Maybe a "PRO" OpenSSH version is called for. I don't know what features it could offer -- maybe a nice GUI or something. This way, folks in IT groups with a few bucks left in the budget can justify buying a few licenses thereby helping the OpenBSD group.
I avoid using debit cards at retail stores if at all possible. The only exceptions are when for some reason I can't use my CC AND the store is a very large reputable firm. Enter my PIN into some mom and pop shop, not likely.
On another note, yes, software does store CC numbers all the time. This is EXACTLY the same security that we've had for years with CC's. Before computers, we had hard copy "impressions" -- those had your full CC number too. CC's are inherently insecure, but that's ok. Let the CC company take on that risk, that's their business.
It's probably much more useful to use the rover for a few minutes a day than to let it sit idle for several months. After a long break, who knows what will break, stick, or die. The rover is well past it's best before date already, anything to reduce the stress on the machine is probably a good idea.
It's not too surprising. For Vista to keep a clean system clean is a much easier task than cleaning up messed up systems of spyware. There are only a handful of places that spyware can insert itself -- the various startup folders, registry keys, services, drivers etc. Vista doesn't have to recognize the individual spyware, it just has to flag suspicious changes that aren't digitally signed by known companies and then provide a good interface for the end user to disable (or renable) them. Somewhat like the "TeaTimer" tool that SpyBot provides (which is great, BTW).
Just check while accounting for the diff's. I haven't RTFA, but I would imagine that the actual amount of changed code in the ROM is relatively small. I doubt that one would need twice the capacity to be able to report back correct false data. Now, uncompressible noise would be a problem...
I still can't understand why PEAR doesn't get the same user contributable documentation system that PHP uses! Time and time again I've tried to use a new PEAR module only to be completely befuddled with the lack of examples and documentation. IMHO, PEAR usage would grow substantially if the docs were better. Don't get me wrong, the folks who have put the code up are great, and they do try; however, it's an uphill battle. It's just so much easier if end-users could chip in with the docs. And yes, I have mentioned this on a forum or a bug tracker or something --- 3 years ago.
Even if the boards are kept quite cheap, you have the problem of finding (cheap) appropriately sized cases. There just isn't the volume for these things, so the cost of a case is about 2x the cost of a generic mini-atx PC case. Of course you could build your own case... however, that requires a whole mess of tools and costs and time too.
Yes, we keep it easy for Federal and Provincial elections. We only pick an MP or MLA so there's only one X to mark on the ballot.
However, our civic elections are huge - at least in the big cities. In Vancouver, we've got the mayor, 10 city councillors, parks and school boards, and about half a dozen "referendum" (more like spending approvals than true referendums). Maybe 30 votes in all. We've been using paper ballots with electronic scanners for years. Paper trail, fast counts, etc. Really, voting technology isn't rocket science....
Too bad, for a moment I thought that Asimov was going to have another prediction come true. I've always remembered from one of his short stories or books that humanoid robots were the natural form for mechanical assistants. The idea was that they would be "interface compatible" with all the gear on farms that already exist... cars, tractors, trucks, tools, etc. I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer.
In Canada we've had a somewhat similar system for quite a few years. Above 10K, a deposit has to be reported to the CCRA (roughly equivalent to the IRS, at least with respect to taxes). This was originally intended to hamper the drug trade. Whether or not there is a more sophisticated system based on past transactions for trying to catch "terrorism", I don't know.
Everyone reading/. probably realizes that there is nothing special in Intel processors that would enable 10 way calling. Really, an quad Opteron should be able to handle the task in a VMWare session if push came to shove. =)
My point, is that it always should have been a co-marketing pitch. There's nothing wrong with that. If you go to McDonalds, you get a Coke with your Happy Meal and a Disney licensed toy. McD's doesn't tell you that Coke is Good and Pepsi is Bad.
However, in the Skype situation, it started to be marketed with terms like "only Intel has the performance to do x". At that time, it became a ticking time bomb for Skype and Intel for a PR disaster -- although, not as bad as the Sony Rootkit one.
IIRC, a lot of that cash reserve was already earmarked for a settlement -- it would have made sense to put aside about a half a billion since thay had a tentative deal for 450M at this time last year. So, the corporate books won't be hit too bad.
As much as I despise NTP's "business", it was better for RIM to do the deal. Customer uncertainty and all that...
I've just discovered OpenLaszlo earlier this week. It's a (now) open sourced web RAD system. It compiles into Flash files so almost anyone can run the apps, and it feels a lot less hacky than Javascript ever did... blasted browser wars, "standards", and all. Pretty interesting technology -- especially if you can't wrap your mind around building an application in the Flash "everything is a movie" model. The IDE is an Eclipse plugin.
I think the original point to my post was that AJAX is nice but I don't think that the standards are there yet.
I'm tired about all the speculation about how much of a loss Sony will take on each initial device. Of course there will be a loss, and the amount of the loss depends MORE on how you decide to distribute the cost of engineering (both at the component level, and at the system level) over the lifespan of the PS3.
How much will it cost to manufacture, excluding the up front investments? Probably reasonably close to the XBox360. Just look at the pieces. 200M transistor CPU and GPU's cost pretty much the same no matter the design. The cases are reasonably comparable. Power supplies will be similar -- unless the PS3 magically is able to use a whole lot less power than the Xbox, but I doubt it. The one difference major difference would be the DVD drive vs whatever the PS3 will have, but this added expense is offset by helping Sony launch their next-gen DVD format.
You absolutely pay a premium for a brand name like Sony or Toshiba. And often the components and factories are one and the same as the "off brands". However, this does not mean the the devices are the same quality! Sony can and often will sit their own QA staff to pick and choose the devices that are the best looking off of the factory line. They pay a few bucks more per unit, but they'll get the best of the product. This doesn't guarantee quality (nor make the off-brands any lesser quality) per se, but Sony is playing the odds.
Remember, Sony has to support this stuff for 5 years, plus they have an brand and image to maintain. The off-brands don't have to worry, if things go wrong, they can disappear into the void.
In short, on a $100 DVD player, it doesn't really matter, what have you got to loose? On a $2000 TV, I'm going with the big brands.
I don't understand, aren't these dedicated boxes? Just turn off unnecessary services, run the service packs, and use a firewall to restrict access by IP address (even the XP SP2 / W2K3 built in firewall can do this). Windows isn't that vulnerable with basic precautions. Especially dedicated and presumably mostly locked down machines.
Guess what? If you want remote access to the camera, every OS or hardware IP camera will require open ports! It's just a matter of working within that requirement - e.g. IP filters or VPN. For most folks, a $50 router with decent NAT + port forwarding + inbound IP address rules will be sufficient. For $100 you can probably get a VPN server (well, maybe 200?).
I would have held off on buying a DVD burner for a while longer; but it became ridiculous.
A DVDR became cheaper than CDR (after levee) a couple years ago -- and it's only gotten worse since. And I'm not talking about price per bit.
They don't even sell 5 or 10 packs of CDs in the smaller stores anymore. A while ago, I had to buy some CDRs for a client to burn those stupid Gateway recovery CD's (which is a whole other rant). I had to visit a few nearby stores before I finally gave up and bought a spindle of 50 CDs.
I can't wait for them to try and put a levee on DVD's... lets see, 6 times the capacity... say $1 per blank?
It's Finland vs. Sweden. I can't imagine too many people will watch this one. Let me put it this way, I'd bet that the Victoria's Secret stream will have had more viewers.
I've been playing around with this service lately: http://www.pplive.com/. It works relatively well -- I'm sure that it would work a lot better for me if there were more North American users. Apparently a lot of soccer ("football") fans use it. There are a couple dozen p2p streams of Chinese TV and radio. If only there were a few more English stations. =)
The client looked a little sketchy at first, so I have been running it in a VMWare client. But that was me being rather paranoid.
Streams take a while to buffer. Plus, it's tougher than regular P2P because the data expires after a minute or two (it's a live stream, remember). So it really depends on your upstream bandwidth. If you can't upload at least enough for 1 other person, you're a drain on the network! And, like BT, you're relying on charity if you're not pulling your own weight. My max upstream is around 300kbps - barely enough to do a 1:1 ul/dl raio. A lot of the time I'm depending on charity of others who have more upstream, and when bandwidth is scarce, I just can't get a stable stream.
Oh, if you want to give it a try, CCTV4 is the state sponsored English language station.
Really, how greedy do you have to be? NTP pretty much had a deal with RIM for $450M one year ago. Sheesh, for a "company" with no staff or product or facilities? Forget haggling over the details about future revenue streams or whatever happened to break down the previous deal. I would have been happy to sell the whole "company" for that much money. Be rich, buy an island, and sit around on a beach trying to think about what other patents I should get or buy to screw over the next industry.
There are still 4 patents that are under review. So, tomorrow is still the big day. Even if NTP is granted an injunction, don't expect to see Blackberries go dark. There will have to be some sort of transition period, say 30 days. It'll be interesting to watch RIM race to migrate all of their US customers to the patent-safe workaround (assuming that the workaround does in fact exist).
If I recall correctly, pebbles excel where you need easy to maintain, relatively small power plants. Say, a small town in Alaska. They have downsides, the safety "shell" of the pebbles ends up being radioactive and it becomes waste that is impractical to recylce. Spent fuel in regular reactors are relatively pure, so they can be reprocessed. Also, they don't scale as well. There are some very good articles on the web about this -- probably some on the Wikipedia.
Really, how much gear does one need running at home? More importantly, how much power and space are you willing to use to do it? I've got an ancient P166MMX running downstairs for file/print/mail/and even web hosting for my personal website (not the one in the sig). About a year ago, it was a sad old P90 that finally had a seizure of some sort. The only thing I would consider changing right now is a bit more hard drive space... and maybe RAID. (Yes, I do regular backups).
Oh, that excludes workstations, routers, and hubs of course. Two desktops and a laptop - none of them is particularly high-end either.
Many corporate geared computers have little sensors to report on when the cases have been opened. So, really, to be really paranoid, you'd have to find the sensor on your particular PC, then figure out how to get at the hard drive without triggering it.
Email/http/ftp/ssh/vpn are also options, but that's rather easy to monitor for abnormally large amounts of data.
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Maybe a "PRO" OpenSSH version is called for. I don't know what features it could offer -- maybe a nice GUI or something. This way, folks in IT groups with a few bucks left in the budget can justify buying a few licenses thereby helping the OpenBSD group.
I avoid using debit cards at retail stores if at all possible. The only exceptions are when for some reason I can't use my CC AND the store is a very large reputable firm. Enter my PIN into some mom and pop shop, not likely.
On another note, yes, software does store CC numbers all the time. This is EXACTLY the same security that we've had for years with CC's. Before computers, we had hard copy "impressions" -- those had your full CC number too. CC's are inherently insecure, but that's ok. Let the CC company take on that risk, that's their business.
It's probably much more useful to use the rover for a few minutes a day than to let it sit idle for several months. After a long break, who knows what will break, stick, or die. The rover is well past it's best before date already, anything to reduce the stress on the machine is probably a good idea.
It's not too surprising. For Vista to keep a clean system clean is a much easier task than cleaning up messed up systems of spyware. There are only a handful of places that spyware can insert itself -- the various startup folders, registry keys, services, drivers etc. Vista doesn't have to recognize the individual spyware, it just has to flag suspicious changes that aren't digitally signed by known companies and then provide a good interface for the end user to disable (or renable) them. Somewhat like the "TeaTimer" tool that SpyBot provides (which is great, BTW).
Just check while accounting for the diff's. I haven't RTFA, but I would imagine that the actual amount of changed code in the ROM is relatively small. I doubt that one would need twice the capacity to be able to report back correct false data. Now, uncompressible noise would be a problem...
I still can't understand why PEAR doesn't get the same user contributable documentation system that PHP uses! Time and time again I've tried to use a new PEAR module only to be completely befuddled with the lack of examples and documentation. IMHO, PEAR usage would grow substantially if the docs were better. Don't get me wrong, the folks who have put the code up are great, and they do try; however, it's an uphill battle. It's just so much easier if end-users could chip in with the docs. And yes, I have mentioned this on a forum or a bug tracker or something --- 3 years ago.
Even if the boards are kept quite cheap, you have the problem of finding (cheap) appropriately sized cases. There just isn't the volume for these things, so the cost of a case is about 2x the cost of a generic mini-atx PC case. Of course you could build your own case... however, that requires a whole mess of tools and costs and time too.
Yes, we keep it easy for Federal and Provincial elections. We only pick an MP or MLA so there's only one X to mark on the ballot.
However, our civic elections are huge - at least in the big cities. In Vancouver, we've got the mayor, 10 city councillors, parks and school boards, and about half a dozen "referendum" (more like spending approvals than true referendums). Maybe 30 votes in all. We've been using paper ballots with electronic scanners for years. Paper trail, fast counts, etc. Really, voting technology isn't rocket science....
Too bad, for a moment I thought that Asimov was going to have another prediction come true. I've always remembered from one of his short stories or books that humanoid robots were the natural form for mechanical assistants. The idea was that they would be "interface compatible" with all the gear on farms that already exist... cars, tractors, trucks, tools, etc. I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer.
In Canada we've had a somewhat similar system for quite a few years. Above 10K, a deposit has to be reported to the CCRA (roughly equivalent to the IRS, at least with respect to taxes). This was originally intended to hamper the drug trade. Whether or not there is a more sophisticated system based on past transactions for trying to catch "terrorism", I don't know.
Everyone reading /. probably realizes that there is nothing special in Intel processors that would enable 10 way calling. Really, an quad Opteron should be able to handle the task in a VMWare session if push came to shove. =)
My point, is that it always should have been a co-marketing pitch. There's nothing wrong with that. If you go to McDonalds, you get a Coke with your Happy Meal and a Disney licensed toy. McD's doesn't tell you that Coke is Good and Pepsi is Bad.
However, in the Skype situation, it started to be marketed with terms like "only Intel has the performance to do x". At that time, it became a ticking time bomb for Skype and Intel for a PR disaster -- although, not as bad as the Sony Rootkit one.
Fair enough. For the record, I didn't intend to imply that JS itself was hackish, it's the browser compatibility and consistency that drives me nuts.
IIRC, a lot of that cash reserve was already earmarked for a settlement -- it would have made sense to put aside about a half a billion since thay had a tentative deal for 450M at this time last year. So, the corporate books won't be hit too bad.
As much as I despise NTP's "business", it was better for RIM to do the deal. Customer uncertainty and all that...
I've just discovered OpenLaszlo earlier this week. It's a (now) open sourced web RAD system. It compiles into Flash files so almost anyone can run the apps, and it feels a lot less hacky than Javascript ever did... blasted browser wars, "standards", and all. Pretty interesting technology -- especially if you can't wrap your mind around building an application in the Flash "everything is a movie" model. The IDE is an Eclipse plugin.
I think the original point to my post was that AJAX is nice but I don't think that the standards are there yet.
I'm tired about all the speculation about how much of a loss Sony will take on each initial device. Of course there will be a loss, and the amount of the loss depends MORE on how you decide to distribute the cost of engineering (both at the component level, and at the system level) over the lifespan of the PS3.
How much will it cost to manufacture, excluding the up front investments? Probably reasonably close to the XBox360. Just look at the pieces. 200M transistor CPU and GPU's cost pretty much the same no matter the design. The cases are reasonably comparable. Power supplies will be similar -- unless the PS3 magically is able to use a whole lot less power than the Xbox, but I doubt it. The one difference major difference would be the DVD drive vs whatever the PS3 will have, but this added expense is offset by helping Sony launch their next-gen DVD format.
You absolutely pay a premium for a brand name like Sony or Toshiba. And often the components and factories are one and the same as the "off brands". However, this does not mean the the devices are the same quality! Sony can and often will sit their own QA staff to pick and choose the devices that are the best looking off of the factory line. They pay a few bucks more per unit, but they'll get the best of the product. This doesn't guarantee quality (nor make the off-brands any lesser quality) per se, but Sony is playing the odds.
Remember, Sony has to support this stuff for 5 years, plus they have an brand and image to maintain. The off-brands don't have to worry, if things go wrong, they can disappear into the void.
In short, on a $100 DVD player, it doesn't really matter, what have you got to loose? On a $2000 TV, I'm going with the big brands.
I don't understand, aren't these dedicated boxes? Just turn off unnecessary services, run the service packs, and use a firewall to restrict access by IP address (even the XP SP2 / W2K3 built in firewall can do this). Windows isn't that vulnerable with basic precautions. Especially dedicated and presumably mostly locked down machines.
Guess what? If you want remote access to the camera, every OS or hardware IP camera will require open ports! It's just a matter of working within that requirement - e.g. IP filters or VPN. For most folks, a $50 router with decent NAT + port forwarding + inbound IP address rules will be sufficient. For $100 you can probably get a VPN server (well, maybe 200?).
I would have held off on buying a DVD burner for a while longer; but it became ridiculous.
A DVDR became cheaper than CDR (after levee) a couple years ago -- and it's only gotten worse since. And I'm not talking about price per bit.
They don't even sell 5 or 10 packs of CDs in the smaller stores anymore. A while ago, I had to buy some CDRs for a client to burn those stupid Gateway recovery CD's (which is a whole other rant). I had to visit a few nearby stores before I finally gave up and bought a spindle of 50 CDs.
I can't wait for them to try and put a levee on DVD's... lets see, 6 times the capacity... say $1 per blank?
It's Finland vs. Sweden. I can't imagine too many people will watch this one. Let me put it this way, I'd bet that the Victoria's Secret stream will have had more viewers.
If only it was Canada vs. USA...
I've been playing around with this service lately: http://www.pplive.com/. It works relatively well -- I'm sure that it would work a lot better for me if there were more North American users. Apparently a lot of soccer ("football") fans use it. There are a couple dozen p2p streams of Chinese TV and radio. If only there were a few more English stations. =)
The client looked a little sketchy at first, so I have been running it in a VMWare client. But that was me being rather paranoid.
Streams take a while to buffer. Plus, it's tougher than regular P2P because the data expires after a minute or two (it's a live stream, remember). So it really depends on your upstream bandwidth. If you can't upload at least enough for 1 other person, you're a drain on the network! And, like BT, you're relying on charity if you're not pulling your own weight. My max upstream is around 300kbps - barely enough to do a 1:1 ul/dl raio. A lot of the time I'm depending on charity of others who have more upstream, and when bandwidth is scarce, I just can't get a stable stream.
Oh, if you want to give it a try, CCTV4 is the state sponsored English language station.
Really, how greedy do you have to be? NTP pretty much had a deal with RIM for $450M one year ago. Sheesh, for a "company" with no staff or product or facilities? Forget haggling over the details about future revenue streams or whatever happened to break down the previous deal. I would have been happy to sell the whole "company" for that much money. Be rich, buy an island, and sit around on a beach trying to think about what other patents I should get or buy to screw over the next industry.
There are still 4 patents that are under review. So, tomorrow is still the big day. Even if NTP is granted an injunction, don't expect to see Blackberries go dark. There will have to be some sort of transition period, say 30 days. It'll be interesting to watch RIM race to migrate all of their US customers to the patent-safe workaround (assuming that the workaround does in fact exist).
If I recall correctly, pebbles excel where you need easy to maintain, relatively small power plants. Say, a small town in Alaska. They have downsides, the safety "shell" of the pebbles ends up being radioactive and it becomes waste that is impractical to recylce. Spent fuel in regular reactors are relatively pure, so they can be reprocessed. Also, they don't scale as well. There are some very good articles on the web about this -- probably some on the Wikipedia.
Really, how much gear does one need running at home? More importantly, how much power and space are you willing to use to do it? I've got an ancient P166MMX running downstairs for file/print/mail/and even web hosting for my personal website (not the one in the sig). About a year ago, it was a sad old P90 that finally had a seizure of some sort. The only thing I would consider changing right now is a bit more hard drive space... and maybe RAID. (Yes, I do regular backups).
Oh, that excludes workstations, routers, and hubs of course. Two desktops and a laptop - none of them is particularly high-end either.
Many corporate geared computers have little sensors to report on when the cases have been opened. So, really, to be really paranoid, you'd have to find the sensor on your particular PC, then figure out how to get at the hard drive without triggering it.
Email/http/ftp/ssh/vpn are also options, but that's rather easy to monitor for abnormally large amounts of data.