Does gene therapy, which has been a reality for some time, change your DNA? I suppose, even if it did, it'd take some time to propagate entirely through the body.
Most fraud is due to insiders:
1) The reality is that a single corrupt official can simply change someone's record of biometrics in the ID card database, so no matter how strong the crypto is in the card, any kind of direct access to to backend systems is going to be the weak spot.
2) Despite banks insisting on super-strength SSL crypto (https) in ecommerce sites, the banks themselves still use unencrypted X25 and ISDN links. Yes, really. Any insider can tap into the links and capture "useful" information.
Either you want a portrait screen with the same aspect ratio as an A4 sheet, or, a landscape screen with the x-y aspect swapped.
The former allows you to edit a page at a time, the latter allows two pages side by side.
One of the problems that the larger displays face is that either the illunication is uneven, or if you sit somewhat close to them the viewing angle varies across the screen and causes the perception of illumination to vary.
A colleague has one of the huge Apple cinema screens, great for graphics work but is almost too big for text work as you have to turn your head to see the whole screen (given the cramped working conditions!).
the big problem with logging from java web pages is that many programmers forget that the server is multi-threaded; the answer is to have a local variable created at the start of each page from a static synchronized number which allows you to track which thread is generating the debug.
it was once said "noone ever got fired for buying IBM".
IBM were arrogant, dictated prices, killed off 3rd party compatibility and used FUD to defend themselves. IBM dominated the computer business, so much so that their personal computer system, based on the 8088, was able to defeat the many rivals which were much more sophisticated. Many people despised IBM, and people loved Microsoft for as the latter offered the freedom and flexibility people wanted.
IBM fell from grace, and Microsoft rose up as the Good Guys.
Microsoft are now arrogant, dominate the market, kill third party products off using undocumented APIs + patents + incompatibilities caused by random patching changes. People despise Microsoft's attitude.
Meanwhile, IBM have embraced OpenSource and are often seen as the Good Guys.
People think Microsoft are unstoppable... but will they collapse under their own legacies? Will another organisation take their place and dominate, and could that be Apple (IMHO not) or IBM (IMHO not). Can Sun Microsystems return from the dead with Solaris on x86?
Personally, I can't wait till the antique architecture and 8088-compatibility legacy of the x86 dies forever. The PowerPC architecture is sweet; Sun's sparc is not bad at all. Arm is almost too primitive (ideal for handhelds). Alpha has been killed by HPaq. It's an exciting time to be an observer, and I'm glad I'm not betting the farm on which computing platform and OS will be the next king!
what's a server doing with a graphics card anyway? Ok, I'll admit that installing linux with a graphical terminal, as a one-off special install is easier, but server installs should be *automated* (ie scripted) for predictable re-creation of a system ensuring compatibility.
Has noone in the windows world learned from Sun, who've had serial consoles which allow *everything* to be controlled remotely using only a character interface?
How we laugh, on the rare occasion we visit a computer room to replace a dead hard drive, at the number of windows admin people clustered round non-booting servers, all with monitors and keyboards on trolleys.
Even now, IPMI and serial consoles on x86 systems are years behind Sun and Lights Out Management (lom).
> You mean to tell me Linux is already
> the most secure, bulletproof OS available?
> What could they possibly have to improve?
well, there were quite a few bugs introduced into 2.6.11 since 2.6.10, such as breaking IP networking over USB (something that caused quite a problem for many people (including me!).
am I the only person who things that the break-neck introduction of more features (bloat) into the kernel is taking priority over stability and testing?
"now Linus is going to develop his own tool for managing the kernel code instead of using something that's already available"
so, how soon till the linux kernel forks and we have a Linus version and a Tridge version (Tridgux?)? We already saw XF86 fork and people seem to have forgotten already.
On the one hand, a fork has *some* benefits, but on the other, it'll make Microsoft rub their hands in glee - dissent amongst the enemy and all that.
"digital video broadcasting - terrestrial" (DVB-T) (i.e. broadcast from antenna masts rather than satellite) is well established all over Europe.
the over-air modulation scheme DVB-T uses is quite robust and copes with multi-path propagation, fading and other problems. early cheap set top boxes (STB) were prone to interference, but modern ones are pretty good. In Germany they even have receivers on trains and buses, as the system copes with moving receivers.
As I understand it, the replacement for radio, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) is a similar technology, refined somewhat, to allow car radios to receive the digital stream without the usual drop-outs.
terrestrial digital TV was trialled in USA, but unfortunately the trend in the USA to try and lead the market before the technology is either fully working, reliable or standards based meant that it was not a big success - the modulation scheme meant that a lot of people got a much poorer picture than with the old analogue. whether anyone in USA is brave enough to try again and change to the working standard, DVB-T.
As an aside, it should be noticed that whilst DVB-T and DAB *could* be used to give a few more channels with a higher quality than the older analogue systems, in practise in the UK, far too much digital compression is used in order to squeeze in lots more channels, and thus either the picture quality suffers from mpeg artifacts or on the radio mpeg distortion can be clearly heard; useful links: http://www.david.robinson.org/commsbill/ http://www.techmind.org/digital/
"put it back in the horse", said one visitor to the US on drinking American beer!
true, there are many people who only care that their drink is cold & not water, but there are many people who really enjoy beer and discovering new beers. try the Flying Saucer pub in Forth Worth TX for example.
the real tragedy about Budweiser is that the original Czech product, http://www.budvar.cz/ Budweiser Budvar is a really nice beer.
I used Debian stable, with a hand-picked items from testing, on my firewall (iptables, plus various proxies).
It never goes down, except if there's a power failure, and to be honest I usually forget it's there!
However, my SuSE-running desktops and laptop are kept up to date because I use bluetooth, want the latest/best KDE, and provide the best support for my hardware. They get rebooted once a week or so as and when I tweak something.
I read an article about the costs of employing skilled production line workers.
In USA, over US$3000 per month
In Europe, over US$2500 per month
In China, far less than US$300 per month, often as little as $150
So, the next time anyone/.'s who work in electronics or computer manufacturing ask for a payrise, remind yourself you're already being paid as much as TWENTY TIMES MORE than your Chinese competitor's employees.
I heard a similar story about some salesmen who insisted on taking an expensive laptop to show the engineers in an atomic energy lab their new software. The changed into the clothes provided, having signed the terms and conditions, and at the end of the "show", when they tried to leave, they had to leave their nice laptop behind despite much protesting.
I remember seeing Chicken Run, a UK claymation comedy, in a movie theater [Cinema to we in the UK] when visiting the US. I laughed out loud when the US audience didn't, and quite frequently, the US audience members laughed and I didn't.
It's damn hard to please audiences round the world, hence Hollywood's reliance on special effects, fast action and big explosions.
How about YOU take a bit more control of your life: go join your local drama group or amateur theatrics club, get a camcorder, make your own movies, do something creative rather than passively soak up what the world throws at you!
I'm sure this guy in Malaysia who was mutilated for his biometric key to a mercedes now wishes it had some sort of electronic key instead... lucky for him it didn't need a retina scan otherwise he'd be a prime tester of a bionic eye!
Me, I'm never going to use anything that required an imprint of my penis, just in case of hijackers!
a Zaurus has a higher resolution screen - full VGA
- runs linux natively - free development environment, no cryptographic locking down of hardware - no proprietary protocols/interfaces (excepting the connectors are, which is the same problem as all mobile devices) - just regular IRDA, compact flash, USB, SD slots.
I've found my Zaurus 860, running Cacko replacement ROM to be far more resilient than my previous Palm T3 when networking. A full firewall on a portable device? Only with linux.
Check out www.oesf.org for more details of the community around the Zaurus, and places to download movie players etc.
There are quite a few games, as well as emulators for other handhelds; people have even managed to run POSE, the Palm emulator on it, which means you could run a lot of PalmOS4 games.
However, the killer to the PSP and Nintendo DS and the Zodiac are their accelerated video, something not all Zaurus models have or can take full advantage of (older ones have the ATI LCD accelerator/controller in them, newer models are PXA270 which controls the LCD itself).
to respond to the troll... DVI is great! Firewire too!
but HDMI will be the adopted standard in the long run? Why? because it allows encryption of the video signal, which the content providers (MPAA etc) demand in order to release high definition video formatted movies.
First you could LART people remotely using SLTP - simple LART transfer protocol, but now you can do remote massages with Asterisk!
Asterisk@Home 0.2 iso released
November 24, 2004 ...
Asterisk@Home also has a built in xPL agent that send out massages with CallerID and voicemail information.
I'm a permie in the UK, and develop software for a major telco, which is used only in-house or by our customers (think portal, think intranet). I would be very unhappy if I was a contractor and they took my software and didn't pay me to write it. I think most slashdotters want to be paid for their work too.
I thus try to ensure I have licenses for all my software, and if I use a shareware package, I register it. However, I've rarely had any luck getting my employers to buy shareware, only one previous employer I've had even bothered to buy a license for WinZip, they also bought license(s) for SuSE linux.
If I wrote software products for general sale, I would make a reasonable effort to prevent casual piracy, but it would be a tricky balance between upsetting customers and getting ripped off! I would rather sell 1000 copies and refund say 20 users, than only sell 500 copies and know there were 500 rip-offs. I would hope I'd be supporting, maintaining, and improving the package sufficiently well that if a version's protection was broken, people would want the latest version and thus buy/upgrade anyway.
I would strongly consider using some sort of dongle, almost certainly a USB dongle, and allow customer to install the application as many times as they wanted. The dongle would also only enable critical features such as opening files read/write, so that the customer could share files with non-registered users.
I would only use a dongle which had strong crypto, so it couldn't be copied (easily).
I would also ensure that my product was clearly labelled that it was dongle-protected so that people would know they have a choice.
there's nothing in the article to suggest that a dual-core amd64 can be used in a dual-cpu motherboard?
I would think that AMD will have to make multi-cpu versions of the dual-core chips, to support the inter-cpu comms, just as there are 1xx, 2xx, 4xx and 8xx versions of the regular opterons. But it'd be cool to cheaply upgrade a dual mobo to quad!
We have some dual-cpu opterons tyan motherboard machines here, and they are awesomely quick - we use FreeBSD, amd64 where possible but too often i386 mode because java and other things aren't supported in 64 bit mode at all yet.
rc5-72 rating is about 9M keys per second, twice that of a P4 2.8GHz machine; however, they are slaughtered by a dual Apple G5 system which achieves nearly FOUR TIMES the performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Does gene therapy, which has been a reality for some time, change your DNA? I suppose, even if it did, it'd take some time to propagate entirely through the body.
Most fraud is due to insiders:
1) The reality is that a single corrupt official can simply change someone's record of biometrics in the ID card database, so no matter how strong the crypto is in the card, any kind of direct access to to backend systems is going to be the weak spot.
2) Despite banks insisting on super-strength SSL crypto (https) in ecommerce sites, the banks themselves still use unencrypted X25 and ISDN links. Yes, really. Any insider can tap into the links and capture "useful" information.
The former allows you to edit a page at a time, the latter allows two pages side by side.
One of the problems that the larger displays face is that either the illunication is uneven, or if you sit somewhat close to them the viewing angle varies across the screen and causes the perception of illumination to vary.
A colleague has one of the huge Apple cinema screens, great for graphics work but is almost too big for text work as you have to turn your head to see the whole screen (given the cramped working conditions!).
agreed, log4j is excellent
the big problem with logging from java web pages is that many programmers forget that the server is multi-threaded; the answer is to have a local variable created at the start of each page from a static synchronized number which allows you to track which thread is generating the debug.
it was once said "noone ever got fired for buying IBM".
IBM were arrogant, dictated prices, killed off 3rd party compatibility and used FUD to defend themselves. IBM dominated the computer business, so much so that their personal computer system, based on the 8088, was able to defeat the many rivals which were much more sophisticated. Many people despised IBM, and people loved Microsoft for as the latter offered the freedom and flexibility people wanted.
IBM fell from grace, and Microsoft rose up as the Good Guys.
Microsoft are now arrogant, dominate the market, kill third party products off using undocumented APIs + patents + incompatibilities caused by random patching changes. People despise Microsoft's attitude.
Meanwhile, IBM have embraced OpenSource and are often seen as the Good Guys.
People think Microsoft are unstoppable... but will they collapse under their own legacies? Will another organisation take their place and dominate, and could that be Apple (IMHO not) or IBM (IMHO not). Can Sun Microsystems return from the dead with Solaris on x86?
Personally, I can't wait till the antique architecture and 8088-compatibility legacy of the x86 dies forever. The PowerPC architecture is sweet; Sun's sparc is not bad at all. Arm is almost too primitive (ideal for handhelds). Alpha has been killed by HPaq. It's an exciting time to be an observer, and I'm glad I'm not betting the farm on which computing platform and OS will be the next king!
don't worry, you're not an alcoholic till you drink more than your doctor!
what's a server doing with a graphics card anyway? Ok, I'll admit that installing linux with a graphical terminal, as a one-off special install is easier, but server installs should be *automated* (ie scripted) for predictable re-creation of a system ensuring compatibility.
Has noone in the windows world learned from Sun, who've had serial consoles which allow *everything* to be controlled remotely using only a character interface?
How we laugh, on the rare occasion we visit a computer room to replace a dead hard drive, at the number of windows admin people clustered round non-booting servers, all with monitors and keyboards on trolleys.
Even now, IPMI and serial consoles on x86 systems are years behind Sun and Lights Out Management (lom).
> the most secure, bulletproof OS available?
> What could they possibly have to improve?
well, there were quite a few bugs introduced into 2.6.11 since 2.6.10, such as breaking IP networking over USB (something that caused quite a problem for many people (including me!).
am I the only person who things that the break-neck introduction of more features (bloat) into the kernel is taking priority over stability and testing?
so, how soon till the linux kernel forks and we have a Linus version and a Tridge version (Tridgux?)? We already saw XF86 fork and people seem to have forgotten already.
On the one hand, a fork has *some* benefits, but on the other, it'll make Microsoft rub their hands in glee - dissent amongst the enemy and all that.
Useful site about ATSC, its pros and cons:i ndex.sh tml
http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/atsc/
"digital video broadcasting - terrestrial" (DVB-T) (i.e. broadcast from antenna masts rather than satellite) is well established all over Europe.
http://www.techmind.org/digital/
the over-air modulation scheme DVB-T uses is quite robust and copes with multi-path propagation, fading and other problems. early cheap set top boxes (STB) were prone to interference, but modern ones are pretty good. In Germany they even have receivers on trains and buses, as the system copes with moving receivers.
As I understand it, the replacement for radio, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) is a similar technology, refined somewhat, to allow car radios to receive the digital stream without the usual drop-outs.
terrestrial digital TV was trialled in USA, but unfortunately the trend in the USA to try and lead the market before the technology is either fully working, reliable or standards based meant that it was not a big success - the modulation scheme meant that a lot of people got a much poorer picture than with the old analogue. whether anyone in USA is brave enough to try again and change to the working standard, DVB-T.
As an aside, it should be noticed that whilst DVB-T and DAB *could* be used to give a few more channels with a higher quality than the older analogue systems, in practise in the UK, far too much digital compression is used in order to squeeze in lots more channels, and thus either the picture quality suffers from mpeg artifacts or on the radio mpeg distortion can be clearly heard; useful links:
http://www.david.robinson.org/commsbill/
"put it back in the horse", said one visitor to the US on drinking American beer!
true, there are many people who only care that their drink is cold & not water, but there are many people who really enjoy beer and discovering new beers. try the Flying Saucer pub in Forth Worth TX for example.
the real tragedy about Budweiser is that the original Czech product, http://www.budvar.cz/ Budweiser Budvar is a really nice beer.
I used Debian stable, with a hand-picked items from testing, on my firewall (iptables, plus various proxies).
It never goes down, except if there's a power failure, and to be honest I usually forget it's there!
However, my SuSE-running desktops and laptop are kept up to date because I use bluetooth, want the latest/best KDE, and provide the best support for my hardware. They get rebooted once a week or so as and when I tweak something.
Use the right tool for the right job.
I read an article about the costs of employing skilled production line workers.
/.'s who work in electronics or computer manufacturing ask for a payrise, remind yourself you're already being paid as much as TWENTY TIMES MORE than your Chinese competitor's employees.
In USA, over US$3000 per month
In Europe, over US$2500 per month
In China, far less than US$300 per month, often as little as $150
So, the next time anyone
I heard a similar story about some salesmen who insisted on taking an expensive laptop to show the engineers in an atomic energy lab their new software. The changed into the clothes provided, having signed the terms and conditions, and at the end of the "show", when they tried to leave, they had to leave their nice laptop behind despite much protesting.
hasn't it been proven that windows cheats during boot-up and pre-loads the browser's home page before the browser starts?
so, if I stick "wget www.google.com" into the linux network script, does this make Linux the winner?
we, back in Europe, didn't, and now you've managed to foist your evil apon us!
away foul fiends of DRM, begone, in the name of all that is good, begone!
- - - - - - - - - -
mod me down, ye drm-loving people who don't understand English humour, if ye dare, you're probably just RIAA lackeys undercover
I remember seeing Chicken Run, a UK claymation comedy, in a movie theater [Cinema to we in the UK] when visiting the US. I laughed out loud when the US audience didn't, and quite frequently, the US audience members laughed and I didn't.
It's damn hard to please audiences round the world, hence Hollywood's reliance on special effects, fast action and big explosions.
How about YOU take a bit more control of your life: go join your local drama group or amateur theatrics club, get a camcorder, make your own movies, do something creative rather than passively soak up what the world throws at you!
I'm sure this guy in Malaysia who was mutilated for his biometric key to a mercedes now wishes it had some sort of electronic key instead... lucky for him it didn't need a retina scan otherwise he'd be a prime tester of a bionic eye!
Me, I'm never going to use anything that required an imprint of my penis, just in case of hijackers!
a Zaurus has a higher resolution screen - full VGA
- runs linux natively
- free development environment, no cryptographic locking down of hardware
- no proprietary protocols/interfaces (excepting the connectors are, which is the same problem as all mobile devices) - just regular IRDA, compact flash, USB, SD slots.
I've found my Zaurus 860, running Cacko replacement ROM to be far more resilient than my previous Palm T3 when networking. A full firewall on a portable device? Only with linux.
Check out www.oesf.org for more details of the community around the Zaurus, and places to download movie players etc.
There are quite a few games, as well as emulators for other handhelds; people have even managed to run POSE, the Palm emulator on it, which means you could run a lot of PalmOS4 games.
However, the killer to the PSP and Nintendo DS and the Zodiac are their accelerated video, something not all Zaurus models have or can take full advantage of (older ones have the ATI LCD accelerator/controller in them, newer models are PXA270 which controls the LCD itself).
to respond to the troll... DVI is great! Firewire too!
but HDMI will be the adopted standard in the long run? Why? because it allows encryption of the video signal, which the content providers (MPAA etc) demand in order to release high definition video formatted movies.
you are a troll and I claim my five free iTunes tracks.
First you could LART people remotely using SLTP - simple LART transfer protocol, but now you can do remote massages with Asterisk!
Asterisk@Home 0.2 iso released
...
November 24, 2004
Asterisk@Home also has a built in xPL agent that send out massages with CallerID and voicemail information.
I'm a permie in the UK, and develop software for a major telco, which is used only in-house or by our customers (think portal, think intranet). I would be very unhappy if I was a contractor and they took my software and didn't pay me to write it. I think most slashdotters want to be paid for their work too.
I thus try to ensure I have licenses for all my software, and if I use a shareware package, I register it. However, I've rarely had any luck getting my employers to buy shareware, only one previous employer I've had even bothered to buy a license for WinZip, they also bought license(s) for SuSE linux.
If I wrote software products for general sale, I would make a reasonable effort to prevent casual piracy, but it would be a tricky balance between upsetting customers and getting ripped off! I would rather sell 1000 copies and refund say 20 users, than only sell 500 copies and know there were 500 rip-offs. I would hope I'd be supporting, maintaining, and improving the package sufficiently well that if a version's protection was broken, people would want the latest version and thus buy/upgrade anyway.
I would strongly consider using some sort of dongle, almost certainly a USB dongle, and allow customer to install the application as many times as they wanted. The dongle would also only enable critical features such as opening files read/write, so that the customer could share files with non-registered users.
I would only use a dongle which had strong crypto, so it couldn't be copied (easily).
I would also ensure that my product was clearly labelled that it was dongle-protected so that people would know they have a choice.
there's nothing in the article to suggest that a dual-core amd64 can be used in a dual-cpu motherboard?
I would think that AMD will have to make multi-cpu versions of the dual-core chips, to support the inter-cpu comms, just as there are 1xx, 2xx, 4xx and 8xx versions of the regular opterons. But it'd be cool to cheaply upgrade a dual mobo to quad!
We have some dual-cpu opterons tyan motherboard machines here, and they are awesomely quick - we use FreeBSD, amd64 where possible but too often i386 mode because java and other things aren't supported in 64 bit mode at all yet.
rc5-72 rating is about 9M keys per second, twice that of a P4 2.8GHz machine; however, they are slaughtered by a dual Apple G5 system which achieves nearly FOUR TIMES the performance.
They're lying for money
I recall an old adage.. "when noone believes a man's lies any more, he hires a lawyer to tell them for him".
Proof? SCO vs linux/IBM.