Also important to understand is that the lower the transmitting frequency, the further the signal will go (given the same transmitter strength). Going from 1 Ghz to 500 Mhz and you double the transmission range without increasing the transmitter strength.
That is grossly oversimplified.
If you reduce the frequency and keep the power (and gain of the antenna) constant, the amplitude of the signal will go up, but it's not really the amplitude that matters when picking up a signal. Really, it's the background noise that's the limiting factor -- the S/N ratio, as you've already mentioned. As long as the power stays the same, and the noise level stays the same, the S/N ratio will be the same.
And I don't think you'd double the transmission range by halving the frequency. Assuming that the amplitude was what mattered and not the power (which I don't agree with), I'd expect a 41% increase (sqrt(2)) assuming you're not running into problems with line of sight or attenuation in the air and the like.
To make this equation even more difficult, the lower the transmitting frequency, the higher noise level.
That might work as a rule of thumb, but it's pretty rough.
I remember reading that 4G cell phone network will (with much lower connection speeds) will require on the order of 500MHz of radio spectrum. To put this number in prospective FCC actions slices of 10MHz for billions of $.
Right, but cell phones (and PCS and other phones, even though they distance themselves from `cell' phones) work by using lower power signals that only have to reach a tower a short distance away. Everything is broken up into `cells'.
So a person over here can be using X amount of bandwidth, and so can a person a few miles away. Dozens of people could be using the same frequency simultaneously in a single city, and tens of thousands could be nationwide.
I don't know how much bandwidth the 4G phones will require, but I seriously doubt it's 500 MHz for a single connection. But whatever the bandwidth required, many users will be able to use the same slot of bandwidth in a single city.
Wing span of only 1.7 meters. (Of course, I'll assume that we're looking only at planes that carry people. Not that R/C or free-flight planes aren't `real planes'...)
There's birds alive now with wing spans larger than 1.7 meters:)
Most software testing is not done for security. It's done checking for functionality, making sure that things work as they should.
In development of my web-based applications I scrutinize and TRY to physically break everything I can break in my webaps.
You haven't disproven my point. You've only given one anecdotal piece of evidence that somebody checks for security flaws. You haven't even shown me that you personally spend more time checking for security flaws than anything else (though I don't doubt that you do. But if so, you're the exception rather than the rule.)
I suspect that Microsoft checks for security issues too. But I also suspect that this is less than 50% of their total testing. I did not say `software testing is not done for security'. I said `Most software testing is not done for security', and I believe this statement to be accurate.
Perhaps I was a little more vague that I should have been, but ultimately it depends on the application. Some will get more security-specific testing than others, but I suspect that overall (painting all of software testing with a very broad brush here) security-specific testing is a good deal less than 50% of all software testing done.
In the web based applications that I've written, security has always been a prime consideration. However, even then, I've probably spent more time verifying that things work rather than verifying that they work securely. To make sure things are secure, I've concentrated more on the code, making sure I don't trust the user's input until it's been validated/scrubbed, things like that. But that's not really `testing', that's more development. (And yes, I do some testing that things work securely afterwards, trying to break things, but not as much time as I spend making sure that things work correctly. Security is important, but so is functionality.)
And any sort of network or web application is a special case, requiring extra special attention to security. (Though one would certainly argue that a network aware OS like Windows should pay similar attention to security, and it's relatively clear that Microsoft does not.)
Security testing is major in my productions, and always should be.
Good for you. But I never said it shouldn't be or isn't `major'.
I am positive that it is for Apple's OS X.
Ok, but in order for my statement to be inaccurate in the case of OS X, you'd have to show that over 50% of their testing is looking specifically for security related issues. I don't doubt that security is important to them, but I suspect that security checking doesn't take most of their testing time.
You know, I spend way too much time defending statements on/. that really ought to be obvious. I should stop wasting my time -- I'm probably not convincing anybody, and I'm not even really entertaining myself.
Granted that Windows is massive, but really, they've had what, 3 years now since they announced their new dedication to security?
Most software testing is not done for security. It's done checking for functionality, making sure that things work as they should.
And the post that I was replying to simply said ` oh wait.. they dont test anything..' which is patently incorrect. (Of course, the post has also been modded -1, which is probably exactly where it belongs.)
I'm not saying this is the way it should be, only that it's the way it is. And it does make sense... people don't buy Windows because it's secure. They buy it because it's what they know, it runs their software, and it does what they want. Security is an after-thought to most people, especially the sort who uses Windows.
They could have done a total code audit of the Windows source in that time, including ensuring that it passed static analysis tools.
Perhaps, but that's not what I'm talking about. They may not be testing what needs testing, but it seems quite likely that Microsoft spends more time testing something about their product than anybody else does, if only because of their size and the breadth of their products.
Some of the code in windows XP hasnt even been seen by a human being for years upon years.
Commercial software testing rarely involves looking directly at the code. Instead, it tends to involve going through scripts where you do something known and looking for a known result, and if you don't get the result, you log that as a defect, which the developers then investigate.
The scripts involved generally come from previously found and corrected defects (making sure they don't come back) and possibly from things that the developers think might break. And a large part of it comes from what somebody thinks somebody might do with the software. In any event, much of it's usually heavily scripted so that nothing is left out, though it's very difficult to get a script going that tests everything (and in fact, it's probably impossible for something as complex as Windows.)
And then there's beta programs, where they give the unfinished package to end users who are willing to beta test, and the users are asked to submit bug reports. But this is generally much less formal, and it seems to me that most users don't submit bug reports at all (as long as they can work around the bugs found), though there are some that will report every little thing (and these users are great for making beta programs work.)
(Right or wrong, that's generally the way how it's done. Code reviews are another matter entirely.)
As for open source software, they generally skip the whole scripted human run test suite, though many software packages do provide a test suite that does much of the same thing automatically. (`make test' is a wonderful thing when done properly...)
Of course, huge packages like Windows or Office are the exception rather than the rule, and these are the sorts of things that really need a scripted, human run testing phase. Redhat Linux (the entire package) and OpenOffice may get similar treatments, but most smaller packages don't.
Alas, Microsoft has admited that it focused more upon putting features into its products and pushing it out the door in a nice boxed product moreso than security.
That may be true (or may not. I'd really love to see a citation from Microsoft where they claim that they focus more on adding features than security. That just doesn't sound like the sort of thing that PR would let them say, even if it's true.)
In any event, the number of developers and testers and such assigned to Windows and Office is huge, probably larger than the entire staffs of most software companies. A small percentage of those people are probably assigned to doing product testing, probably a similar percentage as is assigned to similar jobs in other software companies. But since the entire team is so large, more testing is likely to be done. (Now, perhaps far more testing is needed, but that's not what I'm talking about here.)
Really, the only software packages that I can think of that might get more formal testing than Windows and Office might be something like Oracle.
Microsoft probably puts their stuff through more testing than anybody. And it's needed -- even with all that testing, things slip through. (I'll skip talking about why there's so many bugs... others can do that.)
The Linux kernel is much smaller than Windows. Far less testing is needed, though of course some testing is still a good idea.
And I know this is unrelated, but the article submission talks about Spyware? Well, not all Spyware is bad. Just because software reports home, that doesn't make it evil. It's only evil if it does this without your knowledge and consent. (And putting this into a huge legal click-through doesn't really count.)
An example of `good' spyware would be the Google Toolbar. Yes, it can contact google if configured to do so, but at least 1) this provides some benefit to you, and 2) google makes it very clear what it's doing, not burying it in some click-through legal agreement and 3) you can easily turn it off if desired.
and how does crippling the software with DRM or patents and locking it up help promote the goal of the GPL: keeping software free (as in libre)?
I didn't say it did.
It's not actually clear what the new GPL is going to do. According to the MSNBC, the new GPL is going to be `including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology.'
Well, guess what? That's IBM. That's Sun. That's Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, etc. It's probably even companies like Redhat. That's pretty much every large company that writes and sells software, actually.
I'm not sure what the penalties are supposed to be either (and fsf.org doesn't seem to say, at least not without digging), but if they go as far as saying that the company can't use GPL'd software, then that'll go over like a lead balloon. `Oh, if you use the GPLv3, IBM can't use it.' `Really? Then I'll just use GPLv2.'
It's not so much that patenting software is a bad idea (well, it's a bad idea for the government to allow it, but since it's allowed, it's unwise for companies not to do it) it's that using those patents offensively against free software is a bad thing. Which isn't what the MSNBC article says in the summary, though Greeve does hint at that.
(Actually, the current mess with patents in the US, software and other, would be greatly improved if the Patent Office would merely apply it's own rules -- that something to be patented must not be obvious to the layperson, and must not be covered by prior art. It would also help if they'd make it a lot simpler to contest a patent by bringing up things (like prior art) that the patent reviewer was not aware of.)
in this world we live in, "kooks" are the most sane and reasonable people it seems.
Perhaps, though many people don't consider RMS to be sane and reasonable, even many people in the `open source' community. And to outsiders, he just comes across as a kook.
He's done a large number of very good things for software in general -- don't get me wrong. But perceptions are important -- perhaps not so much to us, but to the suits, definately.
So we're going to freely share it with everyone we agree with.
yea right kiddie, you are probably just another of those free software users who has never spent sleepless night behind a computer trying to make a living from it.
I suspect you missed the irony in the post you were referring to. Assuming that this is correct, I'll explain it to you :
At the very lowest level, the GPL is about `free' software. Not free as in beer, but free as in freedom (though free as in beer tends to come along with it as well.) However, the GPL is not the most `free' license out there. It puts signifigant restrictions on what you can do with the code, but these restrictions are generally something that companies and people can live with.
The idea is that these restrictions are needed to keep the software `free'. And while many disagree, many do agree that it's a good thing.
However, the idea that you can't use GPL software at all if you patent software or use DRM, well, that's nuts. That's about as un-free as possible, and I suspect that it will lead to people either 1) using the old version of the GPL or 2) discarding the GPL entirely for a BSD or other license.
Certainly, I don't expect any companies to decide not to patent software or use DRM just because of this new GPL.
RMS has done a lot of good things for the ideas of open source software and free software and such, and has personally given us several excellent pieces of software (like emacs, the King of Editors!:) But he's also sort of a fringe character, and has many kook-like characteristics. Pushing a GPL that doesn't allow the use of the software by certain people will only make his views even less relevant...
In any event, I don't think the post you were responding to was coming from your typical `warez puppy' mindset, which seems to be how you responded to it. It looked sarcastic to me.
I know this is a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyways, though I'm probably preaching to the choir...
The incentive to buy Office should be that Office is a better product.
It should not be that only Office can work with Office, which is what everybody else uses...
(Of course, Microsoft is in the business of making money, not playing fair. And there's little benefit to them to working with OpenOffice, so...)
Today, a large number of people value cost over all other things
This is hardly unique to `today'. This has always been the case.
We show too much kindness to rapist and child molesters.
Well, when they start `sex offender' type registration for all serious offencers, not just `sex offencers', I'll agree with it a bit more.
But for now, you can murder somebody, and you don't have to register, but mooning somebody, peeing outside, or being 20 and having sex with a 17 year old who said she was 19 can get you labeled as a sex offender for life (depends on the state) and that's just plain wrong.
Did you know that a person who molests a child still has parental rights so long as it was their child they molested?
I suspect that varies from state to state. In any event, even if you molest your child, you're still their parent, so it would seem appropriate that you should still have `paternal rights' (which is a remarkably vague concept anyways.)
They (Child Protective Services and similar government organizations) don't generally take children away from their parents and never ever give them back except maybe in the most extreme cases. Being placed in a foster home or orphanage, especailly forever, is seriously disruptive to a child's life, so they're not going to do that if there's any other alternative. They'll have to look at each case individually and try and work out what's best for the children. In most cases, that probably involves staying with the parent(s), and instead getting counselling for the parents or something.
Infants generally have no problems getting adopted. But once the kids grow up a bit, things change, especially if they're not white. Few people want to adopt them, and so they get shuffled between foster parents and orphanages. Not a good way to grow up.
It's up to the government to get with the times and update their forensics software.
I wouldn't suggest holding your breath waiting for that to happen.
If you're a normal citizen, not out on parole or having to register as a sex offender or something, use whatever OS and browser you want. They haven't make this illegal yet.
If you've been convicted of child porn violations, or have to register as a sex offender, you're screwed already, and nobody's likely to really care. Our legal system has a nice habit of continuing to punish people for things like this indefinitely (in spite of the Constitution's `no cruel and unusual punishments' section) and I don't see this changing any time soon. Even if all you did was get caught peeing behind a bush.
NOBODY is going to make the police update their equipment just to give you more freedom in what OS or browser you use. (And you should be glad that they allow Windows XP, and not 95 or 3.1.)
Not at all, especially if it's your kid. But it's not that simple.
The money has to be spent before it's needed, and there's no way to know when or where it'll be needed, or if it'll ever be needed.
Ultimately, you'd need to take the cost of the device, installation and upkeep over a period of time, then divide by the average number of people who drown in these pools (probably very small, but non zero) in that timespan, the divide that by the odds of this machine detecting this and causing their lives to be saved.
Unless a person drowns in each pool each year or so, the cost per saved life is going to be much higher than 65k pounds. And really, if a pool has professional lifeguards on duty all the time, I suspect it's quite infrequent that people drown in pools with lifeguards. I know it happens, but it's rare.
I'm not saying it's not a good deal, but just because a 65k pound machine saved one life, that doesn't mean you can extrapolate that to say we could save 10 lives by spending 650k pounds.
It's sort of like the occasional push to add seatbelts to school buses. Sure, it might save lives, but if you do the math, it works out to costing many millions of dollars per life saved. (As school buses are already quite safe.) At some point, it becomes an economic issue, though nobody wants to be the one to say that $50 million dollars (warning: made up number alert) per child's life is too much to pay.
Still, that video was the neatest thing to watch. I pictured it being my four year old daughter down there, and found myself wanting those machines everywhere. I see their stock going up in the near future...
Bull. You've got at least 4 too many 9's in there. If 99.999+% of your email really is spam, I'd suggest turning off your mail daemon.
recently had to fend off a 200mbit/sec ssh bruteforce
That's a DoS attack, not just probing for vulnerabilities. That's the exception, rather than the rule.
And ssh is different than a web server. Unless you're running a shell box for an ISP, you probably have a good idea where your ssh connections should be coming from, and blocking everything else isn't a bad policy at all.
But web servers are generally out there for people to access. They're not usually private, though of course some are. (Actually, smtp servers are similar, though this is part of the cause of the spam problem too. But they're not as open as they used to be...)
(And really, sshd shouldn't allow more than a few password attempts per second to be made. If somebody's really hitting your box that hard, either they don't understand what they're doing, or they're after you and not actually expecting to get in. And seriously, if they're hitting you that hard, filtering at the router probably won't fix it.)
and i see no reason to deal with them until they clean up their act.
Fine. If it's your box, it's your box. Block as you see fit. If it's not your personal box, but instead an ISPs mail server or something, you'll need to think a lot harder about what you block and why.
Additionally, what sort of actions do other Slashdot users take to protect themselves from rogue IP space
Ok, if the `problem' is that you see wierd entries in your logs, that obviously somebody is trying to crack into box, and they're not using up a signifigant portion of your bandwidth, filling up your disk with logs or actually getting into your box, there is no problem. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can get on with your life.
So what do you do? You keep your machine secure. You keep up to date on patches, you use software that has a good security record, and you keep half an eye on your box for signs of intrusions. And you do regular backups, just in case things do go really bad.
But you don't stress out over every wierd line in your Apache log. I used to watch my logs carefully and report cracking attempts, but that was long ago. Now, there's so many I could spend my whole life doing that. That, and most of the attempts come from compromised machines anyways, and the admins of those boxes generally don't care anyways (or at least they just don't respond.) It's tilting at windmills.
(Do keep the logs, mind you, but don't stress out over them. You can use tools to give you summaries and show exceptions if you wish, but you'll need to filter out the really common crack attempts, or eventually you'll just tune out the summaries, because they're always full of... junk.)
Now, if it's a serious problem, like a DoS attack, then you may need to react. The phone is far more effective than an email, but it's hard to know who to call, especially if it's in a remote country. And the addresses may be spoofed and so you may not know the source at all.
But occasional requests for wierd files on your web server? Forget it.
Good thing, too. Like the goggles,
they'd probably do nothing. Though they'd let the FBI know that these probably are the disks they're looking for.
The denser the data gets packed on the disk, the stronger the magnetic field needed to put it there, and the stronger the magnetic field needed to erase it. Weaker magnetic fields will basically do nothing.
Modern tape and hard drives require very strong magnetic fields to erase them. Your bulk eraser or speaker magnets won't do it.
And even if you do have a magnet that's strong enough to make your disk drive unable to read the data that was on it, law enforcement may still be able to read the data through other means. It all depends on how much time and money they're willing to throw at the problem of getting it out.
Can anyone even contact these agencies around this area?
I said in/near. If you can't contact the police in New Orleans, contact them in a nearby city. They're probably helping out and can help get you in contact with somebody. And I'm sure the Red Cross could help get you aimed in the right direction as well. Your local ARES group, especially if you live close to New Orleans, is probably already working on plans to help. They might be your best bet if you're a ham.
Personally I am an Eagle Scout, have 2 meritorious life saving awards, I am CPR certified by the Red Cross, and of course I am a ham. I also have extensive experience in boating and maritime activities.
That's nice. It still has no bearings on whether other people, prepared or not, should pack up and go to New Orleans without knowing what they're getting into or what sort of help is needed.
This is not the first time a disaster has happened, and hams (and others) have tried to help. There are procedures in place for helping, and it would be most effective to use them.
You're not the first person to suggest that people flock to New Orleans. For example, there's
this bozo, a known troll on the austin.general group. He may be seriously trying to help, but knowing his history I have my doubts. And if the mayor really did call out for this, I'd expect to read it on cnn.com, not just on austin.general.
that apparently somebody has finally documented NTFS.
I haven't read the book, but I doubt the author has any more information on the NTFS file formats than the Linux NTFS driver developers.
He doesn't need to know any more than they do to recover data off the disk. In fact, it may be that the author learned everything he needed to know about the NTFS file system by reading the Linux NTFS driver source code and any associated reverse-engineered documentation.
Actually, you can recover a lot of data off of a disk without understanding the underlying filesystem format at all. Granted, you'll do better if you understand the format, but it's not essential.
For example, if the police suspect that a computer has child porn on it, you could scan the disk, block by block, looking for blocks that have the JFIF header, and then following the stream after that and seeing if it's a valid jpeg. Most of the time, a small file won't be fragmented at all and you can read almost every jpeg image on the disk this way, even those that were deleted, knowing nothing of the filesystem format.
There's even programs out there that will do this all for you. One common application is recovering pictures off of a compact flash card (or whatever) after your digital camera went haywire and trashed the FAT headers.
I would like to propose hams descend on the city and surrounding areas to provide a temporary communications infrastructure until such time that officials are able to provide this on their own.
I would instead propose that hams contact the authorities in/near New Orleans or the Red Cross and ask what sort of assistance they can offer, rather than just loading up their car or boat and going.
A flood of well intentioned amateurs (ham radio and others) could very well make things worse rather than better. Even well prepared hams may -- or may not -- be of much assistance. And poorly prepared hams could very well end up requiring rescuing of their own.
Fortunately, organizations like ARES do have protocols in place for things like this. If you want to help, contacting your local ARES group might be a good place to start. But certainly, don't just load your car up with bottled water and radio gear and go.
Maybe now that the power is down, all that broadband-over-power-lines will be down so the ham radio operators can help with the truly urgent info.
Great. Now all the ham operators in New Orleans can talk to each other. But all the other cities in the US, they still have their BPL (because the power is still on), so there's nobody else to talk to, just each other. Local BPL doesn't really affect transmission of HF signals, only the reception.
And of course if you have BPL active in your city 99.9% of the time, making the HF bands useless, how many hams would go to the trouble of obtaining and maintaining HF equipment for that 0.1% of the time it actually works? A rig may work after being in storage for a few years, but the batteries probably won't, and the antenna may or may not.
Fortunately, BPL has not been rolled out universally, so the HF bands are still useful for most. For now.
It seems like Verizon, Sprint or someone could make a boatload of money from opportunities like this.
Ok, let's assume that Verizon has a fleet of mobile cell towers with generators, solar powered blimp repeaters, etc. all ready to go to New Orleans on a moment's notice.
In order to make a boatload of money, somebody would have to pay for it. Who would pay?
Sure, the service would be worth paying for, but Verizon would immediately be accused of price gouging if they tried to actually get somebody to pay for it. Everybody would expect the `enhanced' service to be provided for free.
How would you react if you were a Verizon customer and your phone, which hadn't worked before, rang, and it was Verizon offering to make your phone work again for the next three days for only $29.95? Just give your credit card! It might be a bargain, it might even save your life and many other lives, but the outcry against it would be enormous.
I do see how this would be useful, but unless the governments have already made some sort of deal to fund this sort of thing in advance, I don't see where a boatload of money could be made. In fact, all I see is an opportunity to provide service for free -- which gets them a lot of good karma and brownie points, but it's often hard to take that to the bank.
So, was the author somehow able to get more in-depth documentation on NTFS than the Linux NTFS driver developers have?
Why would he need it? The current Linux NTFS driver already has was he needs -- reading.
When you're doing any sort of analysis or data recovery of a disk, the first rule is you don't write to the disk. You copy everything somewhere else, preferably bit by bit, then disconnect the original, and then mount the copy of the original, read only and work on it, copying what you recover to another disk.
As for the devices that explicitly prevent writing to the disk, the only real need I see for those would be if you needed to PROVE to a court that you didn't write to a disk. For data recovery (not looking for criminal evidence) you probably don't need that -- just make sure you don't write to the disk and you're fine.
Common sense. As a group, people try really hard not to die.
Suppose the world's overall temperature goes up 50 degrees F. The equator would become mostly uninhabitable, but the poles would become more inhabitable. People would move towards the poles. (Billions would probably die due to starvation and other causes, but many would live.)
If the global temperature dropped 50 degrees F, people would gravitate towards the equator. Similar results.
If the difference was 150 degrees F rather than 50 degrees F, that would pretty much make the entire planet uninhabitable. But a few humans would still survive, at least for a while -- probably in underground bunkers, especially if they had a few years to prepare. As long as the heat/cold didn't last more than a few years, the human race would probably survive, though 99+% of the people would probably die.
Global warming's problems are much smaller than that. (But they're still serious problems. It's just that they won't kill 90% of the population, at least not in a short period of time.)
Last night the neighbours' tyrannosaur was in our garden again.
I hate it when that happens.
In any event, obviously something killed off the dinosaurs, but it didn't kill all life, because the species of the plants in your garden survived, as did our ancestors.
Human beings are a bit more resourceful than dinosaurs when it comes to surviving. I don't doubt that a serious disaster could kill 99% of us, but that last 1% is going to be very difficult to get.
Even some sort of super-flu or disease would have a hard time killing us all. There's always going to be some people with a natural immunity, and some people who are so remote from everybody else that they'll survive when everybody else dies.
I have trouble believing that the Earth is really all that fragile.
I don't know how fragile the Earth is. I hope you're right.
What I was trying to say is that the effect of the polar icecaps melting on the % of the sun's energy retained by the Earth is not insignifigant.
As for the fragility of the Earth, we could certainly raise the overall temperature of the Earth 30 degrees, or reduce it by a similar amount, or start WW3 (nuclear war, nuclear winter) etc. -- even with the worst possible global warming scenario, ice age scenario, or nuclear winter scenario, epidemic, whatever, people will survive.
Millions, perhaps billions of people will die, but there will be millions who survive. And many animals will survive as well, though we're doing our best to kill them out.
Short of something like our sun dying out or going red giant or nova on us, some life will survive. Perhaps some serious event will kill 99% of the life on the planet, but something will survive, and assuming that whatever killed everybody is temporary, life will eventually recover.
As for global warming, just a few degrees can cause serious problems for people. Coastal areas will flood. Food production may be impacted, causing famine. But overall, most people will probably survive, unless it becomes really severe.
Slashdot Mirror
If you reduce the frequency and keep the power (and gain of the antenna) constant, the amplitude of the signal will go up, but it's not really the amplitude that matters when picking up a signal. Really, it's the background noise that's the limiting factor -- the S/N ratio, as you've already mentioned. As long as the power stays the same, and the noise level stays the same, the S/N ratio will be the same.
And I don't think you'd double the transmission range by halving the frequency. Assuming that the amplitude was what mattered and not the power (which I don't agree with), I'd expect a 41% increase (sqrt(2)) assuming you're not running into problems with line of sight or attenuation in the air and the like.
That might work as a rule of thumb, but it's pretty rough.So a person over here can be using X amount of bandwidth, and so can a person a few miles away. Dozens of people could be using the same frequency simultaneously in a single city, and tens of thousands could be nationwide.
I don't know how much bandwidth the 4G phones will require, but I seriously doubt it's 500 MHz for a single connection. But whatever the bandwidth required, many users will be able to use the same slot of bandwidth in a single city.
Wing span of only 1.7 meters. (Of course, I'll assume that we're looking only at planes that carry people. Not that R/C or free-flight planes aren't `real planes' ...)
There's birds alive now with wing spans larger than 1.7 meters :)
I suspect that Microsoft checks for security issues too. But I also suspect that this is less than 50% of their total testing. I did not say `software testing is not done for security'. I said `Most software testing is not done for security', and I believe this statement to be accurate.
Perhaps I was a little more vague that I should have been, but ultimately it depends on the application. Some will get more security-specific testing than others, but I suspect that overall (painting all of software testing with a very broad brush here) security-specific testing is a good deal less than 50% of all software testing done.
In the web based applications that I've written, security has always been a prime consideration. However, even then, I've probably spent more time verifying that things work rather than verifying that they work securely. To make sure things are secure, I've concentrated more on the code, making sure I don't trust the user's input until it's been validated/scrubbed, things like that. But that's not really `testing', that's more development. (And yes, I do some testing that things work securely afterwards, trying to break things, but not as much time as I spend making sure that things work correctly. Security is important, but so is functionality.)
And any sort of network or web application is a special case, requiring extra special attention to security. (Though one would certainly argue that a network aware OS like Windows should pay similar attention to security, and it's relatively clear that Microsoft does not.)
Good for you. But I never said it shouldn't be or isn't `major'. Ok, but in order for my statement to be inaccurate in the case of OS X, you'd have to show that over 50% of their testing is looking specifically for security related issues. I don't doubt that security is important to them, but I suspect that security checking doesn't take most of their testing time.You know, I spend way too much time defending statements on /. that really ought to be obvious. I should stop wasting my time -- I'm probably not convincing anybody, and I'm not even really entertaining myself.
And the post that I was replying to simply said ` oh wait.. they dont test anything..' which is patently incorrect. (Of course, the post has also been modded -1, which is probably exactly where it belongs.)
I'm not saying this is the way it should be, only that it's the way it is. And it does make sense ... people don't buy Windows because it's secure. They buy it because it's what they know, it runs their software, and it does what they want. Security is an after-thought to most people, especially the sort who uses Windows.
Perhaps, but that's not what I'm talking about. They may not be testing what needs testing, but it seems quite likely that Microsoft spends more time testing something about their product than anybody else does, if only because of their size and the breadth of their products.The scripts involved generally come from previously found and corrected defects (making sure they don't come back) and possibly from things that the developers think might break. And a large part of it comes from what somebody thinks somebody might do with the software. In any event, much of it's usually heavily scripted so that nothing is left out, though it's very difficult to get a script going that tests everything (and in fact, it's probably impossible for something as complex as Windows.)
And then there's beta programs, where they give the unfinished package to end users who are willing to beta test, and the users are asked to submit bug reports. But this is generally much less formal, and it seems to me that most users don't submit bug reports at all (as long as they can work around the bugs found), though there are some that will report every little thing (and these users are great for making beta programs work.)
(Right or wrong, that's generally the way how it's done. Code reviews are another matter entirely.)
As for open source software, they generally skip the whole scripted human run test suite, though many software packages do provide a test suite that does much of the same thing automatically. (`make test' is a wonderful thing when done properly ...)
Of course, huge packages like Windows or Office are the exception rather than the rule, and these are the sorts of things that really need a scripted, human run testing phase. Redhat Linux (the entire package) and OpenOffice may get similar treatments, but most smaller packages don't.
That may be true (or may not. I'd really love to see a citation from Microsoft where they claim that they focus more on adding features than security. That just doesn't sound like the sort of thing that PR would let them say, even if it's true.)In any event, the number of developers and testers and such assigned to Windows and Office is huge, probably larger than the entire staffs of most software companies. A small percentage of those people are probably assigned to doing product testing, probably a similar percentage as is assigned to similar jobs in other software companies. But since the entire team is so large, more testing is likely to be done. (Now, perhaps far more testing is needed, but that's not what I'm talking about here.)
Really, the only software packages that I can think of that might get more formal testing than Windows and Office might be something like Oracle.
Microsoft probably puts their stuff through more testing than anybody. And it's needed -- even with all that testing, things slip through. (I'll skip talking about why there's so many bugs ... others can do that.)
The Linux kernel is much smaller than Windows. Far less testing is needed, though of course some testing is still a good idea.
And I know this is unrelated, but the article submission talks about Spyware? Well, not all Spyware is bad. Just because software reports home, that doesn't make it evil. It's only evil if it does this without your knowledge and consent. (And putting this into a huge legal click-through doesn't really count.)
An example of `good' spyware would be the Google Toolbar. Yes, it can contact google if configured to do so, but at least 1) this provides some benefit to you, and 2) google makes it very clear what it's doing, not burying it in some click-through legal agreement and 3) you can easily turn it off if desired.
(And maybe you should read more carefully. I did discuss other options.)
It's not actually clear what the new GPL is going to do. According to the MSNBC, the new GPL is going to be `including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology.'
Well, guess what? That's IBM. That's Sun. That's Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, etc. It's probably even companies like Redhat. That's pretty much every large company that writes and sells software, actually.
I'm not sure what the penalties are supposed to be either (and fsf.org doesn't seem to say, at least not without digging), but if they go as far as saying that the company can't use GPL'd software, then that'll go over like a lead balloon. `Oh, if you use the GPLv3, IBM can't use it.' `Really? Then I'll just use GPLv2.'
It's not so much that patenting software is a bad idea (well, it's a bad idea for the government to allow it, but since it's allowed, it's unwise for companies not to do it) it's that using those patents offensively against free software is a bad thing. Which isn't what the MSNBC article says in the summary, though Greeve does hint at that.
(Actually, the current mess with patents in the US, software and other, would be greatly improved if the Patent Office would merely apply it's own rules -- that something to be patented must not be obvious to the layperson, and must not be covered by prior art. It would also help if they'd make it a lot simpler to contest a patent by bringing up things (like prior art) that the patent reviewer was not aware of.)
Perhaps, though many people don't consider RMS to be sane and reasonable, even many people in the `open source' community. And to outsiders, he just comes across as a kook.He's done a large number of very good things for software in general -- don't get me wrong. But perceptions are important -- perhaps not so much to us, but to the suits, definately.
At the very lowest level, the GPL is about `free' software. Not free as in beer, but free as in freedom (though free as in beer tends to come along with it as well.) However, the GPL is not the most `free' license out there. It puts signifigant restrictions on what you can do with the code, but these restrictions are generally something that companies and people can live with.
The idea is that these restrictions are needed to keep the software `free'. And while many disagree, many do agree that it's a good thing.
However, the idea that you can't use GPL software at all if you patent software or use DRM, well, that's nuts. That's about as un-free as possible, and I suspect that it will lead to people either 1) using the old version of the GPL or 2) discarding the GPL entirely for a BSD or other license.
Certainly, I don't expect any companies to decide not to patent software or use DRM just because of this new GPL.
RMS has done a lot of good things for the ideas of open source software and free software and such, and has personally given us several excellent pieces of software (like emacs, the King of Editors! :) But he's also sort of a fringe character, and has many kook-like characteristics. Pushing a GPL that doesn't allow the use of the software by certain people will only make his views even less relevant ...
Join us now and share the software indeed.
In any event, I don't think the post you were responding to was coming from your typical `warez puppy' mindset, which seems to be how you responded to it. It looked sarcastic to me.
The incentive to buy Office should be that Office is a better product. ...
It should not be that only Office can work with Office, which is what everybody else uses
(Of course, Microsoft is in the business of making money, not playing fair. And there's little benefit to them to working with OpenOffice, so ...)
This is hardly unique to `today'. This has always been the case.But for now, you can murder somebody, and you don't have to register, but mooning somebody, peeing outside, or being 20 and having sex with a 17 year old who said she was 19 can get you labeled as a sex offender for life (depends on the state) and that's just plain wrong.
I suspect that varies from state to state. In any event, even if you molest your child, you're still their parent, so it would seem appropriate that you should still have `paternal rights' (which is a remarkably vague concept anyways.)They (Child Protective Services and similar government organizations) don't generally take children away from their parents and never ever give them back except maybe in the most extreme cases. Being placed in a foster home or orphanage, especailly forever, is seriously disruptive to a child's life, so they're not going to do that if there's any other alternative. They'll have to look at each case individually and try and work out what's best for the children. In most cases, that probably involves staying with the parent(s), and instead getting counselling for the parents or something.
Infants generally have no problems getting adopted. But once the kids grow up a bit, things change, especially if they're not white. Few people want to adopt them, and so they get shuffled between foster parents and orphanages. Not a good way to grow up.
If you're a normal citizen, not out on parole or having to register as a sex offender or something, use whatever OS and browser you want. They haven't make this illegal yet.
If you've been convicted of child porn violations, or have to register as a sex offender, you're screwed already, and nobody's likely to really care. Our legal system has a nice habit of continuing to punish people for things like this indefinitely (in spite of the Constitution's `no cruel and unusual punishments' section) and I don't see this changing any time soon. Even if all you did was get caught peeing behind a bush.
NOBODY is going to make the police update their equipment just to give you more freedom in what OS or browser you use. (And you should be glad that they allow Windows XP, and not 95 or 3.1.)
The money has to be spent before it's needed, and there's no way to know when or where it'll be needed, or if it'll ever be needed.
Ultimately, you'd need to take the cost of the device, installation and upkeep over a period of time, then divide by the average number of people who drown in these pools (probably very small, but non zero) in that timespan, the divide that by the odds of this machine detecting this and causing their lives to be saved.
Unless a person drowns in each pool each year or so, the cost per saved life is going to be much higher than 65k pounds. And really, if a pool has professional lifeguards on duty all the time, I suspect it's quite infrequent that people drown in pools with lifeguards. I know it happens, but it's rare.
I'm not saying it's not a good deal, but just because a 65k pound machine saved one life, that doesn't mean you can extrapolate that to say we could save 10 lives by spending 650k pounds.
It's sort of like the occasional push to add seatbelts to school buses. Sure, it might save lives, but if you do the math, it works out to costing many millions of dollars per life saved. (As school buses are already quite safe.) At some point, it becomes an economic issue, though nobody wants to be the one to say that $50 million dollars (warning: made up number alert) per child's life is too much to pay.
Still, that video was the neatest thing to watch. I pictured it being my four year old daughter down there, and found myself wanting those machines everywhere. I see their stock going up in the near future ...
And ssh is different than a web server. Unless you're running a shell box for an ISP, you probably have a good idea where your ssh connections should be coming from, and blocking everything else isn't a bad policy at all.
But web servers are generally out there for people to access. They're not usually private, though of course some are. (Actually, smtp servers are similar, though this is part of the cause of the spam problem too. But they're not as open as they used to be ...)
(And really, sshd shouldn't allow more than a few password attempts per second to be made. If somebody's really hitting your box that hard, either they don't understand what they're doing, or they're after you and not actually expecting to get in. And seriously, if they're hitting you that hard, filtering at the router probably won't fix it.)
Fine. If it's your box, it's your box. Block as you see fit. If it's not your personal box, but instead an ISPs mail server or something, you'll need to think a lot harder about what you block and why.So what do you do? You keep your machine secure. You keep up to date on patches, you use software that has a good security record, and you keep half an eye on your box for signs of intrusions. And you do regular backups, just in case things do go really bad.
But you don't stress out over every wierd line in your Apache log. I used to watch my logs carefully and report cracking attempts, but that was long ago. Now, there's so many I could spend my whole life doing that. That, and most of the attempts come from compromised machines anyways, and the admins of those boxes generally don't care anyways (or at least they just don't respond.) It's tilting at windmills.
(Do keep the logs, mind you, but don't stress out over them. You can use tools to give you summaries and show exceptions if you wish, but you'll need to filter out the really common crack attempts, or eventually you'll just tune out the summaries, because they're always full of ... junk.)
Now, if it's a serious problem, like a DoS attack, then you may need to react. The phone is far more effective than an email, but it's hard to know who to call, especially if it's in a remote country. And the addresses may be spoofed and so you may not know the source at all.
But occasional requests for wierd files on your web server? Forget it.
The denser the data gets packed on the disk, the stronger the magnetic field needed to put it there, and the stronger the magnetic field needed to erase it. Weaker magnetic fields will basically do nothing.
Modern tape and hard drives require very strong magnetic fields to erase them. Your bulk eraser or speaker magnets won't do it.
And even if you do have a magnet that's strong enough to make your disk drive unable to read the data that was on it, law enforcement may still be able to read the data through other means. It all depends on how much time and money they're willing to throw at the problem of getting it out.
This is not the first time a disaster has happened, and hams (and others) have tried to help. There are procedures in place for helping, and it would be most effective to use them.
You're not the first person to suggest that people flock to New Orleans. For example, there's this bozo, a known troll on the austin.general group. He may be seriously trying to help, but knowing his history I have my doubts. And if the mayor really did call out for this, I'd expect to read it on cnn.com, not just on austin.general.
He doesn't need to know any more than they do to recover data off the disk. In fact, it may be that the author learned everything he needed to know about the NTFS file system by reading the Linux NTFS driver source code and any associated reverse-engineered documentation.
Actually, you can recover a lot of data off of a disk without understanding the underlying filesystem format at all. Granted, you'll do better if you understand the format, but it's not essential.
For example, if the police suspect that a computer has child porn on it, you could scan the disk, block by block, looking for blocks that have the JFIF header, and then following the stream after that and seeing if it's a valid jpeg. Most of the time, a small file won't be fragmented at all and you can read almost every jpeg image on the disk this way, even those that were deleted, knowing nothing of the filesystem format.
There's even programs out there that will do this all for you. One common application is recovering pictures off of a compact flash card (or whatever) after your digital camera went haywire and trashed the FAT headers.
A flood of well intentioned amateurs (ham radio and others) could very well make things worse rather than better. Even well prepared hams may -- or may not -- be of much assistance. And poorly prepared hams could very well end up requiring rescuing of their own.
Fortunately, organizations like ARES do have protocols in place for things like this. If you want to help, contacting your local ARES group might be a good place to start. But certainly, don't just load your car up with bottled water and radio gear and go.
AD5RH
And of course if you have BPL active in your city 99.9% of the time, making the HF bands useless, how many hams would go to the trouble of obtaining and maintaining HF equipment for that 0.1% of the time it actually works? A rig may work after being in storage for a few years, but the batteries probably won't, and the antenna may or may not.
Fortunately, BPL has not been rolled out universally, so the HF bands are still useful for most. For now.
DE AD5RH
In order to make a boatload of money, somebody would have to pay for it. Who would pay?
Sure, the service would be worth paying for, but Verizon would immediately be accused of price gouging if they tried to actually get somebody to pay for it. Everybody would expect the `enhanced' service to be provided for free.
How would you react if you were a Verizon customer and your phone, which hadn't worked before, rang, and it was Verizon offering to make your phone work again for the next three days for only $29.95? Just give your credit card! It might be a bargain, it might even save your life and many other lives, but the outcry against it would be enormous.
I do see how this would be useful, but unless the governments have already made some sort of deal to fund this sort of thing in advance, I don't see where a boatload of money could be made. In fact, all I see is an opportunity to provide service for free -- which gets them a lot of good karma and brownie points, but it's often hard to take that to the bank.
When you're doing any sort of analysis or data recovery of a disk, the first rule is you don't write to the disk. You copy everything somewhere else, preferably bit by bit, then disconnect the original, and then mount the copy of the original, read only and work on it, copying what you recover to another disk.
As for the devices that explicitly prevent writing to the disk, the only real need I see for those would be if you needed to PROVE to a court that you didn't write to a disk. For data recovery (not looking for criminal evidence) you probably don't need that -- just make sure you don't write to the disk and you're fine.
Suppose the world's overall temperature goes up 50 degrees F. The equator would become mostly uninhabitable, but the poles would become more inhabitable. People would move towards the poles. (Billions would probably die due to starvation and other causes, but many would live.)
If the global temperature dropped 50 degrees F, people would gravitate towards the equator. Similar results.
If the difference was 150 degrees F rather than 50 degrees F, that would pretty much make the entire planet uninhabitable. But a few humans would still survive, at least for a while -- probably in underground bunkers, especially if they had a few years to prepare. As long as the heat/cold didn't last more than a few years, the human race would probably survive, though 99+% of the people would probably die.
Global warming's problems are much smaller than that. (But they're still serious problems. It's just that they won't kill 90% of the population, at least not in a short period of time.)
I hate it when that happens.In any event, obviously something killed off the dinosaurs, but it didn't kill all life, because the species of the plants in your garden survived, as did our ancestors.
Human beings are a bit more resourceful than dinosaurs when it comes to surviving. I don't doubt that a serious disaster could kill 99% of us, but that last 1% is going to be very difficult to get.
Even some sort of super-flu or disease would have a hard time killing us all. There's always going to be some people with a natural immunity, and some people who are so remote from everybody else that they'll survive when everybody else dies.
What I was trying to say is that the effect of the polar icecaps melting on the % of the sun's energy retained by the Earth is not insignifigant.
As for the fragility of the Earth, we could certainly raise the overall temperature of the Earth 30 degrees, or reduce it by a similar amount, or start WW3 (nuclear war, nuclear winter) etc. -- even with the worst possible global warming scenario, ice age scenario, or nuclear winter scenario, epidemic, whatever, people will survive.
Millions, perhaps billions of people will die, but there will be millions who survive. And many animals will survive as well, though we're doing our best to kill them out.
Short of something like our sun dying out or going red giant or nova on us, some life will survive. Perhaps some serious event will kill 99% of the life on the planet, but something will survive, and assuming that whatever killed everybody is temporary, life will eventually recover.
As for global warming, just a few degrees can cause serious problems for people. Coastal areas will flood. Food production may be impacted, causing famine. But overall, most people will probably survive, unless it becomes really severe.