Sure... so, to use a VOIP phone, I need to lug around and plug in a laptop? If you're using the laptop anyway, then yeah, it's no big deal. But if you only want to use the web on a PDA or a Phone, well, there's not a whole lot of room in an airplane seat in the first place.
At one of my client's, we've used OOo for a few folks who only need access to basic spreadsheet software. I.e. to give them somewhere to type that will do math for them.
OOo fits the bill perfectly. It's compatible enough that the "normal" Excel functions and files will open and save fine. Version 2 of OOo has finally fixed up the worst parts of OOo v. 1 -- the multiuser hackery and the option to set.xls as the default file format.
Will the entire office ever switch? Not for years and years. Some people actually do need to send and receive complex files out of the office for revisions.
In a file the size of a video file, they can make hundreds of subtle changes. With lots and lots of redundancy, even if the re-encoding removes the vast majority of the watermarks, there is a good chance (it doesn't have to be a 100% chance, really) that the file can be traced back to the original purchaser.
Music files at 5MB are a bit tougher, but it's probably doable.
Perhaps (and I'm totally hand waving here), the difference between this software update and other bug fixes and software updates is that to get to 802.11n there are probably additional IP licenses required by Apple. I would assume that there are some new patent licenses required to achive the faster speeds in "n"... so it's hard for Apple to argue that this is part of a regular maintenance update.
I wonder if the hesitancy on the part of them to release this for consumer purchase is due to pressure from AMD and the other component manufacturers. (AMD manufactures the CPU in the OLPC) They don't want to sell millions of low-end CPUs, screens, etc. in the Developed World... they are much better off with the current entry level of $500 or so for a laptop.
Personally, I would consider converting my home server to one of these OLPCs. A couple hundred MHz, a couple USB ports for storage, and low power usage sound about right.
I've been using it for years. I think I started when it was on version 4, at the time, a free 486 w/12 MB of RAM did file, print, email, and web serving. OK, it was too slow for serving dynamic webpages, but it did a great job otherwise.
For the last year or so, I've been running SME6 on a Pentium 166MMX w/128MB of RAM. It flies! Plenty fast enough to saturate a 100Mbit network.
I wouldn't recommend it to "regular" folks though -- among other things, backups are a pain.
A little off topic... but, if you need Linux to work with WiFi and other gear that only has Windows drivers, you can run in a virtualized environment like VMWare. No, it's not the right answer, but it's here now and it works. I can't be bothered to fiddle with WiFi drivers just to get into Linux for a few minutes here and there... it's nice to have it just work with the virtualized network drivers provided by VMWare - especially now that VMWare Server is free as in beer.
A lot of folks are going to say that this is overkill. A safe email client, patches, scanners, etc. should be "good enough". Well, if I was American (as opposed to Canadian), I'd say that this move by the DoD is a good one. Who cares if the risk is "small"? There is a higher risk with HTML email than plain text, and only marginal benefit. We are talking about an organization that needs to operate at very high levels of security.
The vast majority of people don't need to run an SMTP server at home. Just block troublesome IP addresses from sending to random IP addresses and let them use only the ISP's SMTP servers. The few folks who run a full mail server at home, like me, can find an alternate solution, like SMTP Smart Hosting - aka forwarding to the ISP's mail server.
This wouldn't do anything to reduce DDOS's though.
I think that 2007 is the year we'll see action from ISPs to proactively neuter zombies on their network. It's been several years of DDOS's now and the technology to compile which IPs have been hacked is available. All we need is some incentive to push ISPs to look after their own network. Maybe make a public list of the worst ISPs for sending SPAM?
Plop a PS2 down in front of a room of twenty-somethings, and more likely than not you'll get the guys playing on the console while the gals chit-chat or whatever.
A couple weeks ago, I was at a party where there was a Wii -- everyone was playing it. I was astounded. I don't think that there has ever been a gaming console that has appealed to the majority of females.
Now, IIRC, about 50% of the planet is female, so, who's going to win this round of consoles?
I wish ISPs would cut off home users who send mail beyond some threshold, say 1000/hr. I've been fiddling with mail filters a lot the last couple months, and watching the logs scroll by, it's clearly dynamic IPs that send the bulk of the SPAM.
BTW. Greylisting still works pretty well. Now if only I could figure out how to compile milter-greylist with DNS block list support on my RHEL VPS...
I installed Google Desktop a while back. It's great for searching IMAP mail... anyway, another benefit is that it does a little pop-up, similar to newer Outlook installs. My only gripe is that it does it pre-Spam filter...
At work using Outlook, I edit inbound messages all the time to add a quick note to the top or whatever. E.g., drag a message to my "to do" folder and turn it into a note page for the task. I really miss this at home. So much so that I would switch (back) to Outlook at home, if it would learn to use IMAP better.
Yes, this allows one to make an inbound message look different than what you received, but that's the point. If you want to prove that you didn't write what is in someone else's mailbox, sign everything with PGP. Email is insecure, we might as well make it easier to use... besides, how hard is it to tag a message as modified? Isn't that what custom header tags are for?
Wouldn't it be more productive to let access to these sites go unrestricted, but log every request that goes to them? Maybe insert some sort of warning page (via the ISP's web proxy) to tell the end user that they're being watched?
After a certain threshold of accesses for a single account, pass the particulars to the authorities to take a closer look.
I'm sure that there are legal issues with this idea... but there are also legal issues with trying to censor access, as suggested in the article. At least my way would lead to arrests of the pervs.
There were literally billions of DVD's and hundreds of millions of DVD players manufactured in China before EVD was ever born. Granted, most of those were exported, still the established base was WAY too large. Besides, no one really pays the royalties on DVD players, even here in North America. I was corrected by someone here on/. before, the royalties for every part of a DVD player* is around $25 USD. There are often DVD players retailing here for $25 USD. Do you think proper royalties are being paid?
Now, HDDVD and BlueRay are barely established... there may be a chance there.
* Philips gets a big chunk for the disc design (I think), but there are also royalties for MP3, Dolby, DivX, etc.
When the computer market was growing by leaps and bounds, the sheer number of new installs of the latest software would eventually push people to upgrade their own older office software. But now that the installed base of Office 97/2K/XP/2K3 is so huge, never mind all the other office suites that attempt to be compatible with the O2K formats, is this going to happen with whatever format Office 2007 uses?
I know that I'm not likely to be using Office 2007 for at least a few years, if ever, so until then, folks are just going to have to make sure they do a "save as" for me. I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone.
I don't really follow the Office 2007 file format news, is the new format the default format?
For once I actually RTFA. The article claims that the rocks used at the top of the pyramids react differently than rocks used at the bottom of the pyramids when poked with some new fangled methodology. I'm actually surprised that it's possible to make limestone that is so similar to naturally formed rock that it took until 2006 for this to be figured out.
The majority of the pyramid material was still quarried.
Not sure if I agree with your Open Source investment plan, but, if you really want to find mutual funds that invest in Open Source companies (how many public companies fit THAT criteria anyway?), you can look up the institutional shareholders (i.e. big guys) for the company.
For example Red Hat, the Yahoo Major Holders page (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=RHAT) tells us that the "FIDELITY GROWTH COMPANY FUND" owns about 10% of RHAT shares.
I can't name very many publicly trading Open Source related companies... I rather doubt that you'll find a fund that has is primarily OSS focused.
The Shkval torpedo is the one weapon that I remember hearing about a couple years ago that used bubbles to reduce friction. Crazy stuff... who would have imagined that bubbles would help build a better weapon?
There is no way MS would do this. My laptop has about a 95% chance of coming out of standby correctly and maybe 80% for hibernate mode. At least once a week I'll get tired of waiting for the something to wake up (I think the WiFi) and I do a hard reboot.
How many MILLION computers will have similar problems? Ugh. What MS could do is produce a drop dead simple WOL system to wake up all the PC's 15 minutes before the "normal" work hours...
For a a couple years I used a javascript encoder for public web pages. But somewhere between getting 20 SPAM a day and getting 250 SPAM a day, I had to setup better anti-SPAM systems. So there wasn't much benefit to trying to hide various email addresses with convoluted hacks like JS.
Another option is to include a "email contact form", but those have downsides too.
Yeah, it depends on the needs, but Terminal Server sounds like a good idea to me. I get tired of waiting for a 20MB file over VPN, I can't imagine waiting for a GB sized file...
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Sure... so, to use a VOIP phone, I need to lug around and plug in a laptop? If you're using the laptop anyway, then yeah, it's no big deal. But if you only want to use the web on a PDA or a Phone, well, there's not a whole lot of room in an airplane seat in the first place.
At one of my client's, we've used OOo for a few folks who only need access to basic spreadsheet software. I.e. to give them somewhere to type that will do math for them.
.xls as the default file format.
OOo fits the bill perfectly. It's compatible enough that the "normal" Excel functions and files will open and save fine. Version 2 of OOo has finally fixed up the worst parts of OOo v. 1 -- the multiuser hackery and the option to set
Will the entire office ever switch? Not for years and years. Some people actually do need to send and receive complex files out of the office for revisions.
In a file the size of a video file, they can make hundreds of subtle changes. With lots and lots of redundancy, even if the re-encoding removes the vast majority of the watermarks, there is a good chance (it doesn't have to be a 100% chance, really) that the file can be traced back to the original purchaser.
Music files at 5MB are a bit tougher, but it's probably doable.
Perhaps (and I'm totally hand waving here), the difference between this software update and other bug fixes and software updates is that to get to 802.11n there are probably additional IP licenses required by Apple. I would assume that there are some new patent licenses required to achive the faster speeds in "n"... so it's hard for Apple to argue that this is part of a regular maintenance update.
I wonder if the hesitancy on the part of them to release this for consumer purchase is due to pressure from AMD and the other component manufacturers. (AMD manufactures the CPU in the OLPC) They don't want to sell millions of low-end CPUs, screens, etc. in the Developed World... they are much better off with the current entry level of $500 or so for a laptop.
Personally, I would consider converting my home server to one of these OLPCs. A couple hundred MHz, a couple USB ports for storage, and low power usage sound about right.
I've been using it for years. I think I started when it was on version 4, at the time, a free 486 w/12 MB of RAM did file, print, email, and web serving. OK, it was too slow for serving dynamic webpages, but it did a great job otherwise.
For the last year or so, I've been running SME6 on a Pentium 166MMX w/128MB of RAM. It flies! Plenty fast enough to saturate a 100Mbit network.
I wouldn't recommend it to "regular" folks though -- among other things, backups are a pain.
Would it be feasible to design a reactor that wasn't a security risk? Maybe that pebble bed reactor concept?
A little off topic... but, if you need Linux to work with WiFi and other gear that only has Windows drivers, you can run in a virtualized environment like VMWare. No, it's not the right answer, but it's here now and it works. I can't be bothered to fiddle with WiFi drivers just to get into Linux for a few minutes here and there... it's nice to have it just work with the virtualized network drivers provided by VMWare - especially now that VMWare Server is free as in beer.
A lot of folks are going to say that this is overkill. A safe email client, patches, scanners, etc. should be "good enough". Well, if I was American (as opposed to Canadian), I'd say that this move by the DoD is a good one. Who cares if the risk is "small"? There is a higher risk with HTML email than plain text, and only marginal benefit. We are talking about an organization that needs to operate at very high levels of security.
The vast majority of people don't need to run an SMTP server at home. Just block troublesome IP addresses from sending to random IP addresses and let them use only the ISP's SMTP servers. The few folks who run a full mail server at home, like me, can find an alternate solution, like SMTP Smart Hosting - aka forwarding to the ISP's mail server.
This wouldn't do anything to reduce DDOS's though.
I think that 2007 is the year we'll see action from ISPs to proactively neuter zombies on their network. It's been several years of DDOS's now and the technology to compile which IPs have been hacked is available. All we need is some incentive to push ISPs to look after their own network. Maybe make a public list of the worst ISPs for sending SPAM?
Plop a PS2 down in front of a room of twenty-somethings, and more likely than not you'll get the guys playing on the console while the gals chit-chat or whatever.
A couple weeks ago, I was at a party where there was a Wii -- everyone was playing it. I was astounded. I don't think that there has ever been a gaming console that has appealed to the majority of females.
Now, IIRC, about 50% of the planet is female, so, who's going to win this round of consoles?
I've place my bet on the Wii.
I wish ISPs would cut off home users who send mail beyond some threshold, say 1000/hr. I've been fiddling with mail filters a lot the last couple months, and watching the logs scroll by, it's clearly dynamic IPs that send the bulk of the SPAM.
BTW. Greylisting still works pretty well. Now if only I could figure out how to compile milter-greylist with DNS block list support on my RHEL VPS...
I installed Google Desktop a while back. It's great for searching IMAP mail... anyway, another benefit is that it does a little pop-up, similar to newer Outlook installs. My only gripe is that it does it pre-Spam filter...
At work using Outlook, I edit inbound messages all the time to add a quick note to the top or whatever. E.g., drag a message to my "to do" folder and turn it into a note page for the task. I really miss this at home. So much so that I would switch (back) to Outlook at home, if it would learn to use IMAP better.
Yes, this allows one to make an inbound message look different than what you received, but that's the point. If you want to prove that you didn't write what is in someone else's mailbox, sign everything with PGP. Email is insecure, we might as well make it easier to use... besides, how hard is it to tag a message as modified? Isn't that what custom header tags are for?
Wouldn't it be more productive to let access to these sites go unrestricted, but log every request that goes to them? Maybe insert some sort of warning page (via the ISP's web proxy) to tell the end user that they're being watched?
After a certain threshold of accesses for a single account, pass the particulars to the authorities to take a closer look.
I'm sure that there are legal issues with this idea... but there are also legal issues with trying to censor access, as suggested in the article. At least my way would lead to arrests of the pervs.
There were literally billions of DVD's and hundreds of millions of DVD players manufactured in China before EVD was ever born. Granted, most of those were exported, still the established base was WAY too large. Besides, no one really pays the royalties on DVD players, even here in North America. I was corrected by someone here on /. before, the royalties for every part of a DVD player* is around $25 USD. There are often DVD players retailing here for $25 USD. Do you think proper royalties are being paid?
Now, HDDVD and BlueRay are barely established... there may be a chance there.
* Philips gets a big chunk for the disc design (I think), but there are also royalties for MP3, Dolby, DivX, etc.
Whoops... my mistake.
:)
How about misleading I complain about the title?
When the computer market was growing by leaps and bounds, the sheer number of new installs of the latest software would eventually push people to upgrade their own older office software. But now that the installed base of Office 97/2K/XP/2K3 is so huge, never mind all the other office suites that attempt to be compatible with the O2K formats, is this going to happen with whatever format Office 2007 uses?
I know that I'm not likely to be using Office 2007 for at least a few years, if ever, so until then, folks are just going to have to make sure they do a "save as" for me. I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone.
I don't really follow the Office 2007 file format news, is the new format the default format?
For once I actually RTFA. The article claims that the rocks used at the top of the pyramids react differently than rocks used at the bottom of the pyramids when poked with some new fangled methodology. I'm actually surprised that it's possible to make limestone that is so similar to naturally formed rock that it took until 2006 for this to be figured out.
The majority of the pyramid material was still quarried.
Not sure if I agree with your Open Source investment plan, but, if you really want to find mutual funds that invest in Open Source companies (how many public companies fit THAT criteria anyway?), you can look up the institutional shareholders (i.e. big guys) for the company. For example Red Hat, the Yahoo Major Holders page (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=RHAT) tells us that the "FIDELITY GROWTH COMPANY FUND" owns about 10% of RHAT shares. I can't name very many publicly trading Open Source related companies... I rather doubt that you'll find a fund that has is primarily OSS focused.
The Shkval torpedo is the one weapon that I remember hearing about a couple years ago that used bubbles to reduce friction. Crazy stuff... who would have imagined that bubbles would help build a better weapon?
o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval_torped
There is no way MS would do this. My laptop has about a 95% chance of coming out of standby correctly and maybe 80% for hibernate mode. At least once a week I'll get tired of waiting for the something to wake up (I think the WiFi) and I do a hard reboot. How many MILLION computers will have similar problems? Ugh. What MS could do is produce a drop dead simple WOL system to wake up all the PC's 15 minutes before the "normal" work hours...
For a a couple years I used a javascript encoder for public web pages. But somewhere between getting 20 SPAM a day and getting 250 SPAM a day, I had to setup better anti-SPAM systems. So there wasn't much benefit to trying to hide various email addresses with convoluted hacks like JS. Another option is to include a "email contact form", but those have downsides too.
Yeah, it depends on the needs, but Terminal Server sounds like a good idea to me. I get tired of waiting for a 20MB file over VPN, I can't imagine waiting for a GB sized file...