MAC addresses can be sniffed too and cloned. Just about every NIC has the ability to have it's MAC set in the driver nowadays. Heck, in routers, it's a semi-big selling feature to be able to "clone" a MAC address (used if your ISP filters access by MAC).
There's not that big of a difference between games and DVD's for rentals. NetFlix is NOT paying $5 for a DVD. In the old VHS rental days it was more like $50 (conservatively) for a movie with a commercial rental license. I'm not sure what the premium for rental games would be, but I'm sure it's pretty hefty as well.
In the end, I don't think it's significantly different enough from their current business to be worth worrying about.
Anyone know if memory use has gotten any more efficient? I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage. It's not a problem if when it's up and browsing, but if I flipped to another application for awhile, and Moz gets paged out to disk, the delay to switch back to Moz is a little annoying. At least on my relatively slow by today's standards, WinXP box.
On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?
I stand corrected! I did some cursory research on this short while ago - the Linksys box I was trying to configure for a client definitely did NOT have this feature, neither did the home line of NetGear (at least from what I could tell from the online manual). In fact, the fellow at the store claimed that no "cheap" router would provide this level of filtering. I didn't really have the time to look any further, so I left it at that. That said, I'll keep D-link in mind for future recommendations, though personally I'm happy behind a Linux box...
Nope. Without some form of page rank (where links count), search engine results would have to be based entirely on the content of the page - those were the really bad old days of hidden text, stuffed title tags, and the imfamouse "meta tags". I have a feeling some form of page rank will be with us for a long, long time.
Besides application specific rules which another poster has mentioned, software firewalls also better REMOTE address filtering - I've recently been researching this, and few, if any, of the "29 bucks" routers will provide anywhere near the level of control that a software firewall provides. For example, if I wanted to run a development web/database server and I want to restrict access to a handful of IP address (yeah, I know, VPN, blah blah blah) there are no other "cheap" options.
Why? The hardware router guys want to push customers requiring this stuff to their professional $200+ lineup.
True. I wasn't thinking of hot linking though. I'm thinking about preventing people from downloading your images (and article content) and uploading them on their own server. Kind of the next step beyond simple watermarking - I imagine Flash could show the 'proper' graphic when called as part of the 'proper' website, but show some sort of 'web-pirate' message when hosted on another server.
It bugs me that the vast majority of cordless phones for sale and purchased are unencrypted mini-radios.
Digital Spread Spectrum phones provide a reasonable amount of security, certainly orders of magnitude better than 'regular' cordless phones. DSS phones have been around for years, but for the sake of a few bucks and a lack of product knowledge, way too many people buy the $49.99 special at Walmart.
One of these day's I should buy or modify something to pickup analog signals so that I can scare/shock my friends/relatives/customers into buying better phones...
I've noticed a few sites use flash for "static" images - e.g. Anandtech. Does anyone know if this some form of rip-off protection?
I've been too lazy to test it out for myself, but I suspect that theres a bit of code in there to determine which URL is trying to load the Flash image. If so, it might be an increasingly popular practice.
I've noticed this happen a few times. Some small website puts up an interesting article. Some one submits it to Slashdot, who runs with it. Then "big" websites like Wired or News.com pick up on the story - timed so coincidentaly that I'm pretty sure that at least some of them are reading Slashdot. Finally, it hits traditional media - newspapers and somewhat less frequently, TV. So, who knows.
Good idea! I hate it when I go "back" a few pages then take a different "branch" only to loose the ability to easily go... back... to the original branch that I had viewed.
Here in BC we used to have photo radar vans. That program was recently disbanded for various reasons, including operating costs. One of the cost overruns was in that in the plan, OCR was intended to read the license plates from the photos of speeding cars. It never worked, and eventually it was replaced (or perhaps supervised) by a human operator. IIRC, the whole OCR fiasco cost millions in tax money to "develop" the software which just couldn't handle the task with enough accuracy to be completely trusted.
Granted, this was several years ago... software and hardware are probably better now. Plus for what you suggest, 100% accuracy isn't required.
Well, the more recent versions of the GoogleBar (only for IE) have voting buttons - cute smiley buttons at that! Whether or not it's a preliminary move to some sort of moderation-like system has been debated in many a Google forum.
Good idea... but how do you handle people behind proxys and NATs? IP address != user anymore. I suppose overall it might not be a problem, but I'd be hesitant to limit access on IP address alone.
Well... yeah. I think people have got to stop thinking of computers as "computers". And to me, Apple is a few years ahead of the game.
Just wait, in 8 years, probably less, iTunes will make Apple the biggest force in music. All the existing players, EMI, Universal, Sony, etc. are far to preoccupied with trying to hold on to an old business model to do anything reasonably competitive.
Actually, I don't have first hand experience with Debian on a server, but I do recognize that Debian's strengths and weaknesses are a better match for servers than desktops.
I've played around with Debian on my workstation. It's good, and stable. Apt-get is really nice. But hardware support and ease of installation just aren't up to par for a dope like me. It's Mandrake for my Linux half of a dual boot desktop.
That said, servers are fine with Debian. No X, no audio, no tv tuner, no dual-boot, no palm pilots, etc. All these little annoying things can probably be setup with enough patience, but I don't have it. Yet on a server, these things just don't matter. Plus, the benefits of a stable distribution and ease of (security) updates is much more valuable.
I agree! Blocking dangerous attachments is very important these days. Viruses move far too quickly for virus signatures to be of much use. Be proactive and block those executables - it's not a total solution (e.g. macro viruses in Office files) but it's a good start. Anyone who actually needs an.exe is probably capable of getting it an alternate way (FTP, web, courier).
FWIW, Symantec Mail Gateway Anti-virus (that's not the proper name, but you get the idea) can be configured in this way. Most mail scanners probably can...
Slashdot Mirror
MAC addresses can be sniffed too and cloned. Just about every NIC has the ability to have it's MAC set in the driver nowadays. Heck, in routers, it's a semi-big selling feature to be able to "clone" a MAC address (used if your ISP filters access by MAC).
Please forgive my ignorance, but does sniffing packets still have that much use (for internal traffic) when most networks are switched nowadays?
I guess you could use them to to watch the traffic in and out of a single machine, but how do you use this to diagnose network-wide issues?
There's not that big of a difference between games and DVD's for rentals. NetFlix is NOT paying $5 for a DVD. In the old VHS rental days it was more like $50 (conservatively) for a movie with a commercial rental license. I'm not sure what the premium for rental games would be, but I'm sure it's pretty hefty as well.
In the end, I don't think it's significantly different enough from their current business to be worth worrying about.
FWIW, some of the newer Toshiba handhelds have a USB host port - Pocket PC though, if you care.
Thanks to that Gopher link, I can now claim to have used Gopher.... Hmm... is that good resume fodder? =)
What's next? Archie?
Is it as similar as my perusal of the site seems? That would be pretty useful.
Is this part of the "QuickStart" (or whatever it's called) feature?
Anyone know if memory use has gotten any more efficient? I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage. It's not a problem if when it's up and browsing, but if I flipped to another application for awhile, and Moz gets paged out to disk, the delay to switch back to Moz is a little annoying. At least on my relatively slow by today's standards, WinXP box.
On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?
I stand corrected! I did some cursory research on this short while ago - the Linksys box I was trying to configure for a client definitely did NOT have this feature, neither did the home line of NetGear (at least from what I could tell from the online manual). In fact, the fellow at the store claimed that no "cheap" router would provide this level of filtering. I didn't really have the time to look any further, so I left it at that. That said, I'll keep D-link in mind for future recommendations, though personally I'm happy behind a Linux box...
Nope. Without some form of page rank (where links count), search engine results would have to be based entirely on the content of the page - those were the really bad old days of hidden text, stuffed title tags, and the imfamouse "meta tags". I have a feeling some form of page rank will be with us for a long, long time.
Besides application specific rules which another poster has mentioned, software firewalls also better REMOTE address filtering - I've recently been researching this, and few, if any, of the "29 bucks" routers will provide anywhere near the level of control that a software firewall provides. For example, if I wanted to run a development web/database server and I want to restrict access to a handful of IP address (yeah, I know, VPN, blah blah blah) there are no other "cheap" options.
Why? The hardware router guys want to push customers requiring this stuff to their professional $200+ lineup.
True. I wasn't thinking of hot linking though. I'm thinking about preventing people from downloading your images (and article content) and uploading them on their own server. Kind of the next step beyond simple watermarking - I imagine Flash could show the 'proper' graphic when called as part of the 'proper' website, but show some sort of 'web-pirate' message when hosted on another server.
Of course, bandwidth theft is a problem too.
It bugs me that the vast majority of cordless phones for sale and purchased are unencrypted mini-radios.
Digital Spread Spectrum phones provide a reasonable amount of security, certainly orders of magnitude better than 'regular' cordless phones. DSS phones have been around for years, but for the sake of a few bucks and a lack of product knowledge, way too many people buy the $49.99 special at Walmart.
One of these day's I should buy or modify something to pickup analog signals so that I can scare/shock my friends/relatives/customers into buying better phones...
I've noticed a few sites use flash for "static" images - e.g. Anandtech. Does anyone know if this some form of rip-off protection?
I've been too lazy to test it out for myself, but I suspect that theres a bit of code in there to determine which URL is trying to load the Flash image. If so, it might be an increasingly popular practice.
I've noticed this happen a few times. Some small website puts up an interesting article. Some one submits it to Slashdot, who runs with it. Then "big" websites like Wired or News.com pick up on the story - timed so coincidentaly that I'm pretty sure that at least some of them are reading Slashdot. Finally, it hits traditional media - newspapers and somewhat less frequently, TV. So, who knows.
Good idea! I hate it when I go "back" a few pages then take a different "branch" only to loose the ability to easily go ... back... to the original branch that I had viewed.
Here in BC we used to have photo radar vans. That program was recently disbanded for various reasons, including operating costs.
One of the cost overruns was in that in the plan, OCR was intended to read the license plates from the photos of speeding cars. It never worked, and eventually it was replaced (or perhaps supervised) by a human operator. IIRC, the whole OCR fiasco cost millions in tax money to "develop" the software which just couldn't handle the task with enough accuracy to be completely trusted.
Granted, this was several years ago... software and hardware are probably better now. Plus for what you suggest, 100% accuracy isn't required.
No one is going to be forced to use internet over power line. You can stick with dialup/dsl/cable ... if you really think it'll be more reliable.
Well, the more recent versions of the GoogleBar (only for IE) have voting buttons - cute smiley buttons at that! Whether or not it's a preliminary move to some sort of moderation-like system has been debated in many a Google forum.
Good idea... but how do you handle people behind proxys and NATs? IP address != user anymore. I suppose overall it might not be a problem, but I'd be hesitant to limit access on IP address alone.
Yeah, in this situation, BT would probably shine.
Well... yeah. I think people have got to stop thinking of computers as "computers". And to me, Apple is a few years ahead of the game.
Just wait, in 8 years, probably less, iTunes will make Apple the biggest force in music. All the existing players, EMI, Universal, Sony, etc. are far to preoccupied with trying to hold on to an old business model to do anything reasonably competitive.
Actually, I don't have first hand experience with Debian on a server, but I do recognize that Debian's strengths and weaknesses are a better match for servers than desktops.
I've played around with Debian on my workstation. It's good, and stable. Apt-get is really nice. But hardware support and ease of installation just aren't up to par for a dope like me. It's Mandrake for my Linux half of a dual boot desktop.
That said, servers are fine with Debian. No X, no audio, no tv tuner, no dual-boot, no palm pilots, etc. All these little annoying things can probably be setup with enough patience, but I don't have it. Yet on a server, these things just don't matter. Plus, the benefits of a stable distribution and ease of (security) updates is much more valuable.
I agree! Blocking dangerous attachments is very important these days. Viruses move far too quickly for virus signatures to be of much use. Be proactive and block those executables - it's not a total solution (e.g. macro viruses in Office files) but it's a good start. Anyone who actually needs an .exe is probably capable of getting it an alternate way (FTP, web, courier).
FWIW, Symantec Mail Gateway Anti-virus (that's not the proper name, but you get the idea) can be configured in this way. Most mail scanners probably can...
The only bootable Linux CD that figured out the Audio (and non-framebuffer Video) for my system!
Now, if only the name was a little easier to remember...
Well, I'm sort of on the fence on this too. I'll believe it when I see it.
I doubt we'll see any big improvements from branch prediction, really, how much better than 80-90% can you get?
Perhaps they'll play around with cache sizes, or hyper threading will really mature.