They may be great products, but they are a bit expensive for home use.
The prices can be a bit difficult to find using the site, but all serial ATA raid controllers were above 400 US dollars.
I've heard of these controllers before, and people seem to like them very much. But at this price-point (and maybe availability too) they seem to be aimed more at the professional market.
Which is fine if you are a professional user, obviously.
What a bunch of non-sense. RAID won't prevent any wrong data to be written to the disks. It justs makes it against hardware crashes. If the controller or other sub-system goes awry, you can still lose your data. Operating systems do not have any influence on the controler (or does any other software, like virusses). If a malicious piece of software destroys your data, it is destroyed no matter what.
The thing I hate about those controller cards (both ATA and SCSI is that they use a significant amount of time to boot up. Especially if you've got RAID incorporated on your motherboard, this is a serious drawback.
With the current state of hard disk drives, RAID 1 makes sense though. Failure is always imminent it seems. It seems about time that hard drives are replaced by other means of storage without moving parts.
Unfortunately, those other memory technologies do not seem to catch on significantly.
Warper
ps. currently suffering from a SMART warning on my WD 120 GB drive. Darn. Let's check if I've still got 2 years warranty on the thing. I think that that is the minimum European warranty anyways.
Because this text is clearly nonsense. None of the protocols you mention have inherent security flaws Maybe you should have noticed ftp instead, which does have some quirks.
RPC has been targeted due to a defunct implementation on MS side, and the fact that it was open to the internet by default. This has nothing to do with security of the protocols an sich.
To make your point completely moot: when MS does develop it's own protocols (SMB, PPTP etc) they are inferior to the standardised protocols concerning security.
One can safely say that the MS record on implementing secure protocols up till now is not that great.
Only the XBox seems to be quite secure. Of all things, a game console is the current MS flagship:)
Open ports are an obvious weakness in the security of an operating system. It is therefore not suprising that the author uses this item to show why the Windows OS is poorly designed in respect to security.
However, the one weakness that keeps showing up is a more fundamental architectural problem. And that is the Internet Exploder as main part of the operating system.
Let me explain: Internet Exploder is build in into Windows at system level. It therefore can run processes at this level. If IE is cracked, it would probably give the attacker full system rights.
Now this is not such a problem if you are just surfing Microsoft.com (astalavista is another matter altogether). Unfortunately it is also used by both their mail clients (Outlook and Outlook Express) to (pre-) view mail.
So now we have an security risk that can be activated from the web. All the big mail viri seem to use this architectural weakness.
To make matters worse, Microsoft has always put functionality before security and has added enhancement uppon enhancement to Internet Exploder. We are talking Java and VBScript, their own Java VM, Active X components, XML support, support for 2 different kind of plugins, the use of IE to view local folders... The list is virtually endless.
All and all this adds up to one of the worst security nightmares that have ever been created. Enough material to build a complete multi-bilion support structure for it in fact. The only thing that can be done to make this go away is to remove Internet Exploder as the central HUB for functionality on a home PC. Something that Microsoft is probably not inclined to do:)
In that case I hope they don't use percentages or other divisions:). I mean what's 75% of $0.10? $0.08 or 0.07?
But I agree with your message. Floating point is fine, as long as you are aware of the consequences of using FP. As long as you do not round anything or use floating points in (long running) loops you should be fine.
Warper
(ps. I was tricked calculating roman numbers in my Java roman numbers package myself, so beware. Instead of CCC the answer was CCXCIX !!! Fortunately the Romans did not do too many divisions:)
One that uses mailinglists? I was subscribed to several interesting ones that I had to turn off due to the enourmous feed. Not that my system could not handle it, but I could not.
If you are unlucky some of your employees like chain letters and 'funny' mails, or mails with nude females (could we call those just femails?).
And then you have helpdesks and stuff, or really tech savy people. 't is not that difficult getting 3 mails per minute.
The only problem I have with Postini is that they send me a note for every single virus email they filter out, and I can't seem to turn that off (like I can the spam notification). So I still have ~620 messages in my inbox, about a hundred of which are bogus "You sent a virus" messages.
That should at least be simple to filter out. The 'you send a virus' messages won't be caught by your scanner anyways, they are anoying but they don't carry a virus I presume.
Currently the virusscanner at work does _not_ notify me if a suspect mail has been dropped. This is mightely anoying, since you never know if a business relative did send an infected mail (or one with an executable attachment in our case) or did not post one at all.
Trust me, better to filter some out than not receiving them at all. Unless you are requesting them over a mobile phone line maybe....
Ok, I'll clean the computers and you can leave it at 20% off. 74k employee? Sheesh. I know that the people in my IT dept don't make that kind of cash. I certainly don't, and I am product developer.
Obviously there will be some additonal costs to salary, but 74k for IT seems ridiculous.
Warper
ps. just joking on the cleaning up part, the plane ticket would be too expensive, and the job would be finished too soon for the payments to kick in.
The last time I tried, DivX played Xvid movies like a bicycle on a freeway.
Maybe they should be compatible, but for now this is not the case. If anyone has problems or success the other way around, I am happy to hear from you.
Call me naive, but is there really a purpose in having a multi-tasking, Unix-like kernel... in a PDA?
Yes there are definately reasons to want to have this.
Networking: These devices will be networked more and more. Linux has a great IP stack.
Music: You don't want to stop listening to your music while putting in appointments and stuff.
Background tasks: Like checking mail. Sure, you can do those things Win 3.11 like, but its way easier to implement (if you even need to) with a multitasking system
I would imagine there are many more reasons to come up with, but I think I made my point.
But unfortunately this does not compensate for an underpowered, underfeatured, underdesigned unknown palmtop device. I don't see any audience, not even too many linux freaks, going to get one of these.
Warper
C:\>mkdir nul C:\>cd nul The parameter is incorrect.
Unfortunately for everyone else on your block, as soon as commercial input fails your system will stop providing power out to the utility side. This is to protect power company personnel during line repairs.
I wonder if you would want to provide everyone with power in that event. I would imagine that the number of people you would try to power would be too many (especially when using solar power). And if there was a problem on the utility side next to your house, then providing power to that particular utility side might not be the best idea.
But I'm not an electrical technician, in this case I am just an end user (ugh, having to say that on/. hurts). So don't take my word for it.
They've already got great pictures on the site, they aren't too beautifull (the hubble beats this easily by a big margin, however the focussing problem has already been mentioned here on slashdot). They are funny enough however. Take a good look...
http://www.ngst.nasa.gov/PictureOfTheWeek/Pictur eO fTheWeek.html
In the same way: it is impossible to prove if any sequence of number has been produced by a random number generator. Sure it could put out 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 (you know the drill) but that could just have been coincidence.
If you take enough difficult to predict variables, even the paranoid should not be afraid of pseudo random numbers generated this way. I for one have not seen too many security devices with a lava lamp included:)
I just did it and to my amazement I violated US of A copyright law. I made a second copy of the page! Now my rights in the US are null and I will be completely outside the law when I travel to the US f A.
If they send the complaint in twofold to the justice dept, is the complaint valid? Maybe some US layer could answer this question!
Dunno, caring and feeling embarrased is just what separates us from animals I guess:).
Go and watch the fifth element if you're feeling unhappy. Don't think love is what separates us from the animal kingdom though (stupid name, animal kingdom).
Hmm, I always first look if I need it. At this moment that is a solid no, so I'll be installing RH9 first. Which I do need since my X-Windows is broken (again)!
Yeah, so you will be leaning left and right on every moment. If you want to lean right you select "hand granade" and throw it against the wall right in fron of you.
Most games never use the 3rd mouse button anymore, and they shouldn't. The chance that you click it involuntarily is very high. Having 2 other directions added to this mix does not make the world a better place.
But just maybe the implementation is good enough. The scrollwheels of the MS mice do seem to be better than those of Logitech, or most other manufacturers for that matter.
And you have to say this on the only (well, one of the few) web sites that does not have horizontal scroll bars. I think you should at least have provided an URL:)
You simply must live in a very rich part of the world (I am guessing America would fit best) if you think of third world countries that way.
Most of them do have drinking water etc. It is just that the living standard is sub-optimal. Medical care is lacking, and bad crops mean hunger.
Hell, a lot of parts of the US of A are considered third world country by others, but that does not mean that they haven't got running water or anything...
Noooo, the US would never create such a weak standard now, would they?
Nice from them to spell it out. Typing that up must take more time than to break the code I suppose. In the US you can probably sue them to pieces for that claim. Put some 'important' data on it and let the friendly neighbourhood kid play with the system for a while.
The good thing: the government does not need to have a clipper chip key handy.
Triple DES is very fast, and it is an established encryption algorithm, I am sure this is not just marketing speak.
Normally with tripple des an ede scheme is used (encryption with key a, decryption with key b and encryption again with key a. This is supposed to be almost as secure as a tripple des with an additional key c at the end. Furthermore, only 7 bits will be used of every byte, so the actual encryption will be 112 bits strong.
Single DES is not secure, and especially when the same data is both available encrypted and as plain, the code will be easy to crack. It would be the same attack as against 56 bit WEB encryption on wireless lans. Think minutes.
Actually AES is considered more secure, and is made for fast encryption both in hardware and in software. So why this isn't used for these kinds of products, I do not know.
The obvious cool things are the certification (which may have to be performed again when using AES, think big bucks) and the operating system independence.
The obvious disadvantage: this is symetric encryption. You won't be able to use it for continuous storage on a web server. It only protects you when the system is attacked physically. If you can break the OS, you will be able to get to any data on the storage device... So you could replace it easily with... a door:)
so I feel that I'm doing them a favor by having them not call me because I *NEVER* buy anything sold by an anonymous phone (or door) solicitor.
Right. Most people will say that. But somebody still has to be buying the stuff. So somebody is lying. Please post a followup with the subject "/me sticks finger in the air" if you are the one.
The problem with these kind of intrusions is is that they are relatively new. Or at least the mass exploiration of it is. The law should always be a reflection of society. Comparing how they would fit into current laws is therefore important, but in no way should current laws alone dictate what direction the legal system should take.
My personal view is that spam and telemarketing should be considered a breach of privacy. With the possible exception of research, you should only be able to call or mail somebody after they have opted in into the system. Trying to ban a (not legally binding) opt-out system is obviously right at the other end.
For most people being called by one of these persons is pure harrassment, so the jobs that are lost is unfortunate for them, but for the good of society.
Currently I am not earning enough to be too bothered for myself though. Ok, I'm off buying some Aluminium sidings from Danny.
Warper
Could someone please change the <blockquote> tag to <q>? Thank you!!!
Slashdot Mirror
They may be great products, but they are a bit expensive for home use.
The prices can be a bit difficult to find using the site, but all serial ATA raid controllers were above 400 US dollars.
I've heard of these controllers before, and people seem to like them very much. But at this price-point (and maybe availability too) they seem to be aimed more at the professional market.
Which is fine if you are a professional user, obviously.
Warper
What a bunch of non-sense. RAID won't prevent any wrong data to be written to the disks. It justs makes it against hardware crashes. If the controller or other sub-system goes awry, you can still lose your data. Operating systems do not have any influence on the controler (or does any other software, like virusses). If a malicious piece of software destroys your data, it is destroyed no matter what.
The thing I hate about those controller cards (both ATA and SCSI is that they use a significant amount of time to boot up. Especially if you've got RAID incorporated on your motherboard, this is a serious drawback.
With the current state of hard disk drives, RAID 1 makes sense though. Failure is always imminent it seems. It seems about time that hard drives are replaced by other means of storage without moving parts.
Unfortunately, those other memory technologies do not seem to catch on significantly.
Warper
ps. currently suffering from a SMART warning on my WD 120 GB drive. Darn. Let's check if I've still got 2 years warranty on the thing. I think that that is the minimum European warranty anyways.
Hey, the moderators out there are not too smart today, eh?
Uh oh....
Because this text is clearly nonsense. None of the protocols you mention have inherent security flaws Maybe you should have noticed ftp instead, which does have some quirks.
:)
RPC has been targeted due to a defunct implementation on MS side, and the fact that it was open to the internet by default. This has nothing to do with security of the protocols an sich.
To make your point completely moot: when MS does develop it's own protocols (SMB, PPTP etc) they are inferior to the standardised protocols concerning security.
One can safely say that the MS record on implementing secure protocols up till now is not that great.
Only the XBox seems to be quite secure. Of all things, a game console is the current MS flagship
Warper
Open ports are an obvious weakness in the security of an operating system. It is therefore not suprising that the author uses this item to show why the Windows OS is poorly designed in respect to security.
:)
However, the one weakness that keeps showing up is a more fundamental architectural problem. And that is the Internet Exploder as main part of the operating system.
Let me explain: Internet Exploder is build in into Windows at system level. It therefore can run processes at this level. If IE is cracked, it would probably give the attacker full system rights.
Now this is not such a problem if you are just surfing Microsoft.com (astalavista is another matter altogether). Unfortunately it is also used by both their mail clients (Outlook and Outlook Express) to (pre-) view mail.
So now we have an security risk that can be activated from the web. All the big mail viri seem to use this architectural weakness.
To make matters worse, Microsoft has always put functionality before security and has added enhancement uppon enhancement to Internet Exploder. We are talking Java and VBScript, their own Java VM, Active X components, XML support, support for 2 different kind of plugins, the use of IE to view local folders... The list is virtually endless.
All and all this adds up to one of the worst security nightmares that have ever been created. Enough material to build a complete multi-bilion support structure for it in fact. The only thing that can be done to make this go away is to remove Internet Exploder as the central HUB for functionality on a home PC. Something that Microsoft is probably not inclined to do
Warper
A sig? Haven't I typed enough yet???
25,000 is peanuts? You probably meant 2.500 but you can do a lot of things with that kinda money, even in IT. It depends on your requirements.
Warper
You send me $25,000 and I will send not one but _two_ sachets of peanuts!
In that case I hope they don't use percentages or other divisions :). I mean what's 75% of $0.10? $0.08 or 0.07?
:)
But I agree with your message. Floating point is fine, as long as you are aware of the consequences of using FP. As long as you do not round anything or use floating points in (long running) loops you should be fine.
Warper
(ps. I was tricked calculating roman numbers in my Java roman numbers package myself, so beware. Instead of CCC the answer was CCXCIX !!! Fortunately the Romans did not do too many divisions
One that uses mailinglists? I was subscribed to several interesting ones that I had to turn off due to the enourmous feed. Not that my system could not handle it, but I could not.
If you are unlucky some of your employees like chain letters and 'funny' mails, or mails with nude females (could we call those just femails?).
And then you have helpdesks and stuff, or really tech savy people. 't is not that difficult getting 3 mails per minute.
Warper
Currently the virusscanner at work does _not_ notify me if a suspect mail has been dropped. This is mightely anoying, since you never know if a business relative did send an infected mail (or one with an executable attachment in our case) or did not post one at all.
Trust me, better to filter some out than not receiving them at all. Unless you are requesting them over a mobile phone line maybe....
Warper
Ok, I'll clean the computers and you can leave it at 20% off. 74k employee? Sheesh. I know that the people in my IT dept don't make that kind of cash. I certainly don't, and I am product developer.
Obviously there will be some additonal costs to salary, but 74k for IT seems ridiculous.
Warper
ps. just joking on the cleaning up part, the plane ticket would be too expensive, and the job would be finished too soon for the payments to kick in.
The last time I tried, DivX played Xvid movies like a bicycle on a freeway.
Maybe they should be compatible, but for now this is not the case. If anyone has problems or success the other way around, I am happy to hear from you.
Yes there are definately reasons to want to have this.
I would imagine there are many more reasons to come up with, but I think I made my point.
But unfortunately this does not compensate for an underpowered, underfeatured, underdesigned unknown palmtop device. I don't see any audience, not even too many linux freaks, going to get one of these.
Warper
C:\>mkdir nul
C:\>cd nul
The parameter is incorrect.
I wonder if you would want to provide everyone with power in that event. I would imagine that the number of people you would try to power would be too many (especially when using solar power). And if there was a problem on the utility side next to your house, then providing power to that particular utility side might not be the best idea.
But I'm not an electrical technician, in this case I am just an end user (ugh, having to say that on
They've already got great pictures on the site, they aren't too beautifull (the hubble beats this easily by a big margin, however the focussing problem has already been mentioned here on slashdot). They are funny enough however. Take a good look...
r eO fTheWeek.html
http://www.ngst.nasa.gov/PictureOfTheWeek/Pictu
Warper
Lava lamps work by the use of heat. A lot of heat coming from a lamp making the wax hot.
Now you think it is a _cool_ idea to put that into your computer case? Do you really need another heat generator in your PC?
Neh, bad idea. The fish bowl was (except for the electrical part) a cooler idea.
Warper
In the same way: it is impossible to prove if any sequence of number has been produced by a random number generator. Sure it could put out 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 (you know the drill) but that could just have been coincidence.
:)
If you take enough difficult to predict variables, even the paranoid should not be afraid of pseudo random numbers generated this way. I for one have not seen too many security devices with a lava lamp included
Warper
I just did it and to my amazement I violated US of A copyright law. I made a second copy of the page! Now my rights in the US are null and I will be completely outside the law when I travel to the US f A.
If they send the complaint in twofold to the justice dept, is the complaint valid? Maybe some US layer could answer this question!
Warper
Dunno, caring and feeling embarrased is just what separates us from animals I guess :).
Go and watch the fifth element if you're feeling unhappy. Don't think love is what separates us from the animal kingdom though (stupid name, animal kingdom).
Warper
Hmm, I always first look if I need it. At this moment that is a solid no, so I'll be installing RH9 first. Which I do need since my X-Windows is broken (again)!
Maarten
Yeah, so you will be leaning left and right on every moment. If you want to lean right you select "hand granade" and throw it against the wall right in fron of you.
Most games never use the 3rd mouse button anymore, and they shouldn't. The chance that you click it involuntarily is very high. Having 2 other directions added to this mix does not make the world a better place.
But just maybe the implementation is good enough. The scrollwheels of the MS mice do seem to be better than those of Logitech, or most other manufacturers for that matter.
Ah, so that's why MS was dumping mice in NL.
And you have to say this on the only (well, one of the few) web sites that does not have horizontal scroll bars. I think you should at least have provided an URL :)
Warper
IT security does it all wrapped up.
You simply must live in a very rich part of the world (I am guessing America would fit best) if you think of third world countries that way.
Most of them do have drinking water etc. It is just that the living standard is sub-optimal. Medical care is lacking, and bad crops mean hunger.
Hell, a lot of parts of the US of A are considered third world country by others, but that does not mean that they haven't got running water or anything...
Warper
Noooo, the US would never create such a weak standard now, would they?
Nice from them to spell it out. Typing that up must take more time than to break the code I suppose. In the US you can probably sue them to pieces for that claim. Put some 'important' data on it and let the friendly neighbourhood kid play with the system for a while.
The good thing: the government does not need to have a clipper chip key handy.
Triple DES is very fast, and it is an established encryption algorithm, I am sure this is not just marketing speak.
... a door :)
Normally with tripple des an ede scheme is used (encryption with key a, decryption with key b and encryption again with key a. This is supposed to be almost as secure as a tripple des with an additional key c at the end. Furthermore, only 7 bits will be used of every byte, so the actual encryption will be 112 bits strong.
Single DES is not secure, and especially when the same data is both available encrypted and as plain, the code will be easy to crack. It would be the same attack as against 56 bit WEB encryption on wireless lans. Think minutes.
Actually AES is considered more secure, and is made for fast encryption both in hardware and in software. So why this isn't used for these kinds of products, I do not know.
The obvious cool things are the certification (which may have to be performed again when using AES, think big bucks) and the operating system independence.
The obvious disadvantage: this is symetric encryption. You won't be able to use it for continuous storage on a web server. It only protects you when the system is attacked physically. If you can break the OS, you will be able to get to any data on the storage device... So you could replace it easily with
Warper
Right. Most people will say that. But somebody still has to be buying the stuff. So somebody is lying. Please post a followup with the subject "/me sticks finger in the air" if you are the one.
The problem with these kind of intrusions is is that they are relatively new. Or at least the mass exploiration of it is. The law should always be a reflection of society. Comparing how they would fit into current laws is therefore important, but in no way should current laws alone dictate what direction the legal system should take.
My personal view is that spam and telemarketing should be considered a breach of privacy. With the possible exception of research, you should only be able to call or mail somebody after they have opted in into the system. Trying to ban a (not legally binding) opt-out system is obviously right at the other end.
For most people being called by one of these persons is pure harrassment, so the jobs that are lost is unfortunate for them, but for the good of society.
Currently I am not earning enough to be too bothered for myself though. Ok, I'm off buying some Aluminium sidings from Danny.
Warper