I am sick and tired of the analogy that sniffing network traffic is akin to breaking and entering someone's house.
Let me propose a more accurate analogy. Suppose you keep a lot of personal information about you and your clients on your desk near the window. You don't bother installing blinds or curtains or securing the information in any way. I walk past the street and look through the window. Who's to blame? You for neglecting to secure peoples personal information from the eyes of anyone who walks by your window, or me for daring to look through it?
Don't be naive. It's not a matter of knowing or not knowing. You can't keep a secret on such a scale. If one kid finds out what their compulsory braclet is really for, every kid in the school will know within a day or two.
Well, to be totally honest, one of my favorites is full support for the Google toolbar. The google toolbar is not a feature of Internet Explorer. They could have just as easilly made a better toolbar for almost any browser.
Of course. So users can still click that to download, so it's not the end of the world. Microsoft is just letting page authors know that the automatic download will no longer work, so they might aswell have a standard link and code the thing properly.
It's a move I agree with. No page should ever try to get me to download a file unless I specifically ask for it.
They should really strive to maintain IE's cutting-edge status by incorporating innovative features such as: tabbed browsing popup blocking mouse gestures
RTFA on the popup blockers;)
I agree with the other two. A download manager with resumable downloads would be nice, but it's coming with Longhorn (it's in the alpha builds and hopefully is here to stay).
Yeah, but spammers will adapt. When they see that 95% of their visitors run IE and block popups, whereas the other 5% run a different browser and may be running popup blockers, they will just force the new ultra-intrusive advertising on everyone.
With popups gone, people will resort to javascript alert()s.
"Do you want to download our new penis enlargment software?" (yes/no)
*clicks no*
"Are you sure you dont? It will make your penis 5 times longer straight away... and if you add it to startup, your penis will grow 5 inches on every reboot. Visit our homepage." (yes/no)
*clicks no*
"Ok, so may we interest you in some generic viagra instead?"
What's so special about file download counters that will cause them to break in the new version of IE? I thought they were server-side anyway?
Since it's more difficult to configure a web server to count downloads of all file types, people often use a PHP script which redirects to the target file.
For example http://server.com/getfile.php?file=test.exe
The PHP script updates the server-side counter and then redirects the user to the real file they wanted.
Ever seen those "Your download should start in 5 seconds..." messages?
The new behaviour will make it impossible to automatically pop up a file download dialog, rendering this type of download counter/anti-leech script usless.
Probably to be replaced with even more intrusive advertising, which as already started to appear (I'll redirect you to the page you want if you sit through a 30 second display of a 2MB animated gif).
I would never purchase any product if I see it's company makes use of intrusive advertising like popups, splash-screen ads, or junk email. If only more people were the same...
How can I tell if Internet Explorer has blocked my pop-up window? Functions that return a window object will return null if the window is blocked. Always check the return value of window.open() before using it to avoid script errors when pop-ups are blocked. By allowing a script to determine if the popup was blocked, it opens the floodgates for even more annoying and intrusive advertising.
Now whenever the page detects it's popup was blocked, it will force the user to view a full-screen advertising page for a pre-determined time, or other annoyances.
When will advertisers get the message. If people block pop-up windows, they do so for a reason - they are not interested in you're stupid special offers. They should spare themselves the bandwidth and everyone else the annoyance.
However my scenario was best-case. For a good visibility you would probably need 3mA @ 3V, possibly more in bright daylight.
Additionally the display is colour. While 2-3mA may be acceptable for red leds, green LEDs tend to require more current to acheive the same brightness, and blue LEDs might require 10-15mA+.
Battery life is still a large consideration, and undoubtably an annoyance. After the coolness factor wears off, your shirt will become another device you need to remember charging.
Making the entire person appear transparent is difficult in practice, as it only works well when people look at you from just the right angle and distance.
However, for 50% of the population I'd be more than content if only the shirt itsself could be made to appear transparent, which would be easier to implement, and significantly more impressive visually (note: this depends on the wearer).
Looks kewl in the R&D stage, but a 16x16 pixel LED display has obvious technical problems.
Lets take the image in the photograph. It has about 3/4 of the 256 pixels illuminated. Thats 192 LEDs. Assuming the image is remain visible outside, in sunlight, rather than in a dark room, you would need bright LEDs, each consuming an average current of at least 2mA.
So that's 384mA current consumption. To get through a 12 hour day (hardly impressibe battery life), you would need a battery with a 12*0.384 = 4.6Ah capacity. Your average huge+chunky laptop battery won't provide more than 2.5AH.
The shirt is a great idea, but if I need to carry around a backpack with a car battery, or plug myself in to recharge every hour or two, I say no-thanks.
Ummm, why the hell would you expect the clothes to have camaras, yet alone support the execution of custom software?
Is this a knee-jerk reaction to find an excuse to put on your tin-foil hat? It's nothing more than a semi-intelligent display which will let you upload an animated GIF. And even if they did have cameras (I still have no clue where that came from), they will be less flexible than your average mobiile-phone or digital camera. AFAIK my digital camera is NOT spying on me and my family because I didn't run adaware on it (!)
Let me get this straight. The RAM of a computer does nothing much except storing the context, data for running programs, etc. Most modern PCs have at least 512MB of it, and this is bound to increase in the future.
So every logon/logoff is a 0.5GB data transfer? And what about loading all the programs you are using. Many applications are several hundred MBs at least, and thinking that every program users like to use will be locally pre-installed is naive.
Then once you've (eventually) logged in and are presented with your session, you can forget about things like watching a video, opening a large presentation with photos, or pretty much anything other than basic text editing without a large delay. I'll prefer RDP/citrix any day. VNC/RemoteX isn't good enough as the protocol doesn't cope well with lag on slow connections, but it'll still be better than this proposed system.
Oh, and most importantly, what about applciations. A simple devolopment IDE I use is 100MB. Even if I wish to open a 10kb file, there is going to be a heck of a lot of lag starting programs.
Or do you imagine every imaginable application will be preinstalled locally?
The problem is that while many people are content with accessing a few office documents, and the highest bandwidth they'll ever need is 192kbps+ for streaming an MP3, there are a lot of applications which will simply be impossible with this system, unless bandwidth becomes dirt-cheap;
Watching/editing/capturing video? I have a 200GB HD devoted to video files.
Opening large data files? Many people manipulate high resolution images.
What if you wanted to burn a CD? Is it THAT uncommon to want to copy 600+MB in a few minutes.
While not obvious at first, there will be a lot of frustrations with such a system. It will be a hell of a lot worse than using a terminal server (where with a decent connection and prototol the lag is ususally unnoticable unless you try to manipulate images or video).
Making the hard drive solid-state will not make all problems magically dissapear.
The hard drive probably isn't even a major drain on the batteries.
There are already solid-state portable computers with low power consumption and solid-state components at the expense of proccessing power. They are called PDAs. Ever seen a WinCE handheld? Or a psion? Seems just like what you've described.
Your average GPS unit has an accuracy of 15m. I think the better ones have an accuracy of 5m, unless you use a DGPS setup with two *widely seperated* GPS units. The precision is sufficient for navigation, but nowhere near good enough for determining the tilt/seperation/orientation of several GPS units which are right next to each other. Accelerometers would be a better way of determining if the blimp is level.
As for redundancy, I'd understand the need for a spare GPS unit, but 6 seems excessive. I am inclined to believe there is a typo in the specs, and that they meant 6-gps controlled motors, rather than 6 GPS's which control the motors.
" Held in position by 6 onboard GPS units connected to the ship's engines"
WTF? 6 onboard GPS receivers? What's wrong with one good one. Surely a =10m precision is enough, and if it isn't they could try a differential GPS setup with two receivers, but six?!
Re:Small-scale wifi from balloons.
on
Broadband Blimps
·
· Score: 1
If you want to hook up a 300ft cat5 cable to an advertising baloon, I imagine it will not be able to obtain a 300ft altitude. Cat5 is heavier than your average bit of string.
Saying that, all you really need to supply the AP with is power. Communication can be all wireless.
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With the security cameras, yes. With IM conversations and emails all they ran was a network sniffer.
I am sick and tired of the analogy that sniffing network traffic is akin to breaking and entering someone's house.
Let me propose a more accurate analogy. Suppose you keep a lot of personal information about you and your clients on your desk near the window. You don't bother installing blinds or curtains or securing the information in any way. I walk past the street and look through the window. Who's to blame? You for neglecting to secure peoples personal information from the eyes of anyone who walks by your window, or me for daring to look through it?
Don't be naive. It's not a matter of knowing or not knowing. You can't keep a secret on such a scale. If one kid finds out what their compulsory braclet is really for, every kid in the school will know within a day or two.
a) Find me an altimeter with that kind of sensitivity.
b) How is altitude useful if you don't know how high the ground is at that particular point?
Well, to be totally honest, one of my favorites is full support for the Google toolbar.
The google toolbar is not a feature of Internet Explorer. They could have just as easilly made a better toolbar for almost any browser.
Of course. So users can still click that to download, so it's not the end of the world. Microsoft is just letting page authors know that the automatic download will no longer work, so they might aswell have a standard link and code the thing properly.
It's a move I agree with. No page should ever try to get me to download a file unless I specifically ask for it.
They should really strive to maintain IE's cutting-edge status by incorporating innovative features such as:
;)
tabbed browsing
popup blocking
mouse gestures
RTFA on the popup blockers
I agree with the other two. A download manager with resumable downloads would be nice, but it's coming with Longhorn (it's in the alpha builds and hopefully is here to stay).
Yeah, but spammers will adapt. When they see that 95% of their visitors run IE and block popups, whereas the other 5% run a different browser and may be running popup blockers, they will just force the new ultra-intrusive advertising on everyone.
With popups gone, people will resort to javascript alert()s.
"Do you want to download our new penis enlargment software?" (yes/no)
*clicks no*
"Are you sure you dont? It will make your penis 5 times longer straight away... and if you add it to startup, your penis will grow 5 inches on every reboot. Visit our homepage." (yes/no)
*clicks no*
"Ok, so may we interest you in some generic viagra instead?"
ARGHHHH!
What's so special about file download counters that will cause them to break in the new version of IE? I thought they were server-side anyway?
Since it's more difficult to configure a web server to count downloads of all file types, people often use a PHP script which redirects to the target file.
For example http://server.com/getfile.php?file=test.exe
The PHP script updates the server-side counter and then redirects the user to the real file they wanted.
Ever seen those "Your download should start in 5 seconds..." messages?
The new behaviour will make it impossible to automatically pop up a file download dialog, rendering this type of download counter/anti-leech script usless.
Probably to be replaced with even more intrusive advertising, which as already started to appear (I'll redirect you to the page you want if you sit through a 30 second display of a 2MB animated gif).
I would never purchase any product if I see it's company makes use of intrusive advertising like popups, splash-screen ads, or junk email. If only more people were the same...
How can I tell if Internet Explorer has blocked my pop-up window?
Functions that return a window object will return null if the window is blocked. Always check the return value of window.open() before using it to avoid script errors when pop-ups are blocked.
By allowing a script to determine if the popup was blocked, it opens the floodgates for even more annoying and intrusive advertising.
Now whenever the page detects it's popup was blocked, it will force the user to view a full-screen advertising page for a pre-determined time, or other annoyances.
When will advertisers get the message. If people block pop-up windows, they do so for a reason - they are not interested in you're stupid special offers. They should spare themselves the bandwidth and everyone else the annoyance.
Yeah, whatever. And transporting materials for heavy industry into a high orbit is going to cut costs.
You're idea sounds a hell of a lot better and cheaper than decent acoustic insulation.
Pardon the sarcasm above, but I'm just not buying it. Your idea seems too far-fetched even for sci-fi.
You are right, I fucked up the comparison.
However my scenario was best-case. For a good visibility you would probably need 3mA @ 3V, possibly more in bright daylight.
Additionally the display is colour. While 2-3mA may be acceptable for red leds, green LEDs tend to require more current to acheive the same brightness, and blue LEDs might require 10-15mA+.
Battery life is still a large consideration, and undoubtably an annoyance. After the coolness factor wears off, your shirt will become another device you need to remember charging.
Making the entire person appear transparent is difficult in practice, as it only works well when people look at you from just the right angle and distance.
However, for 50% of the population I'd be more than content if only the shirt itsself could be made to appear transparent, which would be easier to implement, and significantly more impressive visually (note: this depends on the wearer).
Looks kewl in the R&D stage, but a 16x16 pixel LED display has obvious technical problems.
Lets take the image in the photograph. It has about 3/4 of the 256 pixels illuminated. Thats 192 LEDs. Assuming the image is remain visible outside, in sunlight, rather than in a dark room, you would need bright LEDs, each consuming an average current of at least 2mA.
So that's 384mA current consumption. To get through a 12 hour day (hardly impressibe battery life), you would need a battery with a 12*0.384 = 4.6Ah capacity. Your average huge+chunky laptop battery won't provide more than 2.5AH.
The shirt is a great idea, but if I need to carry around a backpack with a car battery, or plug myself in to recharge every hour or two, I say no-thanks.
Ummm, why the hell would you expect the clothes to have camaras, yet alone support the execution of custom software?
Is this a knee-jerk reaction to find an excuse to put on your tin-foil hat? It's nothing more than a semi-intelligent display which will let you upload an animated GIF. And even if they did have cameras (I still have no clue where that came from), they will be less flexible than your average mobiile-phone or digital camera. AFAIK my digital camera is NOT spying on me and my family because I didn't run adaware on it (!)
Let me get this straight. The RAM of a computer does nothing much except storing the context, data for running programs, etc. Most modern PCs have at least 512MB of it, and this is bound to increase in the future.
So every logon/logoff is a 0.5GB data transfer? And what about loading all the programs you are using. Many applications are several hundred MBs at least, and thinking that every program users like to use will be locally pre-installed is naive.
Then once you've (eventually) logged in and are presented with your session, you can forget about things like watching a video, opening a large presentation with photos, or pretty much anything other than basic text editing without a large delay. I'll prefer RDP/citrix any day. VNC/RemoteX isn't good enough as the protocol doesn't cope well with lag on slow connections, but it'll still be better than this proposed system.
Oh, and most importantly, what about applciations. A simple devolopment IDE I use is 100MB. Even if I wish to open a 10kb file, there is going to be a heck of a lot of lag starting programs.
Or do you imagine every imaginable application will be preinstalled locally?
Watching/editing/capturing video? I have a 200GB HD devoted to video files.
Opening large data files? Many people manipulate high resolution images.
What if you wanted to burn a CD? Is it THAT uncommon to want to copy 600+MB in a few minutes.
While not obvious at first, there will be a lot of frustrations with such a system. It will be a hell of a lot worse than using a terminal server (where with a decent connection and prototol the lag is ususally unnoticable unless you try to manipulate images or video).
SSH
Remote Desktop
X Server
VNC
Take your pick.
Making the hard drive solid-state will not make all problems magically dissapear.
The hard drive probably isn't even a major drain on the batteries.
There are already solid-state portable computers with low power consumption and solid-state components at the expense of proccessing power. They are called PDAs. Ever seen a WinCE handheld? Or a psion? Seems just like what you've described.
Your average GPS unit has an accuracy of 15m. I think the better ones have an accuracy of 5m, unless you use a DGPS setup with two *widely seperated* GPS units. The precision is sufficient for navigation, but nowhere near good enough for determining the tilt/seperation/orientation of several GPS units which are right next to each other. Accelerometers would be a better way of determining if the blimp is level.
As for redundancy, I'd understand the need for a spare GPS unit, but 6 seems excessive. I am inclined to believe there is a typo in the specs, and that they meant 6-gps controlled motors, rather than 6 GPS's which control the motors.
" Held in position by 6 onboard GPS units connected to the ship's engines"
WTF? 6 onboard GPS receivers? What's wrong with one good one. Surely a =10m precision is enough, and if it isn't they could try a differential GPS setup with two receivers, but six?!
If you want to hook up a 300ft cat5 cable to an advertising baloon, I imagine it will not be able to obtain a 300ft altitude. Cat5 is heavier than your average bit of string.
Saying that, all you really need to supply the AP with is power. Communication can be all wireless.