I sent an email to Lexar support demanding a refund for my "Secure" Jumpdrive. While I never used the "security" feature that they offer (I bought this because it was cheep at Sam's Club), this is still deceptive advertising. I don't think you can claim a product as "secure" when it is trivial for someone to bypass security.
As one poster commented, "Why not just use ROT-13 to hide the password?"
If Lexar replies, I'll post a follow up. If they don't, then it is off to the BBB to get things fixed.
I don't know how true that is. The high end video cards for scientific computing cost well over $2k, which puts in a large margin for them to profit at least in one small area. In my experiance, not many visualization scientists use Windows for bleeding edge graphics.
In addition, porting a graphics card to more than one platform gives the vendor a chance to find bugs in their design that they might not discover with a single platform release.
Re:Yes, privacy in a casino is highly sought
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 1
Not to meantion, under Nevada law, a casino can do anything it wants to you if you are caught breaking house rules. Including putting you in "the room" and giving you a "talk" if they catch you cheating.
RFID tags in Casinos are fine, as the poster said. You are on someone's private property, so I don't see how you are losing any rights.
If they mean offerings from IBM or SGI, Microsoft may be on to something with their cost numbers. Then again, the idea of "Windows Clusters" scares me to death.
Back in the day of the BBS meeting the Internet, there was a company named Telegrafix. They made a "graphical" telnet application called "RIPtel", which allowed you to use their propriatary vector rendering graphics called RIP (Remote Imaging Protocol) for contacting RIP-enabled BBSes over a Telnet session.
I liked the software so much, I paid $70 for it as part of a "RIPkit" package, which included some SDK stuff.
When I registered, I got a serial number, much like any other software package at the time (around 1997). I punched in the number, and RIPtel responded "contacting server, registering serial number". I thought nothing of this -- I just thought I had to verify the number was legit.
A few months later, my computer crashed (stupid Win95) , and I had to reload everything. When I put RIPtel back on, I punched the serial number back in, RIPtel contact the server, and said my serial number was already in use! I contacted the vendor, and I didn't get a reply. I was screwed.
Telegrafix is now long gone, though they still hava a valid DNS record. This doesn't do me any good if I want to use RIPtel again.
Software activation is horrible, and isn't pro-customer. Vendors need to put trust and power in the hands of the customer. Sell service. Sell upgrades. Don't lock out your own customers with product activation! Learn from the past guys.
Re:OFFTOPIC: but please help a n00b out
on
FreeBSD 4.9 Code Freeze
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know of any commerical backup utilties, but Freebsd supports things like Amanda.
I typically use a simple dump script for backing up 5.x systems:
/sbin/rdump ${LEVEL}uaLf $DIR $FS
Dump will do a snapshot in case of any file system changes during the dump.
FYI, a make world usually isn't needed, as you can just re-make that particular peice of code, or rebuild the kernel if it is a kernel change.
You can do this already. As others have said, you can just use tightvnc/vnc or NoMachine.
You can also detach individual windows by using a pseudoserver such as Xmove, though it doesn't support applications that use X extensions (most gtk+ apps won't work).
The downside to using any of these programs for user switching is that you loose any sort of acceleration, XRender or glx/opengl wise.
A group of people, including myself, are trying to implement something similar in Reno, NV: RAWUG(Reno Area Wireless Group).
These guys are way ahead of us, but if you are in the Reno area, or want to contribute ideas toward how we can setup a community wireless area here, please join our list and help contribute ideas! So far we have a couple people from Seattle and what not.
Personally, I think it would be uber cool to have someone setup a national (or International) wireless users consortum to organise all the great ideas people are coming up with. Non-commerial and commercial ideas a like.
And I assume you are going to dump all your data over the NFS network?
Gigs and gigs of file I/O are going to kill you, as a lot of parallel applications will dump out scratch files to disk. Tell me, is it faster to dump data to a ATA133 or U160 Disk, or gigabit ethernet to a congenested NFS mount?
I can cite examples, such as g98, Amber, Fluent, and other scientific apps you might want to run an a beowulf who tend to dump out check point files.
I run Rocks at the University of Nevada, Reno on 3 of my 4 clusters, and I must say it is better than what CLIC seems to advertise.
With ROCKS, you get:
If you are running out of inodes, you should consider putting/usr/ports onto it's own file system. When you create this file system, make sure you specify additional inodes during the creation. The drawback to additional inodes is reduced disk space.
You should be using separate file systems for each major partition anyway (/,/usr,/tmp,/var at least), but I suspect you just put everything in/, which is bad.
You don't have to use the ports anyway, since pkg_add -r will retrieve the package for you for your release. If you are running -stable, pkg_add -r will always get the latest binary package (and it's dependinces for you).
This makes FreeBSD easy to keep secure. The only time I've had an updated FreeBSD machine broken into was though ftp. No one should run ftp anyway, as it is a flawed protocol.
Here in Reno, NV, we have Charter has our cable company (part of AT&T too? No idea). Anyway, I called to get a cable modem, and they quoted me various rates. I chose the 1.2mbit line for $60/mo, and they said that I'd get charged 5/mo for the cable modem, and 5/mo for not having cable. It was called a "digital access fee". $70/mo total.
A few days later a punk kid comes by to remove filters or what ever they do on the outside. I was watching TV (broadcast) and they kid said "I hope I didn't interupt your cable TV." Confused, I responded, "But I don't have cable...". He gave me a funny look and then left.
A few days later I bought a splitter to see if I got cable, and lo and behold, I had extended basic. (sweet, too bad I only watch FOX and UPN)
Most IDE disks have a warranty of 1 or 3 years. I have seen SCSI drives with 7 year warranties. Talk about backing up your product. Your drive will outlive your computer's useful lifetime.
I had the same problem installing Unreal as you did, the difference being that I was running FreeBSD. In the end I just gave up.
However, I downloaded their demos and the installer they give you rocks. I had zero problems installing and running their 2D games. The 3D games didn't work at all, but then again I had a Nvidia TNT at the time which doesn't work well at all with 3D in FreeBSD/XFree4.1.
I was so impressed with their demo package, that I ended up buying SimCity3000 and Railroad Tycoon 2. (both work great)
Loki did a good job, it is just that their earlier products (Unreal) did suck.
I just got an email back from BSD mall, incase anyone was wondering what was going on with Wind River:
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 10:45:28 -0800 (PST)
From: Chris Coleman
To: Mark C Ballew
Cc:
Subject: Re: FreeBSD Subscription
In-Reply-To:
The subscriptions will not automatically be transferred to us. I have no
idea what Wind River will do with them.
-Chris
On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Mark C Ballew wrote:
> bsdmall,
>
> I have been a long time subscriber to the FreeBSD distribution from Walnut
Creek. When Wind River took over, I still recieved my subscription. Will you
be taking over subscriptions now? If so, I would like to continue my
subscription.
You are saying that that you can't load a data base in memory that is larger than 2 GB, but 2^32 allows 4 GB of memory. There are 4 GB of addressable memory on IA-32.
Also, starting with the Pentium Pro (P6?), Intel added 4 more address lines, meaning that you can have up to 2^36 bits of memory.
Of course, you can still only address 2^32 bits in your database, program, or whatever in memory as one big chunk.
IA-64 will rock, but my SGI's and Alphas have been doing 64-bit for a while now:-)
So you guys know, Myrinet is a 2Gb peak interconnect with a 7us minimum latency. FULL CROSSBAR SWITCH:-) Fiber or serial.
A interesting fact is that up until a few days ago, Myrinet only supported 1 GIG systems. I ran into this while setting up the University of Nevada beowulf named cortex.
I must admit, IA64 with Myrinet 2000 is gonna kick some serious computational ass.
The article says that Myrinet will run MPI, but it will also run PVM and TCP/IP stuff too.
Apparently the New worm doesn't really kill off the new worm. I was trying the telnet port 80 thing on a machine that was infected with V2.0, which address was in my logs.
When I went to telnet, the backdoor didn't work and I got the "Hacked by chinese" message.
Either the worms over write each other, or a machine can be infected by BOTH worms.
Looking at my logs, the first time I got an "/default.ida?XXX" was at about 9:45am PST. About an hour later I stopped getting Code Red I's NNN's in my logs.
This seems to show that the new Code Red worm kills the old version. I don't have any attempted connections from Code Red I in my logs anymore (since about 11am PST).
Slashdot Mirror
I sent an email to Lexar support demanding a refund for my "Secure" Jumpdrive. While I never used the "security" feature that they offer (I bought this because it was cheep at Sam's Club), this is still deceptive advertising. I don't think you can claim a product as "secure" when it is trivial for someone to bypass security.
As one poster commented, "Why not just use ROT-13 to hide the password?"
If Lexar replies, I'll post a follow up. If they don't, then it is off to the BBB to get things fixed.
I don't know how true that is. The high end video cards for scientific computing cost well over $2k, which puts in a large margin for them to profit at least in one small area. In my experiance, not many visualization scientists use Windows for bleeding edge graphics.
In addition, porting a graphics card to more than one platform gives the vendor a chance to find bugs in their design that they might not discover with a single platform release.
Why imagine? There is a tool to do this alraedy.
Not to meantion, under Nevada law, a casino can do anything it wants to you if you are caught breaking house rules. Including putting you in "the room" and giving you a "talk" if they catch you cheating.
RFID tags in Casinos are fine, as the poster said. You are on someone's private property, so I don't see how you are losing any rights.
If they mean offerings from IBM or SGI, Microsoft may be on to something with their cost numbers. Then again, the idea of "Windows Clusters" scares me to death.
I liked the software so much, I paid $70 for it as part of a "RIPkit" package, which included some SDK stuff.
When I registered, I got a serial number, much like any other software package at the time (around 1997). I punched in the number, and RIPtel responded "contacting server, registering serial number". I thought nothing of this -- I just thought I had to verify the number was legit.
A few months later, my computer crashed (stupid Win95) , and I had to reload everything. When I put RIPtel back on, I punched the serial number back in, RIPtel contact the server, and said my serial number was already in use! I contacted the vendor, and I didn't get a reply. I was screwed.
Telegrafix is now long gone, though they still hava a valid DNS record. This doesn't do me any good if I want to use RIPtel again.
Software activation is horrible, and isn't pro-customer. Vendors need to put trust and power in the hands of the customer. Sell service. Sell upgrades. Don't lock out your own customers with product activation! Learn from the past guys.
I don't know of any commerical backup utilties, but Freebsd supports things like Amanda.
I typically use a simple dump script for backing up 5.x systems:
Dump will do a snapshot in case of any file system changes during the dump. FYI, a make world usually isn't needed, as you can just re-make that particular peice of code, or rebuild the kernel if it is a kernel change.
You can do this already. As others have said, you can just use tightvnc/vnc or NoMachine.
You can also detach individual windows by using a pseudoserver such as Xmove, though it doesn't support applications that use X extensions (most gtk+ apps won't work).
The downside to using any of these programs for user switching is that you loose any sort of acceleration, XRender or glx/opengl wise.
In addition, if anyone wants a space to develop waste, send me an email.
This has been implemented in FreeBSD 5.0, according to the security mailing list. You can get a patch for -stable here:
4 -s table.patch
ftp://ftp.jurai.net/users/winter/patches/rfc351
These guys are way ahead of us, but if you are in the Reno area, or want to contribute ideas toward how we can setup a community wireless area here, please join our list and help contribute ideas! So far we have a couple people from Seattle and what not.
Personally, I think it would be uber cool to have someone setup a national (or International) wireless users consortum to organise all the great ideas people are coming up with. Non-commerial and commercial ideas a like.
Gigs and gigs of file I/O are going to kill you, as a lot of parallel applications will dump out scratch files to disk. Tell me, is it faster to dump data to a ATA133 or U160 Disk, or gigabit ethernet to a congenested NFS mount?
I can cite examples, such as g98, Amber, Fluent, and other scientific apps you might want to run an a beowulf who tend to dump out check point files.
Check it out: Rocksclusters
Leave app developers to do their app developing, and let sysadmins secure their box for them.
Of course, this doesn't even touch on his real problem: Linux on the desktop
If you are running out of inodes, you should consider putting /usr/ports onto it's own file system. When you create this file system, make sure you specify additional inodes during the creation. The drawback to additional inodes is reduced disk space.
You should be using separate file systems for each major partition anyway (/,/usr,/tmp,/var at least), but I suspect you just put everything in /, which is bad.
You don't have to use the ports anyway, since pkg_add -r will retrieve the package for you for your release. If you are running -stable, pkg_add -r will always get the latest binary package (and it's dependinces for you).
This makes FreeBSD easy to keep secure. The only time I've had an updated FreeBSD machine broken into was though ftp. No one should run ftp anyway, as it is a flawed protocol.
Here in Reno, NV, we have Charter has our cable company (part of AT&T too? No idea). Anyway, I called to get a cable modem, and they quoted me various rates. I chose the 1.2mbit line for $60/mo, and they said that I'd get charged 5/mo for the cable modem, and 5/mo for not having cable. It was called a "digital access fee". $70/mo total.
A few days later a punk kid comes by to remove filters or what ever they do on the outside. I was watching TV (broadcast) and they kid said "I hope I didn't interupt your cable TV." Confused, I responded, "But I don't have cable...". He gave me a funny look and then left.
A few days later I bought a splitter to see if I got cable, and lo and behold, I had extended basic. (sweet, too bad I only watch FOX and UPN)
This "free cable" ploy can't be accidental guys.
Most IDE disks have a warranty of 1 or 3 years. I have seen SCSI drives with 7 year warranties. Talk about backing up your product. Your drive will outlive your computer's useful lifetime.
I had the same problem installing Unreal as you did, the difference being that I was running FreeBSD. In the end I just gave up.
However, I downloaded their demos and the installer they give you rocks. I had zero problems installing and running their 2D games. The 3D games didn't work at all, but then again I had a Nvidia TNT at the time which doesn't work well at all with 3D in FreeBSD/XFree4.1.
I was so impressed with their demo package, that I ended up buying SimCity3000 and Railroad Tycoon 2. (both work great)
Loki did a good job, it is just that their earlier products (Unreal) did suck.
I just got an email back from BSD mall, incase anyone was wondering what was going on with Wind River:
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 10:45:28 -0800 (PST)
From: Chris Coleman
To: Mark C Ballew
Cc:
Subject: Re: FreeBSD Subscription
In-Reply-To:
The subscriptions will not automatically be transferred to us. I have no
idea what Wind River will do with them.
-Chris
On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Mark C Ballew wrote:
> bsdmall,
>
> I have been a long time subscriber to the FreeBSD distribution from Walnut
Creek. When Wind River took over, I still recieved my subscription. Will you
be taking over subscriptions now? If so, I would like to continue my
subscription.
Maybe if send money to Yggdrasil's Paypal account, you'll get your subscription.
Or travel back in time, either way.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't the Walnut Creek FreeBSD CDROM subscription money go in part to the team?
:-)
I have had a subscription to it for a few years now, and I thought part of that money went to them.
If not, it is still nice to get the latest version on CD every few months
I don't think your statement is totally correct.
:-)
You are saying that that you can't load a data base in memory that is larger than 2 GB, but 2^32 allows 4 GB of memory. There are 4 GB of addressable memory on IA-32.
Also, starting with the Pentium Pro (P6?), Intel added 4 more address lines, meaning that you can have up to 2^36 bits of memory.
Of course, you can still only address 2^32 bits in your database, program, or whatever in memory as one big chunk.
IA-64 will rock, but my SGI's and Alphas have been doing 64-bit for a while now
So you guys know, Myrinet is a 2Gb peak interconnect with a 7us minimum latency. FULL CROSSBAR SWITCH :-) Fiber or serial.
A interesting fact is that up until a few days ago, Myrinet only supported 1 GIG systems. I ran into this while setting up the University of Nevada beowulf named cortex.
I must admit, IA64 with Myrinet 2000 is gonna kick some serious computational ass.
The article says that Myrinet will run MPI, but it will also run PVM and TCP/IP stuff too.
Check it out at their site
Apparently the New worm doesn't really kill off the new worm. I was trying the telnet port 80 thing on a machine that was infected with V2.0, which address was in my logs.
When I went to telnet, the backdoor didn't work and I got the "Hacked by chinese" message.
Either the worms over write each other, or a machine can be infected by BOTH worms.
Looking at my logs, the first time I got an "/default.ida?XXX" was at about 9:45am PST. About an hour later I stopped getting Code Red I's NNN's in my logs.
This seems to show that the new Code Red worm kills the old version. I don't have any attempted connections from Code Red I in my logs anymore (since about 11am PST).