She can be reached via e-mail at parry@aftab.com and for time sensitive issues or for media on a deadline, at 201-463-8663 (her U.S. cell phone). From her site http://www.aftab.com/
I am using the Meteor from http://www.emperorlinux.com/meteor.php. It has the Transmeta Efficeon processor and is pre-configured with all of the power management stuff (I purchased it with Debian pre-installed).
There is a switch just above the keyboard that allows me to put the laptop in low power mode and in that mode it runs a good 7 hours on the extended life battery. It is very useful for my long commutes on the train from Long Island to NYC.
When I was an undergrad studying Laser Optics between 1993 and 1996 the whole Laser Optics department was running on Macs and the macs were great for doing the lab work and running experiments with various pieces of equipment hooked up to the macs for collecting data.
Of course, at that point most of the rest of the school was running windows. Though I do know that there was a group of high end macs (for the day) that were being used by a group of professors for various modeling and research projects in other departments of the school.
Macs were definitely in much wider use in those early days.
How about a Gnome? Also be nice to see Waldo in a random webcam picture. It is great that the dinosaur is in such a remote place that they are going to leave it.
I was traveling to Lake Tahoe over the Thanksgiving holiday and had my laptop in my laptop backpack. The backpack was scanned and then a person took it to a table and hand searched it. It turned out that I had left my computer toolset in my backpack and they must have felt the screwdrivers were too dangerous in my hands. I had a choice to check it in...but instead I checked in my whole bag and just pulled out a couple magazines.
BIG Mistake. My laptop ended up cracked and I was lucky it was still working.
I had a job in the marketing department of a large management and strategy consulting firm. I was in charge of their intellectual capital database as well as an alumni database and direct marketing database.
The company had standardized on MS Office and didn't officially support anything else. The technology group was in a different city and used Oracle on the database side, but I did not have access to those resources.
I spent well over a year trying to get things to work with MS Access and whatever else was available to me on my workstation for handling data and information.
Eventually I found an old unused computer, put Linux on it and was then able to accomplish things which before had been either hard or impossible. A mixture of Perl, MySQL and PHP for interfaces made a lot of things possible which were otherwise very difficult.
For large datasets Excel is worthless and Access does not give you the flexibility you might need to do massive changes or comparisons between two data sets. Perl and MySQL were far superior for manipulating large data sets.
If I need to get things done I will use whatever tool is best for the job out of what is available to me. In a lot of cases, that means working on the command line or writing a script. I would be severely limiting my capabilities by restricting myself to fancy GUIs.
For several years I had run SuSE and Red Hat and had wanted to try Debian, but didn't have enough knowledge to get it installed.
Then, just over a year ago, I learned about Libranet and ordered a copy. Libranet is a distribution that is true to Debian, while providing a cutting edge desktop, slick install and a great administrative interface.
I have found Libranet to be exceptionally stable and you just can't beat Debian for its package management.
McDonald's sales have been in a slump over the last couple of years. They and other fast food companies are certainly looking for a way to boost sales. Doing an iTunes promotion would be brilliant.
IIRC, a person I knew several years back when I was in college had told me about how he and some of his friends had used some laser pointers to turn traffic lights to green. I have personally never seen this done. Has anybody else heard of or seen red laser pointers being used for this purpose?
I also am wondering if it would be illegal if you were using a laser pointer to make the light turn green.
In NYC this Summer, there was a meeting at City Hall with a lot of City Council members in attendance. A councilman from Brooklyn had brought a guest who had run against him in a recent election. As it turned out, his guest pulled out a gun and killed him when they were inside.
When I heard about this, I was surprised because City Hall always has police cars, gates and a security station with a metal detector. I wondered how could they have possibly gotten a gun in there. Later that day it came out that the Mayor, city councilmen and their guests and others were allowed to pass without going through the security procedures. After that incident Mayor Bloomberg said that he would now go through the security procedure just like everyone else.
You can never really know who to trust. And loopholes will be found and exploited by adversaries.
In the las couple of months spammers have managed to use DoS attacks on most of the RBL lists and many of the RBL lists have now gone out of business.
The ability of spammers to conduct DDoS attacks using hundreds of thousands of zombie Windows machines against select targets would easily break any system such as the proposed which has a single point of failure. If you do a DoS attack on the mail relay, then nobody's mail gets through. If there are only a handful of relays, then it would be simple to stop all mail using those relays.
If you greatly increased the relays and made it easy to set up the relays, then spammers would be back just about to where they are now as it would become much more difficult to figure out the good relays from the bad relays. And if you shut down a good relay that you thought was a bad relay...
Actually, here in NYC the lack of power actually did have a silver lining in that everybody was out talking to their neighbors. People don't really interact much anymore with all of their TV and computers and other entertainment available to them. So it was pretty amazing to see people getting to know their neighbors and having a shared experience.
When the power finally came on, one of the news stations interviewed a marriage counselor who said many of her clients had called her to tell her how the blackout resulted in an improved relationship with their spouse. This makes me wonder if the Northeast will have an increase in birth rates in 8 months.
The timeline maybe should have:
May 2004 - Historic rise in birth rates in the Northeast
At my highschool there were many coke machines and the music department would collect all of the recyclable cans and turn them in for the.05 deposit. I was in the choir and it actually netted us quite a bit of money...but it sure did suck when it was your turn to bag up the cans.
One person my company corresponds with had to write us back because to confirm that we were sending a legitimate email with attachment. This is because when we attach a file we generally use the phrase "please see the attached," but now that phrase is apparently making people nervous. Certainly filtering and deleting email based on that phrase wouldn't be good for the people we do business with because it is pretty standard for us to send attachments with just that phrase in the body of the email.
The company I work is a small marketing consultancy that only uses mac OS 9.2 (and Linux on the server side). Our clients have been writing/calling us to tell us to quit sending them viruses, so we have had to write these people back to tell them that we are not the culprits. Are systems are not affected by these worms and that the From addresses have been spoofed. We are also seeing a lot of responses from virus scanners saying we are sending out viruses, when we know that we are not. Some of the addresses that we are supposedly sending to aren't even in our address books!
It has been several centuries since we last saw people who knew a fair amount about nearly all subjects. A few centuries ago, they were called Renaissance Men. I am guessing, that if our lifespan increased by several hundred years we would once again have people who know quite a bit about a wide assortment of subjects.
In recent times, scientists have been working with interdisciplinary teams to achieve new breakthroughs. I can only imagine what scientific breakthroughs would occur with the dawn of a new age of renaissance men.
This is slighly OT...but during the shooting of Ocean's Eleven, Matt Damon borrowed some money from George Clooney for gambling and then to pay him back, he wrote him a check with "lap dance" in the area reserved for describing what the check is for. Of course, George couldn't cash that check.
A while back Blender was destined for the scrap heap when the developers on the project asked the management/owners of the company to work out a deal to open source the project. The management agreed to set a price, and if the developers who wanted to open source the project could meet the price, the code could be given an open source license and live forever.
As you may recall, the blender community appealed to the larger open source community for help, and within months had raised the funds necessary to free the code.
Unfortunately, it is much too late for this to occur in your situation. It is very unfortunate that the management in your company didn't consider doing something like this before they closed the doors.
I have been wondering if the following scenario would work to increase the Linux Market Share.
What if a person or a company with many millions of dollars were to negotiate a deal with all game developers for them to produce all of their games on Linux first, before making it available on Windows. I would guess that many people might either switch to Linux or dual boot Linux in order to play the new games. It would cost next to nothing for people to install Linux in order to play the games.
If I was wealthy, it would be an experiment I would like to try.
I left my office in SoHo (NYC) the other afternoon and saw a mob of people in the shoe store across the street. It is a fairly large shoe store and the whole front of the shoe store is all windows so you can see inside quite easily. The whole place was packed with people and there were even a fair number of people outside the place.
There were easily half a dozen people with cameras who were holding their cameras up and taking snapshots. WhatI found strange is that they didn't seem to really be focusing their cameras on anything in particular.
I thought for sure that there must have been some famous person shopping at the store, but that doesn't usually cause such a strange buzz in NYC (unless you are in Times Square with the tourists).
The first I have heard about flash mobs is through this story on slashdot. And as soon as I read the story, I knew that is what I had seen. When you don't know about flash mobs, the whole thing kind of leaves you a little bit bewildered, yet it absolutely gets your attention.
Wondering what would happen if you spammed this Russian politician and placed the number for the White House or some other important number in the body of the spam. I bet George W. would like it if the Russians were spamming his office.:)
Although face recognition software isn't a very good solution for airport security, it could have an interesting (if not scary) application in the supermarket.
Let's say you have all of these RFID tagged items in your shopping cart and a camera has taken your picture and logged your picture and all of your items into a database. Then on every trip to the store, they could not only have an idea about when you shop and how often, but what you are buying and how your buying habits are changing.
Of course, people who use credit cards when shopping would already be susceptible to such a thing (though I have not heard of any cases of this). Unlike a credit card, the cameras at least wouldn't be tying your identity to your purchase...at least not in a certain sense.
Think I need to wear baseball caps more often...Or maybe I should upgrade to a sombrero.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a switch just above the keyboard that allows me to put the laptop in low power mode and in that mode it runs a good 7 hours on the extended life battery. It is very useful for my long commutes on the train from Long Island to NYC.
Of course, at that point most of the rest of the school was running windows. Though I do know that there was a group of high end macs (for the day) that were being used by a group of professors for various modeling and research projects in other departments of the school.
Macs were definitely in much wider use in those early days.
How about a Gnome? Also be nice to see Waldo in a random webcam picture. It is great that the dinosaur is in such a remote place that they are going to leave it.
Another alternative you have is to visit J and R Computer World and buy a laptop from one of the best computer stores in the city.
BIG Mistake. My laptop ended up cracked and I was lucky it was still working.
The company had standardized on MS Office and didn't officially support anything else. The technology group was in a different city and used Oracle on the database side, but I did not have access to those resources.
I spent well over a year trying to get things to work with MS Access and whatever else was available to me on my workstation for handling data and information.
Eventually I found an old unused computer, put Linux on it and was then able to accomplish things which before had been either hard or impossible. A mixture of Perl, MySQL and PHP for interfaces made a lot of things possible which were otherwise very difficult.
For large datasets Excel is worthless and Access does not give you the flexibility you might need to do massive changes or comparisons between two data sets. Perl and MySQL were far superior for manipulating large data sets.
If I need to get things done I will use whatever tool is best for the job out of what is available to me. In a lot of cases, that means working on the command line or writing a script. I would be severely limiting my capabilities by restricting myself to fancy GUIs.
For several years I had run SuSE and Red Hat and had wanted to try Debian, but didn't have enough knowledge to get it installed.
Then, just over a year ago, I learned about Libranet and ordered a copy. Libranet is a distribution that is true to Debian, while providing a cutting edge desktop, slick install and a great administrative interface.
I have found Libranet to be exceptionally stable and you just can't beat Debian for its package management.
McDonald's sales have been in a slump over the last couple of years. They and other fast food companies are certainly looking for a way to boost sales. Doing an iTunes promotion would be brilliant.
I also am wondering if it would be illegal if you were using a laser pointer to make the light turn green.
When I heard about this, I was surprised because City Hall always has police cars, gates and a security station with a metal detector. I wondered how could they have possibly gotten a gun in there. Later that day it came out that the Mayor, city councilmen and their guests and others were allowed to pass without going through the security procedures. After that incident Mayor Bloomberg said that he would now go through the security procedure just like everyone else.
You can never really know who to trust. And loopholes will be found and exploited by adversaries.
In the las couple of months spammers have managed to use DoS attacks on most of the RBL lists and many of the RBL lists have now gone out of business. The ability of spammers to conduct DDoS attacks using hundreds of thousands of zombie Windows machines against select targets would easily break any system such as the proposed which has a single point of failure. If you do a DoS attack on the mail relay, then nobody's mail gets through. If there are only a handful of relays, then it would be simple to stop all mail using those relays. If you greatly increased the relays and made it easy to set up the relays, then spammers would be back just about to where they are now as it would become much more difficult to figure out the good relays from the bad relays. And if you shut down a good relay that you thought was a bad relay...
When the power finally came on, one of the news stations interviewed a marriage counselor who said many of her clients had called her to tell her how the blackout resulted in an improved relationship with their spouse. This makes me wonder if the Northeast will have an increase in birth rates in 8 months.
The timeline maybe should have: May 2004 - Historic rise in birth rates in the Northeast
At my highschool there were many coke machines and the music department would collect all of the recyclable cans and turn them in for the .05 deposit. I was in the choir and it actually netted us quite a bit of money...but it sure did suck when it was your turn to bag up the cans.
One person my company corresponds with had to write us back because to confirm that we were sending a legitimate email with attachment. This is because when we attach a file we generally use the phrase "please see the attached," but now that phrase is apparently making people nervous. Certainly filtering and deleting email based on that phrase wouldn't be good for the people we do business with because it is pretty standard for us to send attachments with just that phrase in the body of the email.
The company I work is a small marketing consultancy that only uses mac OS 9.2 (and Linux on the server side). Our clients have been writing/calling us to tell us to quit sending them viruses, so we have had to write these people back to tell them that we are not the culprits. Are systems are not affected by these worms and that the From addresses have been spoofed. We are also seeing a lot of responses from virus scanners saying we are sending out viruses, when we know that we are not. Some of the addresses that we are supposedly sending to aren't even in our address books!
Maybe Microsoft could use the DMCA to keep Trillian and others from reverse engineering the protocol.
In recent times, scientists have been working with interdisciplinary teams to achieve new breakthroughs. I can only imagine what scientific breakthroughs would occur with the dawn of a new age of renaissance men.
This is slighly OT...but during the shooting of Ocean's Eleven, Matt Damon borrowed some money from George Clooney for gambling and then to pay him back, he wrote him a check with "lap dance" in the area reserved for describing what the check is for. Of course, George couldn't cash that check.
Blender
As you may recall, the blender community appealed to the larger open source community for help, and within months had raised the funds necessary to free the code.
Unfortunately, it is much too late for this to occur in your situation. It is very unfortunate that the management in your company didn't consider doing something like this before they closed the doors.
What if a person or a company with many millions of dollars were to negotiate a deal with all game developers for them to produce all of their games on Linux first, before making it available on Windows. I would guess that many people might either switch to Linux or dual boot Linux in order to play the new games. It would cost next to nothing for people to install Linux in order to play the games.
If I was wealthy, it would be an experiment I would like to try.
There were easily half a dozen people with cameras who were holding their cameras up and taking snapshots. WhatI found strange is that they didn't seem to really be focusing their cameras on anything in particular.
I thought for sure that there must have been some famous person shopping at the store, but that doesn't usually cause such a strange buzz in NYC (unless you are in Times Square with the tourists).
The first I have heard about flash mobs is through this story on slashdot. And as soon as I read the story, I knew that is what I had seen. When you don't know about flash mobs, the whole thing kind of leaves you a little bit bewildered, yet it absolutely gets your attention.
Wondering what would happen if you spammed this Russian politician and placed the number for the White House or some other important number in the body of the spam. I bet George W. would like it if the Russians were spamming his office. :)
Let's say you have all of these RFID tagged items in your shopping cart and a camera has taken your picture and logged your picture and all of your items into a database. Then on every trip to the store, they could not only have an idea about when you shop and how often, but what you are buying and how your buying habits are changing.
Of course, people who use credit cards when shopping would already be susceptible to such a thing (though I have not heard of any cases of this). Unlike a credit card, the cameras at least wouldn't be tying your identity to your purchase...at least not in a certain sense.
Think I need to wear baseball caps more often...Or maybe I should upgrade to a sombrero.