The new Lithium Sulfur batteries can contain 350Wh/Kg (about 1.26MJ/Kg). Possibly not enough to be a weapon, but that's gotta hurt if a fault in the battery causes it to explode in your hand.
This is true, however the number of times I have seen 802.11 put in because the contractor couldn't be bothered with laying cables...
I hold the firm belief that people who don't have a very good understanding of the security concerns should never be allowed to set up any wireless kit. At least bad security on the wire requires the attacker to actually have physical access to the wire.
A jammer - in the spesific sence of a white-noise transmitter - wouldn't give a 'denial of service' style attack. It would drown out the other transmitters, thus fooling your device into thinking that there is no network avilable.
In what way is that not a denial of service? It denies the clients access to the access point service, in the same way as a bomb in a datacentre denies all the clients from contacting the servers there.
Then, when it needs to reduce the space, it drops the higher-frequency coefficients first -- this is why sharp edges, with lots of high frequency information, suffer most.
This may be a silly question (I've not really got much knowledge of video encoding), but can't the algorithm work out if most of the information in the block is high frequency and in that case start dropping the _low_ frequency components instead?
How exactly do you make a chargeback? Presumably just send printouts of the original auction description and copies of the box of what actually arrived to the credit card company? Would they make a chargeback on such a small transaction?
I personally have had a bad experience with an ebayer recently... Luckilly I only lost 45 ukp.
I wanted a 802.11g card with a specific chipset (PrismGT), so having found a seller on ebay I bid and won the auction. The description of the item in the auction was very specific, quoting the modeul number, etc.
3 weeks later (nice speedy delivery... not) I received a package, which I paid import duty on since the seller was in the states, only to discover that I had been sent an 802.11*B* card worth under 15ukp (and completely useless to me). So I tried to contact the seller to resolve the problem - the seller ignored all my emails. I opened a SquareTrade complaint which the seller ignored. The seller's account had been suspended by ebay shortly after the transaction so they obviously had complaints against him.
However, the auction was paid for over PayPal and had a "PayPal buyer protection" icon on it, so I thought that I was safe... Wrong! I logged a complaint at PayPal, expecting them to refund my money and they said that the seller sending an incorrect item isn't covered by the protection.
So what it comes down to is that if the seller had sent me what I ordered but it wasn't quite as shiny as it was described, I would've been covered, but since the seller sent me something completely different to what I ordered they won't cover me at all.
IMHO the buyer protection scheme isn't worth anything and in the future I will be treating auctions covered by the buyer protection policy with the same suspicion as the unprotected auctions. As far as I could tell from the policy terms, I was covered, but PayPal (who are part of ebay) just weaseled out of it.
why do you think the government mandidated passive safety restraints in cars? Because LOTS of people don't wear seatbelts.
Whilest it's true that a very large proportion of Americans don't wear seatbelts, the same is not true around the world - we have a very high proportion of both drivers and passengers wearing seatbelts here in the UK. Infact, AFAIK the airbag system on american cars is different to UK cars because the american system has to catch people who are travelling at an unrestrained 70mph _because_ of the lack of seatbelt use. What does this show? well I leave it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.:)
Now we all know that su-ing to root is easy for when you need it, but it is something that will piss off and confound most users.
Most Windows converts won't be using the shell, they'll be using the pretty GUI tools to configure everything... And you know what, in the Gnome tools shipped with Fedora, there is no concept of having to "su to root", it simply prompts you for the root password if you try and do something that requires it. Yes, ok, some of the really challenged users might find it confusing to have to enter a password when they hit the "destroy my whole computer" button, but then again, if they're that challenged then it probably just saved them from breaking their system.
Having to enter the root password is less convenient than just being allowed to do whatever you want, but it adds another level of confirmation when doing dangerous things, and do we *really* want to seriously compromise the security of the system just so some windows users can install their spyware easier?
I use xine for DVDs, which works well. Although having said that, xine doesn't draw the menus quite right on the FireFly DVDs (ogle does, but I don't like ogle).
Linux: GAIM
Whilst I use Gaim, it really does wind me up - doesn't support chat sessions properly in MSN (and they seem to indicate they're not going to in the near future) and the auto reconnect stuff insists on popping up a window when it reconnects instead of quietly doing it in the background. Although MSN is annoying anyway since it only allows 1 machine to log in at once (I only use it because I can't convince the people I talk to to use a sane system).
The only thing I used to use Windows for was Excel, so about 2 years ago I decided that OOo had gotten good enough and binned Windows entirely - never looked back. (Ok, I do keep a Windows box around for testing my web sites against IE's brokenness but that machine stays firmly turned off most of the time).
You get the source code for everything in the box with the CDs. The GPL ensures that binaries cannot be distributed without also giving away the source code - if you're not giving somebody a binary copy, they don't need the source code either.
Although there's nothing really stopping a 3rd party getting a copy of RHEL and putting it up for download. However, in reality I suspect most people who will use RHEL instead of Fedora are businesses who will want the official release so they can easilly get their security updates, etc, rather than some (completely legal) ripped off version.
However, Fedora is basically RH Enterprise unstable.
The Fedora development path has quite supprised me - when Fedora was originally announced I was under the impression that they were moving away from the traditional "versioned" release strategy and were going to be going rolling updates instead. i.e. if you keep your system up to date you always get the latest toys and you avoid the 6 monthly big upgrade where all the boxes have to be shut down and upgraded to the new version. Unforuntately this hasn't happened and in a couple of weeks we will all be shuting down our servers and upgrading them to Fedora Core 2.
Isn't that something companies pay their IT staff for?
So what do you get for the (huge) price you pay for the OS? Oh that's right, MS say that you don't need to spend as much on sysadmins because windows requires less administration and patching than a unix.. Umm...:)
Hello? Automatic updates? You haven't been paying attention, have you?
Yes, there are automatic updates if you know enough to turn them on. Most users don't know enough to turn them on though, and automatic updates are no substitute for a qualified engineer because the engineer can check the patch hasn't broken anything else. (When your car manufacturer sends you the part to fix the brakes and you fit it yourself, what do you do if the part has a bug in it that stops the engine running? A qualified engineer might be able to do something about it).
I believe you can automate patching for most if not all of Linux flavors also.
Correct, but that wasn't my point - your system is not being fixed by a qualified engineer. On a free system that's not unepected, but if you're paying 4 grand for your operating system and there was a major bug found in it, shouldn't you expect the vendor to send out someone qualified to patch up your system and make sure the patch didn't break something?
Sticking with the (probably quite bad) car analagy, if you buy a car and the manufacturer discovers that the brakes don't work if you're doing over 60mph, do you only expect to find out about it and get it fixed if you knew enough to sign up for the manufacturer's mailing lists and connected the "warn me if my brakes are buggered" light yourself?
If a car company finds a problem with a car they sold you, they will send you a letter (a real letter, not an email that will probably be mistaken for spam) asking you to take your car to the dealer where a qualified engineer will fix the problem.
Microsoft, on the other hand (or indeed any software vendor) don't mail you, they post a note on their website (how many people regularly check the MS website?) and let you download a patch which you have to install yourself.
If your car manufacturer discovered a problem with the brakes on your car and posted a small notice on their website saying that you could order the replacement part and fit it yourself, there would be hell to pay.
There will always be security problems with software (although there shouldn't be this many), and if you've downloaded a free OS like Linux then you should expect to have to apply the patches yourself, or pay for an engineer to apply them. But if you pay 3,911.57 for the 50 client edition of Windows Advanced Server (I just checked on dabs.com - that's how much they're selling it for) should you not expect for Microsoft to actually tell you when they have found a critical bug, and pay for a qualified engineer to fix it for you?
In a twisted way it'd be fun to see MS being forced to recall and fix all their broken products - would cost them quite a lot to have a few million computers sent to them, fixed and shipped out again:)
Should we put gun makers in jail b/c their products are used to kill people.
You might put the gun makers in jail if their guns backfire and kill a few million gun owners because of a design flaw though.
Similarly, I suspect if it was discovered that you could disconnect the brakes on all the cars in a 10 mile radius by sending out a radio signal I suspect both the manufacturer and the person who sent the signal would be held responsible.
I suspect a year from now slashdot will still be reporting weekly about the latest worm to hit Microsoft systems.
At least the news organisations are making people aware (to some extent) that this is a problem with Windows - almost all the BBC reports about worms and trojans have clearly stated "this does not affect Linux or Mac systems". Unfortunately, if a lot of clueless home users switch over to Linux, we are likley to see Linux worms and trojans doing the rounds - yes, Linux is inherently more secure (your mail reader doesn't automatically execute attachments, your browser doesn't automatically install the latest spyware when you visit your favorite pr0n site), but if you never update you'll still get cracked (infact I suspect an unsecured RedHat 6.0 system would be cracked quicker than an unsecured Win95 box)
Hard Drive - Noisy little beast you can actually have it free hanging in the pc
In my experience, hard drives don't take well to being free-hanging. One of my drives died very soon after I tried suspending it from rubber to keep the noise down and I've heard other people say that rubber mountings can impact the seek times of the drive.
All it takes to get rich without making anything good is to track down those stupid enough to buy your crap.
Ah, but those stupid enough to buy the crap usually aren't sensible enough to use a browser that blocks popups. When will advertisers learn that if you make annoying adverts then people will take measures to remove them. If you make well targeted, non-intrusive or interesting ads then people might actually pay attention to them.
When I'm watching TV I usually skip through the breaks (I use MythTV) because they're so filled with ads specifically designed to be annoying. But if, before I hit skip, an un-annoying, funny ad comes on I'll probably not skip it.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
APS had the advantage of allowing the cameras to be quite a bit smaller than 35mm before good quality digital cameras were affordable. Of course, these days, anyone wanting a small camera will get a pocket sized 2MP digital camera.
The plane--because it had to fly at Mach 2-plus--needed very careful design for heat-dissipation reasons.
Is there any reason the skin of a plane can't be fitted out with the heat shield tiles used on the shuttle? As I understand it, rather than just insulating the craft they actually re-radiate the heat to remain cool.
Having said that, maybe suborbital passenger flight will become a reality before someone builds another supersonic passenger jet (which would make supersonic jets rather redundent)...
NTSC is crap because it came first, and because it had backwards compatibility. NTSC hacked color onto the existing black-and-white signal in a way that allowed black-and-white TV's to still recieve the old signal - without requirng two channels.
The same applies to PAL - the colour subcarrier is stuffed into a backward compatible B&W signal so the old B&W TVs can still see it.
The European Digital TV system (which, like GSM, will likely become the worldwide standard), DVB-T, is a fine system.
For the record, DVB-T really sucks in the UK ATM because it doesn't have (nor has ever had, even on the old OnDigital) (m)any good channels.
In the UK we have no good digital TV systems - DVB-T has sod all channels, digital cable is all propriatory and Sky refuse to release a CAM to decode the signal so my MythTV system has to encode the analogue signal from my sky decoder instead of being able to just grab the MPEG2 stream off the dish. Also, the only way to get 5.1 surround on Sky is to spend a lot of money on Sky Plus (Sky's version of TiVo) - none of the plain decoder boxes will provide a 5.1 output.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent!
MOD PARENT UP!
Is it me, or is the torrent's tracker down?
The new Lithium Sulfur batteries can contain 350Wh/Kg (about 1.26MJ/Kg). Possibly not enough to be a weapon, but that's gotta hurt if a fault in the battery causes it to explode in your hand.
Point being that jamming is a particularly crude way of doing this
I would argue that a distributed flood is a rather crude way of DOSing someone, but people do it and it works.
This is true, however the number of times I have seen 802.11 put in because the contractor couldn't be bothered with laying cables...
I hold the firm belief that people who don't have a very good understanding of the security concerns should never be allowed to set up any wireless kit. At least bad security on the wire requires the attacker to actually have physical access to the wire.
A jammer - in the spesific sence of a white-noise transmitter - wouldn't give a 'denial of service' style attack. It would drown out the other transmitters, thus fooling your device into thinking that there is no network avilable.
In what way is that not a denial of service? It denies the clients access to the access point service, in the same way as a bomb in a datacentre denies all the clients from contacting the servers there.
Then, when it needs to reduce the space, it drops the higher-frequency coefficients first -- this is why sharp edges, with lots of high frequency information, suffer most.
This may be a silly question (I've not really got much knowledge of video encoding), but can't the algorithm work out if most of the information in the block is high frequency and in that case start dropping the _low_ frequency components instead?
How exactly do you make a chargeback? Presumably just send printouts of the original auction description and copies of the box of what actually arrived to the credit card company? Would they make a chargeback on such a small transaction?
I personally have had a bad experience with an ebayer recently... Luckilly I only lost 45 ukp.
I wanted a 802.11g card with a specific chipset (PrismGT), so having found a seller on ebay I bid and won the auction. The description of the item in the auction was very specific, quoting the modeul number, etc.
3 weeks later (nice speedy delivery... not) I received a package, which I paid import duty on since the seller was in the states, only to discover that I had been sent an 802.11*B* card worth under 15ukp (and completely useless to me). So I tried to contact the seller to resolve the problem - the seller ignored all my emails. I opened a SquareTrade complaint which the seller ignored. The seller's account had been suspended by ebay shortly after the transaction so they obviously had complaints against him.
However, the auction was paid for over PayPal and had a "PayPal buyer protection" icon on it, so I thought that I was safe... Wrong! I logged a complaint at PayPal, expecting them to refund my money and they said that the seller sending an incorrect item isn't covered by the protection.
So what it comes down to is that if the seller had sent me what I ordered but it wasn't quite as shiny as it was described, I would've been covered, but since the seller sent me something completely different to what I ordered they won't cover me at all.
IMHO the buyer protection scheme isn't worth anything and in the future I will be treating auctions covered by the buyer protection policy with the same suspicion as the unprotected auctions. As far as I could tell from the policy terms, I was covered, but PayPal (who are part of ebay) just weaseled out of it.
Now that's funny. :)
I have yet to find anything useful that WINE will run though...
I'll get modded flamebait for this but...
:)
why do you think the government mandidated passive safety restraints in cars? Because LOTS of people don't wear seatbelts.
Whilest it's true that a very large proportion of Americans don't wear seatbelts, the same is not true around the world - we have a very high proportion of both drivers and passengers wearing seatbelts here in the UK. Infact, AFAIK the airbag system on american cars is different to UK cars because the american system has to catch people who are travelling at an unrestrained 70mph _because_ of the lack of seatbelt use. What does this show? well I leave it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Now we all know that su-ing to root is easy for when you need it, but it is something that will piss off and confound most users.
Most Windows converts won't be using the shell, they'll be using the pretty GUI tools to configure everything... And you know what, in the Gnome tools shipped with Fedora, there is no concept of having to "su to root", it simply prompts you for the root password if you try and do something that requires it. Yes, ok, some of the really challenged users might find it confusing to have to enter a password when they hit the "destroy my whole computer" button, but then again, if they're that challenged then it probably just saved them from breaking their system.
Having to enter the root password is less convenient than just being allowed to do whatever you want, but it adds another level of confirmation when doing dangerous things, and do we *really* want to seriously compromise the security of the system just so some windows users can install their spyware easier?
Does it have unrivalled compatability with all the worms and trojans too? :)
Linux: XMMS/MPlayer (DVD's sometimes an issue)
I use xine for DVDs, which works well. Although having said that, xine doesn't draw the menus quite right on the FireFly DVDs (ogle does, but I don't like ogle).
Linux: GAIM
Whilst I use Gaim, it really does wind me up - doesn't support chat sessions properly in MSN (and they seem to indicate they're not going to in the near future) and the auto reconnect stuff insists on popping up a window when it reconnects instead of quietly doing it in the background. Although MSN is annoying anyway since it only allows 1 machine to log in at once (I only use it because I can't convince the people I talk to to use a sane system).
The only thing I used to use Windows for was Excel, so about 2 years ago I decided that OOo had gotten good enough and binned Windows entirely - never looked back. (Ok, I do keep a Windows box around for testing my web sites against IE's brokenness but that machine stays firmly turned off most of the time).
You get the source code for everything in the box with the CDs. The GPL ensures that binaries cannot be distributed without also giving away the source code - if you're not giving somebody a binary copy, they don't need the source code either.
Although there's nothing really stopping a 3rd party getting a copy of RHEL and putting it up for download. However, in reality I suspect most people who will use RHEL instead of Fedora are businesses who will want the official release so they can easilly get their security updates, etc, rather than some (completely legal) ripped off version.
However, Fedora is basically RH Enterprise unstable.
The Fedora development path has quite supprised me - when Fedora was originally announced I was under the impression that they were moving away from the traditional "versioned" release strategy and were going to be going rolling updates instead. i.e. if you keep your system up to date you always get the latest toys and you avoid the 6 monthly big upgrade where all the boxes have to be shut down and upgraded to the new version. Unforuntately this hasn't happened and in a couple of weeks we will all be shuting down our servers and upgrading them to Fedora Core 2.
Isn't that something companies pay their IT staff for?
:)
So what do you get for the (huge) price you pay for the OS? Oh that's right, MS say that you don't need to spend as much on sysadmins because windows requires less administration and patching than a unix.. Umm...
Hello? Automatic updates? You haven't been paying attention, have you?
Yes, there are automatic updates if you know enough to turn them on. Most users don't know enough to turn them on though, and automatic updates are no substitute for a qualified engineer because the engineer can check the patch hasn't broken anything else. (When your car manufacturer sends you the part to fix the brakes and you fit it yourself, what do you do if the part has a bug in it that stops the engine running? A qualified engineer might be able to do something about it).
I believe you can automate patching for most if not all of Linux flavors also.
Correct, but that wasn't my point - your system is not being fixed by a qualified engineer. On a free system that's not unepected, but if you're paying 4 grand for your operating system and there was a major bug found in it, shouldn't you expect the vendor to send out someone qualified to patch up your system and make sure the patch didn't break something?
Sticking with the (probably quite bad) car analagy, if you buy a car and the manufacturer discovers that the brakes don't work if you're doing over 60mph, do you only expect to find out about it and get it fixed if you knew enough to sign up for the manufacturer's mailing lists and connected the "warn me if my brakes are buggered" light yourself?
If a car company finds a problem with a car they sold you, they will send you a letter (a real letter, not an email that will probably be mistaken for spam) asking you to take your car to the dealer where a qualified engineer will fix the problem.
Microsoft, on the other hand (or indeed any software vendor) don't mail you, they post a note on their website (how many people regularly check the MS website?) and let you download a patch which you have to install yourself.
If your car manufacturer discovered a problem with the brakes on your car and posted a small notice on their website saying that you could order the replacement part and fit it yourself, there would be hell to pay.
There will always be security problems with software (although there shouldn't be this many), and if you've downloaded a free OS like Linux then you should expect to have to apply the patches yourself, or pay for an engineer to apply them. But if you pay 3,911.57 for the 50 client edition of Windows Advanced Server (I just checked on dabs.com - that's how much they're selling it for) should you not expect for Microsoft to actually tell you when they have found a critical bug, and pay for a qualified engineer to fix it for you?
In a twisted way it'd be fun to see MS being forced to recall and fix all their broken products - would cost them quite a lot to have a few million computers sent to them, fixed and shipped out again :)
Should we put gun makers in jail b/c their products are used to kill people.
You might put the gun makers in jail if their guns backfire and kill a few million gun owners because of a design flaw though.
Similarly, I suspect if it was discovered that you could disconnect the brakes on all the cars in a 10 mile radius by sending out a radio signal I suspect both the manufacturer and the person who sent the signal would be held responsible.
I suspect a year from now slashdot will still be reporting weekly about the latest worm to hit Microsoft systems.
At least the news organisations are making people aware (to some extent) that this is a problem with Windows - almost all the BBC reports about worms and trojans have clearly stated "this does not affect Linux or Mac systems". Unfortunately, if a lot of clueless home users switch over to Linux, we are likley to see Linux worms and trojans doing the rounds - yes, Linux is inherently more secure (your mail reader doesn't automatically execute attachments, your browser doesn't automatically install the latest spyware when you visit your favorite pr0n site), but if you never update you'll still get cracked (infact I suspect an unsecured RedHat 6.0 system would be cracked quicker than an unsecured Win95 box)
Hard Drive - Noisy little beast you can actually have it free hanging in the pc
In my experience, hard drives don't take well to being free-hanging. One of my drives died very soon after I tried suspending it from rubber to keep the noise down and I've heard other people say that rubber mountings can impact the seek times of the drive.
All it takes to get rich without making anything good is to track down those stupid enough to buy your crap.
Ah, but those stupid enough to buy the crap usually aren't sensible enough to use a browser that blocks popups. When will advertisers learn that if you make annoying adverts then people will take measures to remove them. If you make well targeted, non-intrusive or interesting ads then people might actually pay attention to them.
When I'm watching TV I usually skip through the breaks (I use MythTV) because they're so filled with ads specifically designed to be annoying. But if, before I hit skip, an un-annoying, funny ad comes on I'll probably not skip it.
APS had the advantage of allowing the cameras to be quite a bit smaller than 35mm before good quality digital cameras were affordable. Of course, these days, anyone wanting a small camera will get a pocket sized 2MP digital camera.
The plane--because it had to fly at Mach 2-plus--needed very careful design for heat-dissipation reasons.
Is there any reason the skin of a plane can't be fitted out with the heat shield tiles used on the shuttle? As I understand it, rather than just insulating the craft they actually re-radiate the heat to remain cool.
Having said that, maybe suborbital passenger flight will become a reality before someone builds another supersonic passenger jet (which would make supersonic jets rather redundent)...
NTSC is crap because it came first, and because it had backwards compatibility. NTSC hacked color onto the existing black-and-white signal in a way that allowed black-and-white TV's to still recieve the old signal - without requirng two channels.
The same applies to PAL - the colour subcarrier is stuffed into a backward compatible B&W signal so the old B&W TVs can still see it.
The European Digital TV system (which, like GSM, will likely become the worldwide standard), DVB-T, is a fine system.
For the record, DVB-T really sucks in the UK ATM because it doesn't have (nor has ever had, even on the old OnDigital) (m)any good channels.
In the UK we have no good digital TV systems - DVB-T has sod all channels, digital cable is all propriatory and Sky refuse to release a CAM to decode the signal so my MythTV system has to encode the analogue signal from my sky decoder instead of being able to just grab the MPEG2 stream off the dish. Also, the only way to get 5.1 surround on Sky is to spend a lot of money on Sky Plus (Sky's version of TiVo) - none of the plain decoder boxes will provide a 5.1 output.