I forward all spams I get that offer Microsoft software on to MS.
I figure that I'll let MS spend their money on going after the spammers - after all, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, and is useful to me.
I get a nice auto-ack from MS with a tracking number for each report. What does that mean? That I get a nice auto-ack from MS with a tracking number - I have no way of knowing for sure that they do anything with the reports.
But hey, it if nukes a spammer and/or costs MS money, then it's worth it.
I am waiting for the *next* release..
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
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· Score: 1
I am waiting on the *next* release, which, as I understand it, will have the GATOS drivers for the various ATI All-in-wonder cards merged in by default.
What that means is that, out of the box, the ATI Radeon 7500 All-in-wonder will have accelerated 3D, video capture, and TV tuner support.
The current CVS image has these built in, but as I understood it, they did not want to merge that into this release.
Of course, for the newer cards (R300 and later) the 3D will still require the ATI FGLRX driver, which does NOT support the GATOS multimedia extensions, but hopefully, when the GATOS stuff is in the main release, then ATI will support it in the next fglrx release thereafter.
This isn't the Fleet Of Worlds - that would be a set of planets with fusion reactors in orbit.
Obviously, this is Cueball- and woe betide anybody who attempts a landing there - you won't be pissing a Monolith off, you will be converting yourself (and a chunk of the antimatter planet) into energy.
I wasn't aware that it had been outsourced - that's a shame, as their support had been excellent.
That might explain why I've not gotten a response to a request to add some more optional DNSRBLs to the Greymail system, why I was turned down flat on a suggestion that SKTC offer DNS names in the.sktc.net domain (so that I could have had a name assigned to my firewall, e.g. hagood.sktc.net).
Some of us block the REFERER header out of privacy concerns, since many browsers do not distinguish between a GET kicked off due to a page element like an IMG tag, and a link click.
May I make the following suggestions?
If you MUST use a referrer block, please consider simply rate limiting non-matching requests to a very low rate, like 2kB a second. That will keep your bandwidth down, yet allow the paranoid among us to still see your image (albeit after a wait).
Use a CGI to provide the image, and have the page in question generate the link dynamically - that way, for the next five minutes your image might be visible as http://example.com/image.cgi?pic=foo.gif&key=59823 4 and later the key value may be different. That way, you don't rely upon a spoofable header. Yes, this makes your image non-cachable, but if you are using referrer blocking, perhaps that is not a bad thing?
Re:um, car's aren't rockets...
on
Hondas in Space
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Not just the fact that Honda makes many hundreds of thousands of cars, and has been doing so for years.
A Honda does not push the envelope. A Ferrari does. That is why a Ferrari will break down more often, on a per-mile basis, than a Honda.
Now, if you did NOT push a Ferrari to the envelope, it would not break down as much (but then, what would the point of owning a Ferrari be?)
Now, when one day we can build a vehicle that can go into space with as much operational margin as a Honda has for its purpose, then the space vehicle will be as reliable as a Honda.
However, in order for that day to come to pass, we will have to have some form of power plant that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have now, in order to have the power to lift a vehicle into space slowly, and return it slowly. We will have to have some form of propulsion that is not limited by the rocket equation - reactionless thrusters, antigravity, or some other form of sci-fi doubletalk drive.
We don't have them yet. We don't have them on the drawing board yet. We don't even have any good theories that would lead to such drives any time soon.
Now, I agree with the concept of the article - make the rockets as simple as possible, and they will be more reliable. This means don't try for reusability as it is a false economy - every kilo of mass you add to the ship to support reuse is a kilo of cargo you cannot lift.
Personally, I am in favor of what I call BPR's - Big Paper Rockets. Imagine a huge Estes rocket - cellulose exterior, solid fuel interior, that provides you with 90% of the delta-V to get into orbit. The last 10% is provided by a hybrid rocket - solid fuel, liquid oxidizer, so that you can throttle it and get precicely what you need to get into your target orbit.
Most non-living cargos are launched with a system that is, say 99% reliable - and if you roll cloud-cloud, oh well, launch another - they are cheap.
Man rated cargos go up in a Space Honda - a vehicle designed to go into orbit carrying just your crew, and come back with just your crew, and if it comes down to a choice between reusing it afterward and shaving a kilo off it, you shave the kilo.
Now you have cheap to mass-produce boosters, expenive (but no where NEAR as expensive as the launch costs) to build crew vehicles, and cheap cargo pods.
OK, if Paypal will not accept your credit card because you are in East Elbonia, cannot you transfer money from your bank account into your Paypal account?
Yes, it might mean giving Paypal access to a bank account - but if you are an Internet user in one of the banned countries, might it not be worth creating an account solely to tie to Paypal?
Yes, it sucks that Paypal is trying to reduce their exposure to fraud and keep their service cheap. But cannot this be worked around?
I'd take it one step further - log the IP addresses of the machines denied by the bad referrer, and report them to their ISP, and to some of the open relay/trojan blacklists.
You could even try configuring your software to use such blacklists to deny trojaned machines access completely.
Additionally, if you wanted, you could then add those IP addresses to your firewall rules to drop the requests at the firewall.
Lastly, you could teergrub them - set things up to...
Eben announced his intentions to upgrade the GPL with a new processor, a better graphics card, and more memory. This will enable resource intensive software to use the GPL as well.
So long as they don't add spinner hubs, a high wing, a fart-pipe, neon, and Type-R(etarded) stickers I think I can live with that.
The sad thing is, they have FINALLY started doing what they should have been doing from day one - namely, showing the foundation of the Federation - showing why the Federation didn't come into being UNTIL Earth started poking its collective noses into everything.
Had they launched into that, instead of the "Temporal cold war" bullshit (and the Xindi weapon bullshit), they could have caught and held the fans' attention.
But the Temporal Cold war crap turned off a lot of people.
And the Xindi weapon arc turned off many more people.
And that whole "Go back in time to WWII and fight the Nazis, who are working with fugly aliens"... well, the less said about it the better, save that it, too, served to turn off more people.
So when they FINALLY start showing the founding of the Federation - when they finally explain how the stuck-up asshole Vulcans of the first seasons became the race we knew in TOS/TNG/DSV, how the alliances formed because of Starfleet, and how the Romulan wars started - there were no significant viewers left.
Which is a shame, as the series is finally starting to show some potential.
True, a restricted stock may not be sold today. That is not my point.
A stock option is normally issued at very nearly today's market price for a stock, and is nothing more than the guarantee that stock may be purchased at that price.
If gasoline is $1.759 a gallon, and I offer you a piece of paper saying "I guarantee you can buy a gallon of gasoline from me for $1.759", how much is that paper worth right now.
Nothing, as you can go to the gas station and buy that gas for that price without my paper.
Now, if gas goes to $2.759 tomorrow, then that paper is worth $1.00.
If the price of gas goes to $1.009 tomorrow (fat chance), then the paper has no value whatsoever.
Now, if I give you a piece of paper that says "I guarantee you 1 gallon of gas" then that paper is worth $1.759 today. If gas goes to $1.00 a gallon, then it is STILL worth $1.00.
And that is my point - that if Google is actually issuing stock, not options, then they are doing something unusual and worthy of respect.
As I read the article, Google awarded *stock*, not stock options - and I find that significant.
Rather than rewarding employees with paper that has no real value today (and which costs the company no real money today) and which might have value in the future, they are rewarding the employees with paper that has value today, and probably will have value in the future (as well as costing the company real money today).
If that is the case, then kudos to Google.
If the linked story is incorrect and this is nothing more than options - then I retract my kudos.
Things a soldier needs to know about encryption and code breaking:
How to use his encryption equipment in a secure fashion (e.g. not using old codes or keys)
How to keep his encryption equipment from falling into enemy hands.
How to recognise enemy encryption equipment, ranging from simple notepads with Civil-War style encryption cyphers to flash disks with encryption codes.
How not to screw up any enemy encryption gear before the real cryptographers show up.
How to recognize encrypted messages on the battlefield (e.g. code talkers on the radio, code scrawled on a building)
Above and beyond that is gravy - if some soldier who's MOS is not codebreaking wants to try when he isn't doing his MOS, great.
Re:I guess someone at TiVo downloaded Mythtv
on
TiVo to Offer SDK
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that prediction was in The Rolling Stones, not The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Parse it again, Sam:
The enemy (Microsoft) of my enemy (spammers)...
I forward all spams I get that offer Microsoft software on to MS.
I figure that I'll let MS spend their money on going after the spammers - after all, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, and is useful to me.
I get a nice auto-ack from MS with a tracking number for each report. What does that mean? That I get a nice auto-ack from MS with a tracking number - I have no way of knowing for sure that they do anything with the reports.
But hey, it if nukes a spammer and/or costs MS money, then it's worth it.
I am waiting on the *next* release, which, as I understand it, will have the GATOS drivers for the various ATI All-in-wonder cards merged in by default.
What that means is that, out of the box, the ATI Radeon 7500 All-in-wonder will have accelerated 3D, video capture, and TV tuner support.
The current CVS image has these built in, but as I understood it, they did not want to merge that into this release.
Of course, for the newer cards (R300 and later) the 3D will still require the ATI FGLRX driver, which does NOT support the GATOS multimedia extensions, but hopefully, when the GATOS stuff is in the main release, then ATI will support it in the next fglrx release thereafter.
Now, among other things:
This isn't the Fleet Of Worlds - that would be a set of planets with fusion reactors in orbit.
Obviously, this is Cueball- and woe betide anybody who attempts a landing there - you won't be pissing a Monolith off, you will be converting yourself (and a chunk of the antimatter planet) into energy.
(It's a shame that /. does not provide a means to generate a message to a user directly, rather than this sort of approach.)
Tell you what - let's take this over to my journal...
I wasn't aware that it had been outsourced - that's a shame, as their support had been excellent.
.sktc.net domain (so that I could have had a name assigned to my firewall, e.g. hagood.sktc.net).
That might explain why I've not gotten a response to a request to add some more optional DNSRBLs to the Greymail system, why I was turned down flat on a suggestion that SKTC offer DNS names in the
Yes I am.
May I make the following suggestions?
and later the key value may be different. That way, you don't rely upon a spoofable header. Yes, this makes your image non-cachable, but if you are using referrer blocking, perhaps that is not a bad thing?
Not just the fact that Honda makes many hundreds of thousands of cars, and has been doing so for years.
A Honda does not push the envelope. A Ferrari does. That is why a Ferrari will break down more often, on a per-mile basis, than a Honda.
Now, if you did NOT push a Ferrari to the envelope, it would not break down as much (but then, what would the point of owning a Ferrari be?)
Now, when one day we can build a vehicle that can go into space with as much operational margin as a Honda has for its purpose, then the space vehicle will be as reliable as a Honda.
However, in order for that day to come to pass, we will have to have some form of power plant that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have now, in order to have the power to lift a vehicle into space slowly, and return it slowly. We will have to have some form of propulsion that is not limited by the rocket equation - reactionless thrusters, antigravity, or some other form of sci-fi doubletalk drive.
We don't have them yet. We don't have them on the drawing board yet. We don't even have any good theories that would lead to such drives any time soon.
Now, I agree with the concept of the article - make the rockets as simple as possible, and they will be more reliable. This means don't try for reusability as it is a false economy - every kilo of mass you add to the ship to support reuse is a kilo of cargo you cannot lift.
Personally, I am in favor of what I call BPR's - Big Paper Rockets. Imagine a huge Estes rocket - cellulose exterior, solid fuel interior, that provides you with 90% of the delta-V to get into orbit. The last 10% is provided by a hybrid rocket - solid fuel, liquid oxidizer, so that you can throttle it and get precicely what you need to get into your target orbit.
Most non-living cargos are launched with a system that is, say 99% reliable - and if you roll cloud-cloud, oh well, launch another - they are cheap.
Man rated cargos go up in a Space Honda - a vehicle designed to go into orbit carrying just your crew, and come back with just your crew, and if it comes down to a choice between reusing it afterward and shaving a kilo off it, you shave the kilo.
Now you have cheap to mass-produce boosters, expenive (but no where NEAR as expensive as the launch costs) to build crew vehicles, and cheap cargo pods.
OK, if Paypal will not accept your credit card because you are in East Elbonia, cannot you transfer money from your bank account into your Paypal account?
Yes, it might mean giving Paypal access to a bank account - but if you are an Internet user in one of the banned countries, might it not be worth creating an account solely to tie to Paypal?
Yes, it sucks that Paypal is trying to reduce their exposure to fraud and keep their service cheap. But cannot this be worked around?
Which is why you contact the ISP of the originating connection - to get them to clean up their act.
And if they are unwilling or unable to do so - are you really losing (for the
And you can also look for the proxied-for headers, and use them to further refine your lists.
I'd take it one step further - log the IP addresses of the machines denied by the bad referrer, and report them to their ISP, and to some of the open relay/trojan blacklists.
You could even try configuring your software to use such blacklists to deny trojaned machines access completely.
Additionally, if you wanted, you could then add those IP addresses to your firewall rules to drop the requests at the firewall.
Lastly, you could teergrub them - set things up to...
Respond...
Very...
Slowly...
To...
Their...
Request...
Handing stupid money to a spammer^W Search Engine Optimizer is much easier.
Granted, given two companies, one who is doing all of the hard work, and one that is doing the stupid stuff, I know where my money will go.
So long as they don't add spinner hubs, a high wing, a fart-pipe, neon, and Type-R(etarded) stickers I think I can live with that.
The sad thing is, they have FINALLY started doing what they should have been doing from day one - namely, showing the foundation of the Federation - showing why the Federation didn't come into being UNTIL Earth started poking its collective noses into everything.
... well, the less said about it the better, save that it, too, served to turn off more people.
Had they launched into that, instead of the "Temporal cold war" bullshit (and the Xindi weapon bullshit), they could have caught and held the fans' attention.
But the Temporal Cold war crap turned off a lot of people.
And the Xindi weapon arc turned off many more people.
And that whole "Go back in time to WWII and fight the Nazis, who are working with fugly aliens"
So when they FINALLY start showing the founding of the Federation - when they finally explain how the stuck-up asshole Vulcans of the first seasons became the race we knew in TOS/TNG/DSV, how the alliances formed because of Starfleet, and how the Romulan wars started - there were no significant viewers left.
Which is a shame, as the series is finally starting to show some potential.
True, a restricted stock may not be sold today. That is not my point.
A stock option is normally issued at very nearly today's market price for a stock, and is nothing more than the guarantee that stock may be purchased at that price.
If gasoline is $1.759 a gallon, and I offer you a piece of paper saying "I guarantee you can buy a gallon of gasoline from me for $1.759", how much is that paper worth right now.
Nothing, as you can go to the gas station and buy that gas for that price without my paper.
Now, if gas goes to $2.759 tomorrow, then that paper is worth $1.00.
If the price of gas goes to $1.009 tomorrow (fat chance), then the paper has no value whatsoever.
Now, if I give you a piece of paper that says "I guarantee you 1 gallon of gas" then that paper is worth $1.759 today. If gas goes to $1.00 a gallon, then it is STILL worth $1.00.
And that is my point - that if Google is actually issuing stock, not options, then they are doing something unusual and worthy of respect.
As I read the article, Google awarded *stock*, not stock options - and I find that significant.
Rather than rewarding employees with paper that has no real value today (and which costs the company no real money today) and which might have value in the future, they are rewarding the employees with paper that has value today, and probably will have value in the future (as well as costing the company real money today).
If that is the case, then kudos to Google.
If the linked story is incorrect and this is nothing more than options - then I retract my kudos.
"open" is a four letter word, and to Mr. Gates, it is an obscene four letter word.
Above and beyond that is gravy - if some soldier who's MOS is not codebreaking wants to try when he isn't doing his MOS, great.
Direct digital recording of Over the Air HDTV:
MythTV: Yes
Ignoring the Broadcast bit:
MythTV: Yes
It was intended as a slam against Clippy and those who created him - that they wouldn't get it right, either.
I debated putting (sic) on it, but decided that would give the joke away.
Bah - you know nothing of Free Software!
sudo make CHANNEL=new_chan install
"You have changed the channel. Your TV must reboot for this change to take effect...."
"Hi! It looks like you are watching Fear Factor. Would you like me to help you lower your IQ furthur?"
"TV update has detected 14 new updates, 5 of them critical. Install now?"
"You have changed your PVR, stereo, and snackbowl. You must re-register your TV before you continue."
"J00 5uk3r! PW3N3D!"
"Program JSPRINGER.EXE has causes an exception in GOODTASTE.DLL..."