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User: Brianwa

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  1. Re:What kind of encryption did the FBI break? on Judge Orders Child Porn Suspect To Decrypt His Hard Drives · · Score: 1

    Most encrypted .zip files do not encrypt the file names. I wouldn't be surprised if at one point it was the most commonly used encryption scheme. So yeah, that problem is definitely out there.

  2. Re:The next step is WiFi calling on Connecting Android Phones Without Carrier Networks · · Score: 1

    It might just be personal preference on my part. Not many people seem to complain about this, but I am pretty much incapable of deciphering speech when the newer GSM codecs switch to their lowest bandwith settings or try to fill in for dropped packets. To me it just seems like a bunch of speech-like sounds that don't resemble real words in any way. And the ~1 second latency (often times two cell phones) gets bothersome as well.

    I only noticed jitter once or twice. It was less severe than jitter I've experienced through normal cell connections (and even on landlines), although I'm sure it could get way worse with bad network conditions.

    In any case, that phone is broken and the carrier doesn't offer any UMA-capable phones for almost free with a contract anymore. I don't like talking on the phone anyway so meh.

  3. Re:The next step is WiFi calling on Connecting Android Phones Without Carrier Networks · · Score: 1

    My old phone had UMA, which let me connect to my carrier network through wifi alone. I generally preferred the call quality through UMA over GSM except when the network was heavily loaded. It also let me take my phone while traveling and still be able to send texts, make calls, and check voicemail from time to time without paying a dime extra or trying to buy sim cards overseas. I think that being unable to charge roaming fees is why most carriers have either discontinued or never even tried to support this.

  4. Re:The Telephone Network on Ask Slashdot: Old Technology Coexisting With New? · · Score: 1

    Yep, my parent's house had some good old balanced pair (not twisted) phone lines that were probably installed before the house even had electricity. The main phone box consisted of two copper buss bars with bolts you could tighten onto wires. It handled dialup just fine for many years.

  5. Re:I am not defending the USA on Julian Assange: "Online Totalitarianism Is Near, Entire Nations Are Intercepted" · · Score: 1

    If you do a search for "Texas police tank" you'll see that some police department does have a small armored vehicle. I suppose it might technically qualify as a tank but it has road tires and no gun on top. From what I've heard, they didn't use it much and eventually stopped driving it due to fuel costs. I don't have a source on that, is was some random guy on the Internet ;)

    And it turns out that it's much cheaper to buy bullets by the ton. I certainly hope our tax money doesn't go into buying bullets at Walmart prices.

  6. Miscellaneous suggestions on Ask Slashdot: Server Room Toolbox? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Utility knife for opening boxes and stuff.

    A cheapo multimeter. You're working with electronics, having one of these is a requirement even though many people in IT try to get by without them.

    Perhaps a soldering iron and solder sucker. Hopefully you'll never need them but weird shit happens.

    A set of precision screwdrivers is sometimes needed for taking stuff apart, and can be pushed into extra duty as pin extractors or whatever else.

    A dedicated Ethernet tester can be pretty handy too. And get a crimper for these if you don't have one already.

  7. Re:This is what Benjamin Frankin warned us about.. on Shut Up and Play Nice: How the Western World Is Limiting Free Speech · · Score: 1

    BTW, "geek" isn't an insult anymore...

  8. Re: True random. on Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation · · Score: 1

    I think even my TI-83's rand() function beats free will.

  9. Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive... on Lexmark To Exit Inkjet Printer Market · · Score: 1

    I had the same printer. We only got rid of it once all of the plastic paper guides had broken off the front, around 10 years after we bought it. I've never seen an inkjet live up to its reliability, and the price of the ink was amazing.

  10. Re:slashdot computer analogy on A (Mostly) 3-D Printed Race Car Hits 140 Km/h · · Score: 1

    They did print the uprights with Titanium EBM, but the article neglected to mention it.

  11. Re:Electric? on A (Mostly) 3-D Printed Race Car Hits 140 Km/h · · Score: 1

    It looks like they have a few specs on their website: http://www.formulagroupt.be/pages/car

    It doesn't mention their cooling system, but often these motors are oil or water cooled and have a radiator.

  12. Re:The short wheelbase looks funny on A (Mostly) 3-D Printed Race Car Hits 140 Km/h · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's because Formula Student courses are extremely tight and curvy. A shorter wheelbase gives you a smaller rotational inertia, which means you can enter and exit corners faster. This comes at the expense of high speed stability, and indeed most FSAE/FSC cars get quite unstable above 90mph.

    On top of that, a shorter car is a lighter car, and every gram counts on a race car.

  13. Re:OP here on Ask Slashdot: Best *nix Distro For a Dynamic File Server? · · Score: 1

    2. Consider just trying the trees together with symlinks (Use "find" to recurse, then ln -s"). Unless you have many tens of thousands of small files, this will work remarkably well, especially if the disk that holds the symlinks is fast and has a sensible filesystem; you could even make it a ramdisk.

    This seems like the most reasonable solution to me. I think people are getting caught up treating this like a high availability fileserver when it's really just a data acquisition project. Configure the disks to automatically mount, and then use a really simple condition to figure out which mounted disks have data on them (for example, the existence of a directory, or even just the size of the disk). Use a shell script to test this condition and then make symlinks for all of the data files.

    I don't know exactly what kind of equipment OP is working with, but some DAQ systems let you choose what size of files to divide the output into. Try choosing the largest reasonable file size to reduce the number of symlinks.

    If you really think duplicate file names are unlikely then simply don't worry about them. I would at least have the script make some sort of log so you can figure out WTF happened if you find yourself missing some data. Don't worry about security -- this is a scientific project to it's safe to assume that the root password and IP address are written in sharpie on the server anyway, probably within eyesight of a window that faces a busy street. Don't listen to the people suggesting wireless telemetry instead of sneakernet, you have at least an order of magnitude more data than would make sense for such a system.

  14. Re:The whole thing is just staggering on New Signs Voyager Is Nearing Interstellar Space · · Score: 1

    Microwave transmitters aren't exactly super efficient either.

  15. Re:Whitelisting has too much overhead on Ask Slashdot: Low-Cost Tools To Track Employees' Web Use? · · Score: 1

    Haha, that reminds me of my old school district. They blocked just about everything interesting on the Internet, *except* for Slashdot. I always assumed that the guy who controlled the blacklist was also a slashdotter. One year they experimented with giving the secretaries the power to remotely monitor computers and add sites to the district wide blocklist. I got caught browsing Slashdot and immediately unplugged the computer so that my session would disappear from the monitoring software. . . By the time I was logged back in, whoever was in charge had unblocked Slashdot :D

  16. Re:I have seen RAM retention in real life on Protecting a Laptop From Sophisticated Attacks · · Score: 1

    X11 used to do the exact same thing, it would normally show a black screen for several seconds when you stared it but it was actually showing whatever was sitting in the display buffer. I could turn off my computer for up to several seconds and still make out my background image when X restarted. That was an ancient computer too, with a power switch that actually cut all power.

  17. Re:If only Americans had heard of parks. on The Mathematics of Lawn Mowing · · Score: 1

    They can go use it whenever they want, and such parks are large enough that thousands of people can partake in all sorts of sports or other activities at the same time, from barbecuing, to playing catch, to even playing golf, without interfering with one another.

    In typical American parks you can expect to be harassed by the police for such things as being there at the wrong time of day, walking your dog in the wrong area, parking during the wrong hours, or straight up arrested for bringing a beer to your barbecue. Not to mention the random extended closures, or the super weird people who make up their own park rules and go to crazy lengths to try to enforce them.

    I'm not saying that I don't enjoy our parks because I do, but they are not a perfect replacement for having your own space.

  18. Re:Duh. on The End of the Gas Guzzler · · Score: 1

    While it is possible to patch small amounts of damage to carbon fiber, it's more complicated than fixing fiberglass and if you do it wrong, you'll have an extremely dangerous car on your hands. You really wouldn't want to trust your average crappy auto body repair place to do that safely and effectively, you would need someone with a degree in materials science. However, composites and aerospace companies are working on this all the time. In the future we will probably see more robust techniques for these sorts of repairs.

  19. Re:Free access for all... on Charity Raising Money To Buy Used Satellite · · Score: 1

    Yeah, when I was visiting Laos I was startled to come across a village with a big FTA satellite dish mounted to one of the huts. Apparently it's not that unusual for everyone to chip in for some gasoline to run a generator for long enough to watch a TV show or two. With a free internet connection, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine them getting a communal computer as well -- which could be great for them as there is almost no educational material even available in their language, and it would be easy to make such material available through the Internet.

  20. Re:Can i get the old back? on Slashdot Launches Re-Design · · Score: 1

    Seriously, last design change, I had the ability to manually revert to the old style. Is that option gone now? Maybe I'm dull but I cannot find it. . .

  21. Re:I have an idea to stop using cells for cheating on Cheaters Exposed Analyzing Statistical Anomalies · · Score: 1

    They try to do this during AP exams in high school. Most students just keep their phones in their pockets rather than risk losing it. It was also a disruption because undoubtedly some of the students who put their phones in the box forgot to turn them off and received texts or calls during the test and had to run across the room and dig through to box to silence their phones.

  22. Re:Dual stack failed? on After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function? · · Score: 1

    Except many versions of dd-wrt don't support ipv6, and those that do don't have any firewall capability for ipv6. :|

  23. Signing away all of your rights in a dorm contract doesn't actually invalidate your constitutional rights, and most places have additional tenant's rights that also cannot be signed away. Some of the stuff in my dorm contract is pretty ridiculous, including something along the lines of "you must correctly answer any question from any staff member." Nice.

    That said, they hold a lot of leverage over you. Some of my friends have stories about having their class registration blocked until they complied with orders from the housing organization or even unlawful orders from the police. They have keys to your room. They can block your access to whole buildings because you have to swipe your ID card to get in. They know when you're away on break.

    They also declared my living room a "public area" and can enter it without any notice whatsoever. I think this is standard practice in most dorms.

  24. Re:Tattered Image on WikiLeaks Releases Cache of 400,000 Iraq War Documents · · Score: 2, Informative

    My impression is that the gunship was quite far away, possibly even firing from below the horizon. The guy in the van may have just heard explosions, saw people (at least some unarmed) on the ground dying and rushed in to help. In a place where things like terrorist bombings aren't uncommon, he didn't have much of a reason to believe he was driving into an active firefight. It's not like the people on the ground were shooting back at the helicopter at any point.

  25. Re:Lucky on Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life · · Score: 1

    First task? I guess I'm doing it wrong because I'm already getting started on the electrical system and the suspension team won't start on the brakes until a while later.