worthless overseas, or will our own economy (and gov't, too) implode as well? - Joe
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I just don't care for photos on my iPod.
:P Problem was, you had to navigate through 3 pages of icons just to get to the app you needed.
Part of what makes my iPod so nice is that its interface is really simple. I think that this is due, in part, to the fact that it doesn't do a large variety of things. All it does is play music based on playlist, artist, or album.
I've seen similar cluttering on my TiVo. It used to be just about 4 or 5 menu items on the main screen. Now, it's packed from the top of the screen to the bottom.
My old Symbian phone did tons of stuff. Games, calendar, to-do list, camera, web browser... you could even make phone calls with it.
I don't want my iPod to become like my cell phone.
Fortunately, VoIP is young enough such that they could modify the protocols to nip this in the bud.
Cryptographic solutions would probably be the first place to look. For example, suppose my phone will only look at incoming connections which are begun with some certificate signed by the VoIP service provider (Vonage, Skype, whatever). So, in order to be able to call me, your phone first contacts the provider, requests a certificate to connect to me, and the provider gives that to the phone, and then their phone uses that as credentials to get my phone to not ignore it. Then, all the service provider has to do is watch out for excessive numbers of connections coming from one customer.
I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this isn't already built into the VoIP systems. After all, we've been trying for some time now to move email into the domain of cryptographic authentication (SPF is just an intermediate fix) to stop spam. So, we've known for a while that this is "the way to do it right", and we also know from the way e-mail is going that it's a major pain to try to change the system to use it after the system is already in place. So, I'd expect that they might already have this capability.
I pondered this idea over a decade ago and concluded that the less-dumb thing to do would be to encrypt all of the user's documents and then give them a phone number to call to: 1) buy the software and, 2) get all of their files decrypted.
This means nothing. All the article really says is that everybody at ILM has had to sign an agreement not to talk about the possibility of more episodes.
Provided that George Lucas, himself, has had to agree not to discuss the possibility as well, then I have to ask: Isn't this what we've all been hoping for all this time? I, for one, have been praying to my god every night that I wouldn't hear George Lucas talk about any more episodes. - Joe
But basically, the strategy that he seems to advocate here is that of trying to keep the legitimate means of production/distribution less expensive (in time+money) than the illegitimate ones.
This is a bankrupt strategy, and has been for quite some time. Remember when AutoCAD came on a whopping FIVE 5.25" floppy disks? Jeez... it would take forever to download that from your pirate BBS over a 2400 baud modem. Oh, but then US-Robotics came out with the Courier modem which downloaded at 14.4k.
Remember when CD's came out... and nobody could afford a CD burner (or even knew they existed)? If you wanted a digital copy, you had to *buy* one. Oh... but then burners came along.
Remember before photocopiers? If you wanted a copy of a magazine article, you either had to copy it down by hand (too expensive in your time), take photographs of it (too expensive in money), or just buy the damn magazine.
Trying to keep the legit means of distribution a step ahead of the non-legit ones is just insane. Not only does it require a very disruptive transition ("okay, everybody... time to junk your DVD players for the new blu-ray ones.") every time you need to move to a higher-density format, but you'll be doing it more and more often. A couple years ago, DVD recorders were $500. Now, Sony has just rolled out one of the first dual-layer burners and, within a month, it's at BestBuy for $200. Do you think it will be even two years before we see Blu-Ray burners for $200? - Joe
A great example of this happened at my university about 10 years ago. The campus ran a cluster of unix machines for students to get email, read usenet, compile C programs, run nethack, etc.
The nerds amongst us were fairly concerned that the admins: 1) didn't keep the passwords in a shadow file, and 2) didn't run Crack on the password file to find weak passwords. I guess the reasons were that: 1) the OS (I think it was AIX at the time) didn't support
So... one of the nerds kinda... "settled" the issue for them. He ran Crack on the entire password table and POSTED all of the cracked login/password combos (a couple thousand out of something like 10,000 users, I think) to the local campus newsgroups.
Of course... this led to only one account being frozen... and you can probably guess whose it was.
But the campus did start to show a newfound interest in password robustness after that.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay. Only been scammed once, out of $75. But reading this dude's e-mail exchange kinda struck me as a little odd... and I think I figured out what it is.
The buyer overnighted (and paid for morning delivery of) a cashier's check to the guy so that the seller could get the laptop in the mail that day to him.
I don't think I've ever paid extra to speed up an ebay transaction. By that, I mean that I've never sent checks in anything more elaborate than a normal USPS envelope and I've never paid for any kind of shipping for the item other than the basic shipping.
The upshot of this is that it keeps me from getting too anxious about getting the deal going... something that might have saved this guy.
In cases where I gotta have the thing *soon*, I just go to the local computer retailer (BestBuy, Fry's, etc.) or buy.com and pay the extra premium to have it "now". The dude in this article ended up essentially paying a $1,000 premium to have his laptop quickly. Oh yeah, but he didn't get his laptop.
What I'm interested to see is if eBay will eventually allow for the sale of downloadable music that is recorded and released without the involvement of record companies. In other words, what if eBay opens the door to taking the record companies out of the loop between the artist and the listener.
In all likelyhood, the RIAA will crap golden twinkies and try to find some legal means to make ebay sorry they went down this road.
Now, if you're going through all of this just for bragging rights... to be able to say that you have installed Linux on a doorstop, then okay. But let's just all agree that that's the point. But if your goal is to have a usable Linux system without shelling out a bunch of cash... then a mere $100 would get you a laptop which would put your current one to shame, so it wouldn't be worth wasting your time with the one you've got.
So, I guess it's inevitable that someone's going to make a site that lets you send to GMail while avoiding it. Imagine checking your GMail and getting a message saying:
which would be a link to a web page which held the message for, say, two weeks. The service could be set up as a mail relayer, of sorts, where it would be easy to reply to GMail people. For example, the site could be, say, notgmail.com. Then, when replying to someone at GMail, you just add "not" to the address and the service would handle saving your message (only for two weeks, remember) and sending the real Gmail recipient the notice that they've got mail waiting.
I'm surprised that something like this isn't here already. Just imagine GMail's archives getting flooded with "You have received....".
Basically, your options are RAID-1 and RAID-5... as hundreds of people here have already pointed out. RAID-1 is just straight mirroring (where all drives in the array contain the same information). Usually, this just involves two drives, but there's no reason why you couldn't have, say, three or four drives all mirrored... and you could lose all but one of them and still be up and running.
RAID-5 is a very cool beast. You bascially have an array of drives with some portion of them set aside for redundancy. Most of the posts I've seen here only describe a scenario where you have three drives with one of those drives for redundancy. This only scratches the surface, however.
For example, you could have an array of, say, 5 10GB drives, with 2 drives' worth of redundancy. With this, your RAID implementation would make available to you, what seemed to be, a single 30GB drive (since 20GB of the total 50GB is used for redundancy). This way, you could have any two drives go bad and you're still okay.
Another example, I guess, is that you could have a two-drive RAID-5 with one drive's worth of redundancy. In this case, you'd have the functionaly equivalent of a RAID-1 mirroring setup. Not very sexy... but you could do it in some implementations, I'm sure.
I'm trying to use the phrase "X drives' worth of redundancy" instead of "X drives set aside for redundancy" because it's important to point out that, in RAID, all of the drives are considered equal. If you have 5 drives with 2-drive redundancy, it's not like you set 3 of them as the "main" drives and 2 as the "backup" ones. There's no preferential treatment like that. All the drives are equivalent and you could lose any of them and the others all move to cover for the one that was lost.
Now, personally, I like RAID-5 because it offers the ability to use more than 50% of the space you paid for. With RAID-1 mirroring, you always only get to use 50% of the space that really exists. This would be necessary if, when you suffered a storage failure, you always lost half of it. But that's not how it happens. Usually, you lose a single drive. So, it would be nice to maximize your space available, while having some insurance against a single drive failure.
This is where RAID-5 really shines, because each successive drive you add, you get all of that space for your usage. You could have, say, four drives, 1 drive of redundancy, and you get 3 drives' worth of space.
Now, there are a few pros and cons for both RAID-1 and RAID-5 regarding recovering/moving data and changing the size of your array, and I'll list them here.
I was envisioning a system where, after the election, the gov't makes the entire database of hashes freely downloadable to anybody. This would allow for dozens of websites to put up their own "Verify Your Vote" pages, where you could make sure that:
1 - Your hash appears in the database.
2 - Your hash decodes to the votes that you voted.
3 - The votes in the database all add up to *exactly* the same numbers that the government (and everyone else) is coming up with from the database.
This would be pretty much expose any shenanegans that the gov't might try in faking the vote counts since they wouldn't retain control of the receipt verification process. If anyone downloaded the database and came up with a number of votes different from what the gov't was reporting or if a hash didn't appear in the database or decoded to the wrong vote, alarm bells could start being sounded.
However, as several people have pointed out, the ability to get receipts opens up the possibility of vote coercion, since "Vinnie the Hammer" can be waiting outsite to check your receipt and break your legs if you didn't vote "correctly". But the idea of leaving the receipts at the polling place makes it possible for the government to rig the election, since they'd control part of the verification mechanism (the receipts themselves, in this case).
The only solution I can think of off-hand is to have receipts issued randomly (but not in a way that could be known by the voting terminals which are storing the votes in the database. Otherwise, if the terminals knew which votes were getting receipts and which were not, then it would know which ones could be altered). It would need to be something kinda like:
1 - You vote at the terminal.
2 - The terminal issues you a receipt.
3 - At the exit of the polling place, you stop at a table where they roll a die or flip a coin or whatever. If the die/coin comes up a certain way, your receipt goes into the shredder without any of the voting officials seeing it (so they wouldn't be able to go into the database later and delete your vote).
This way, you can go outside and tell "Vinnie the Hammer" that you got unlucky and they shredded your receipt.
"But, your honor.... we were just trying to help Valve meet their release date!". :)
I run a few servers on Linux. Every now and then, one of them craps out; the motherboard goes bad, or the ram gets flaky... or sometimes we just buy a whole new faster box to run our server on.
When that happens, I just shutdown the old machine, take the hard drive out, put it in the replacement machine, and boot it and walk away.
Windows ME and earlier versions could do this, but only after about 30 minutes of "New Hardware Detected", and finding drivers and rebooting, etc. On the other hand, I can take any Linux hard disk image and drop it in just about any machine and it boots right up.
Now, keep in mind that X-Windows is probably not going to work on the new box without some tweaking... but all of the services and console-based interactivity is there. Contrast this with Windows XP where, if someone *gave* me a brand new machine that was much faster than the one I use now, I'd still heasitate to switch to the new machine because of all of the hassle involved in migrating my settings, re-installing software, etc.
He used such a pretty script for some of the lettering, I'm surprised he didn't replace all 's's with 'f's like in old documents.
:) .... and can I get mine on parchement, please?
Instead of "Assignegens", we'd have "Affignegenf". If you actually look at the PDF, you can see how cool it would look in the script he chose.
The court's take on it was that, if it's apparent that you're deliberately staying ignorant of what you're carrying, then that act, itself, demostrates a guilty mind... that you pretty much know that what you're carrying is illegal.
So, I think the court is going to see right through this guy's ruse.
Now, if he were clever he'd write an article like the one he wrote solely to dupe the other readers into turning off their security. Then, he could go wardriving, lanjack someone else's broadband connection, download his warez, mp3z, and kiddie porn from his car through some other dude's IP, and then drive away and let someone else worry about what the courts eventually think.
That's.... if he were clever, of course...
I wonder how many of the DC sniper's victims would be alive today if there had been cameras trained on the streets there...
...those unwitting fallen soldiers in our war for "privacy in public"... we should speak their names with reverence every time we have a quick boink in a back-alley or are able to litter or speed with impunity.
The dude makes it out of steel pipe. Sheesh... I'm surprised he overlooked the fact that he could have filled the pipe with sand or water or mercury or something.
Seriously, though, there are several sites out there that deal with the topic of home-made steadicams. Most of the others, although a little more expensive and a little more complex, are lighter, easier to use, and they even discuss some of the physics behind the steadicam principle, like static vs. dynamic stability, etc. I guess what I'm getting at is: I'm really not impressed by this.
Oh no... "carbon fiber net structure"... "coloured blue, red and yellow lights"... can we please not have this one come back down to earth in Roswell?
Of course, the American chimp-speakers will undoubtedly demand too high of a salary, so they'll probably just teach someone from an Indian call center how to speak chimp as well as they speak English and save a bundle.