Accor - who run the moderately priced Ibis chain - also have some very low cost hotels of a similar, if lower-tech, nature. However travellers with a wider than normal waistband should beware of the very narrow toilets.
"That's why they make these amazing things -- discovered recently, I believe -- called glasses,..."
They can help with some conditions, and cataracts can usually be cleared by a simple operation. Glaucoma, Age-Related Macrodegeneration, and other _common_ eye problems of increasing age are more difficult. Reduced ability to note contrast can be a real disaster area when trying to read some web sites - especially on a LCD display where you cannot crank-up the contrast like you can on a CRT.
"That way the only people in there are the IT people."... and the cleaners (on minimum wage and unlikely to have been seriously security checked, probably) and the security staff (almost as badly paid and not necessarily better checked).
I've no idea what international law has to say about subsonic weapons technology (probably nothing, unless such is at least as dangerous to the user as the target:-), but there was an article in Scientific American - probably in the late 60s or early 70s about research into such weapons and the effects can be (literally) deadly... problem is how to only affect the enemy.
The information on the University's web site - URL not published because they definitely won't want to be slashdotted today - says:
Fire at Highfield campus
A major fire today at the University's Highfield Campus has partially destroyed the Mountbatten Building, in particular the area containing the microfabrication facility. Very fortunately, as far as can be ascertained, no one was injured or is missing as a result of the fire.
Apart from some minor smoke damage to adjacent buildings no other University buildings have been affected and staff and students are asked to return to work as normal on Monday morning.
Undergraduate teaching at the University is expected to take place as usual on Monday and students should arrive for lectures at the normal time.
Staff and postgraduate students who would normally work in the Mountbatten Building and those who work in the Zepler building are asked to attend a meeting at the Turner Sims Concert Hall at 10.30am, for a briefing on the latest situation and to hear about the University's contingency plans.
The Mountbatten Building houses research laboratories and offices for the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). The University, ECS and the ORC will do all that is possible to support staff and students affected by this serious fire.
The emergency services were alerted to the fire when the alarms were activated at 6.30am Sunday, and the fire was under control by mid-afternoon. Based on available information there was nothing in the smoke plume that would pose a significant risk to health beyond that of the normal constituents of any other building fire. The cause of the fire is not yet known.
Local people were advised to avoid making unnecessary journeys in the vicinity and to avoid contact with the smoke plume. Those who are vulnerable or had an existing medical condition were asked to take particular care.
The University's Secretary and Registrar John Lauwerys commented: 'This is a huge loss to the University and the fire has destroyed one of our key research facilities of international importance, supporting groups in both Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre.
'It is a huge relief that no one has been injured as a result of the fire and our concern now is to ensure that staff and students that normally work in the Mountbatten Building are given every help to re-establish their academic work.
'The University is very appreciative of the professionalism and skill of all the emergency services, who responded so quickly and effectively, preventing the fire spreading to adjacent buildings.
'It is not yet safe to enter the Mountbatten Building, so we do not yet know the extent of the loss in terms of people's research material. It is likely to be a few days before this can be fully established,' he added.
[ooops - I had hoped "blockquote" would keep the formatting intact... haven't got time to format cleanly]
- you mean like UK _and_ GB:-)
(.. er, one for each country.)
Yes, and I am well aware that Great Britain and The United Kingdom have different meanings (at least to those in the Northern part of the island of Ireland). I am also not aware of England, Wales, and Scotland having widely used individual country codes.
My address registered on eBay ends with GB (as I originally registered on the US site). The postage calculator on the UK site does not recognise this as being (essentially) the same as UK and thus postage on my purchases is quite frequently incorrectly calculated.
"Subject: You're in! Welcome to Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
IP address: 66.218.66.53
DNS Name: n18.bulk.scd.yahoo.com
Location: London, UK
Emails: 100"
Internetworking in British higher education institutions was seriously set back in the 1980s by the insistence that only "international standards" (that is X25 and its derivatives rather than TCP/IP) were allowed to be used.
The ARPA internet suite was not then recognised as a standard because no accepted international standards body (essentially ISO or CCITT) had published the standards. Eventually some of us* managed to convince the Joint Network Team of the Computer Board that TCP/IP would do what was required and the "coloured book" standards wouldn't and then within 2 years almost all the universities were in line with the rest of the world. (and we could get networking standard that didn't have to be custom written for the UK).
* Some claim that it was a document that I wrote for our JNT contact that finally forced the change.
Let us suppose the researcher (R) reports a security hole to the software producer (let's call them M).
First the report on the problem has to get to someone who has the knowledge to investigate and fix the problem. In a large organisation this is likely to take several days. It then has to be prioritised in his workload (Hey! you think there is only one problem?).
Next he has to verify that the problem exists (hopefully R has provided a repeatable example).
Then comes the first difficult part - identifying the root cause of the problem. If it is a buffer overflow this might be easy; a tricky combination of factors in a single module may be more difficult; an underlying design feature or a clash with an important usability function is going to cause major difficulties.
In the simple cases an initial fix may be possible (and right first fix) within hours - but will then have to be tested against the whole test suite and documented. We are, by now, probably already a week after first report for anything beyond a "damaging exploit in the wild" event.
For the complex, but limited in scope, hole much more is going to need to be done. Several people need to understand the problem and possibly redesign the module. The replacement code will take longer to get right and to test. It probably also needs to be done by the more experienced members of the team... who also have more items in their priority lists. In a case like this the timescale is probably approaching a month for a "fairly high priority" problem.
Now think about the clash of design principles type of problem - in practice this is probably going to need a fairly ugly hack by very skilled programmers (A major redesign is rarely viable for widely distributed commercial software). How long do you think this is going to take?
Any system that is powerful and flexible enough to be useful is also powerful and flexible enough to run viruses/worms.
Re:Interesting flash-based captcha
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 1
That depends on the country whose laws applies.
In the UK, now and in theory, all web sites providing goods or services to the public are supposed to be "accessible".
At present there are clearly some that are not and sooner - rather than later - they may find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit.
Would those organisations that want DRM be more likely to trust an open source that might have a deliberate flaw from someone philosophically opposed to DRM or hidden source that is more likely to have unplanned flaws?
9-track tape drives are stil relatively easy to come by. Seven track is rather more difficult but I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly difficult job to make a 7-track head for a more modern (9-track) drive and use a FPGA or similar to "massage" the data so that the rest of the drive firmware will work.
Is there any intrinsic difference between making the performances available for download and broadcasting the performances on digital radio.
If you have the right equipment (such as a Psion Wavefinder) and a reliable signal (not so easy for digital) you can record all the Proms at MP3 equivalent quality.
There seems to be a general assumption in the media that this is an Al Quaida coordinated attack. It could be. But the locations of the (four, not seven) blasts are such that small devices could easily have been planted by a lone idiot - use the Circle/District line and leave a bomb on a tube each way, then via Picadilly line to Holborn - douuble-back to Russell Sq leaving a bomb on that train. Then out onto a bus for one stop leaving another.
The bombs appear, from their effects, to have been small - probably ounces of commercial explosive or slightly more improvised. In any case easy enough for one person to carry.
"Every system before about 1995 has been emulated..."
Be nice if it were true. I'm not even sure that it is true for microprocessor systems. As for Mainframes and Minicomputers the story isn't so easy. There are good (or fairly good) emulators for the PDP 8, PDP 11, IBM 360/370 family, and probably for the PDP10. An emulator also exists for the ICL 1900 series (but only supports the George 3 operating system - not the other OSes).
But consider:
Multics
GE/Honeywell/Bull 600/6000/Level 66
PDP 9/15
Digico Micro-16 (I know, you've never heard of it!)
Computer Technology Modular One
Atlas
Stretch (IBM 7030)
I suspect one or two of the above have been emulated - I doubt if more than 4 of them have been.
Even the technical manuals that - by modern standards - give extremely detailed information on these systems, almost all fail to be totally detailed about subtle points. (That is if any copies of the manuals still survive).
"You don't need a Vic-20 to read an audio cassette tape..." True... but what modern hardware would you use to read a 7-track 556bpi 1/2" magnetic tape....
To be even more obscure consider the 35mm magnetic tapes used on the Elliot 803 and similar machines.
(Actually I know where the latter can be found... I have no idea where I could find a working 7-track tape drive.)
If your old AGP card is more than about 3 years old (1x or 2x) it won't work on a current-model motherboard anyhow (4x or 8x 1.5v)... and may even damage one.
Comments indicate what the writer intends/thinks the code does. But only the code itself is "meaningful" to the computer itself.
One of my friends has a policy that the first thing he does when attempting to maintain some (usually badly written) program passed onto him is to strip out the comments so that he will not be misled.
I don't take such extreme measures myself - descriptions of procedure parameters and return values and references to unusual or clever algorithms are a good idea. Warnings like You are not expected to understand this or You are advised in your own best interests not to modify the following code without contacting...* also have their uses.
* Most slashdotters will know the origin of the first of these quotations, but how many know where the second one comes from? (unless you have looked at an assembly language known as GIN5 you are unlikely to be even able to guess!).
Yes, and it demonstrates very well the relative advantages of analog(ue) and digital for TV.
Although only about 30 miles from the centre of London, I live in a marginal reception area - it is on the fringes of the service areas of 3 transmitters.
Analogue signals are not great, but watchable. The better digital signals are mainly excellent, but with occasional "freezing" (that is possibly more annoying than the continuous "snow" on the analogue).
The multiplexes than use the higher density encoding (64 QAM) are only viewable in certain weather conditions.
"If you reverse engineer - no restrictions apply"... except ISTR that in EU law you are allowed to reverse engineer only to make compatible products - not to make competing ones.
Now, of course, if this statement by MS is giving Carte Blanche for reverse engineering overiding their own licence agreements...
Perhaps Debian on sparc 32 is already showing signs of neglect in that the installer program crashes on a CD install on a sparcstation 10 or 20. I had to install on a 5 and move the disks across. SS10s/20s are now extremely cheap and 5s are only marginally more expensive - Ultras are just starting to get down to about £50.
Hey, but if you're playing with sparcs then a BSD or (free as in beer!) Solaris may be more in your style.
Slashdot Mirror
Accor - who run the moderately priced Ibis chain - also have some very low cost hotels of a similar, if lower-tech, nature.
However travellers with a wider than normal waistband should beware of the very narrow toilets.
See: www.hotelformule1.com
"A for Andromeda" (Fred Hoyle - TV series and book) and
(sort of) "Macroscope" (Piers Anthony - book) have this as
plot devices.
"That's why they make these amazing things -- discovered recently, I believe -- called glasses, ..."
They can help with some conditions, and cataracts can usually be cleared by a simple operation. Glaucoma, Age-Related Macrodegeneration, and other _common_ eye problems of increasing age are more difficult. Reduced ability to note contrast can be a real disaster area when trying to read some web sites - especially on a LCD display where you cannot crank-up the contrast like you can on a CRT.
"That way the only people in there are the IT people." ... and the cleaners (on minimum wage and unlikely to have been seriously security checked, probably) and the security staff (almost as badly paid and not necessarily better checked).
I've no idea what international law has to say about subsonic weapons technology (probably nothing, unless such is at least as dangerous to the user as the target :-), but there was an article in Scientific American - probably in the late 60s or early 70s about research into such weapons and the effects can be (literally) deadly ... problem is how to only affect the enemy.
- you mean like UK _and_ GB :-) .. er, one for each country.)
(
Yes, and I am well aware that Great Britain and The United Kingdom have different meanings (at least to those in the Northern part of the island of Ireland). I am also not aware of England, Wales, and Scotland having widely used individual country codes.
My address registered on eBay ends with GB (as I originally registered on the US site). The postage calculator on the UK site does not recognise this as being (essentially) the same as UK and thus postage on my purchases is quite frequently incorrectly calculated.
except there isn't - at the moment.
"Subject: You're in! Welcome to Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
IP address: 66.218.66.53
DNS Name: n18.bulk.scd.yahoo.com
Location: London, UK
Emails: 100"
London???
Spam?
The ARPA internet suite was not then recognised as a standard because no accepted international standards body (essentially ISO or CCITT) had published the standards. Eventually some of us* managed to convince the Joint Network Team of the Computer Board that TCP/IP would do what was required and the "coloured book" standards wouldn't and then within 2 years almost all the universities were in line with the rest of the world. (and we could get networking standard that didn't have to be custom written for the UK).
* Some claim that it was a document that I wrote for our JNT contact that finally forced the change.
Let us suppose the researcher (R) reports a security hole to the software producer (let's call them M). ... who also have more items in their priority lists. In a case like this the timescale is probably approaching a month for a "fairly high priority" problem.
First the report on the problem has to get to someone who has the knowledge to investigate and fix the problem. In a large organisation this is likely to take several days. It then has to be prioritised in his workload (Hey! you think there is only one problem?).
Next he has to verify that the problem exists (hopefully R has provided a repeatable example).
Then comes the first difficult part - identifying the root cause of the problem. If it is a buffer overflow this might be easy; a tricky combination of factors in a single module may be more difficult; an underlying design feature or a clash with an important usability function is going to cause major difficulties.
In the simple cases an initial fix may be possible (and right first fix) within hours - but will then have to be tested against the whole test suite and documented. We are, by now, probably already a week after first report for anything beyond a "damaging exploit in the wild" event.
For the complex, but limited in scope, hole much more is going to need to be done. Several people need to understand the problem and possibly redesign the module. The replacement code will take longer to get right and to test. It probably also needs to be done by the more experienced members of the team
Now think about the clash of design principles type of problem - in practice this is probably going to need a fairly ugly hack by very skilled programmers (A major redesign is rarely viable for widely distributed commercial software). How long do you think this is going to take?
Any system that is powerful and flexible enough to be useful is also powerful and flexible enough to run viruses/worms.
That depends on the country whose laws applies. In the UK, now and in theory, all web sites providing goods or services to the public are supposed to be "accessible".
At present there are clearly some that are not and sooner - rather than later - they may find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit.
Would those organisations that want DRM be more likely to trust an open source that might have a deliberate flaw from someone philosophically opposed to DRM or hidden source that is more likely to have unplanned flaws?
In other words they are try to combine two of the most effective ways of extracting money from punters (CCGs and on-line games)
9-track tape drives are stil relatively easy to come by. Seven track is rather more difficult but I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly difficult job to make a 7-track head for a more modern (9-track) drive and use a FPGA or similar to "massage" the data so that the rest of the drive firmware will work.
Is there any intrinsic difference between making the performances available for download and broadcasting the performances on digital radio.
If you have the right equipment (such as a Psion Wavefinder) and a reliable signal (not so easy for digital) you can record all the Proms at MP3 equivalent quality.
There seems to be a general assumption in the media that this is an Al Quaida coordinated attack. It could be. But the locations of the (four, not seven) blasts are such that small devices could easily have been planted by a lone idiot - use the Circle/District line and leave a bomb on a tube each way, then via Picadilly line to Holborn - douuble-back to Russell Sq leaving a bomb on that train. Then out onto a bus for one stop leaving another.
The bombs appear, from their effects, to have been small - probably ounces of commercial explosive or slightly more improvised. In any case easy enough for one person to carry.
Be nice if it were true. I'm not even sure that it is true for microprocessor systems. As for Mainframes and Minicomputers the story isn't so easy. There are good (or fairly good) emulators for the PDP 8, PDP 11, IBM 360/370 family, and probably for the PDP10. An emulator also exists for the ICL 1900 series (but only supports the George 3 operating system - not the other OSes).
But consider:
Multics
GE/Honeywell/Bull 600/6000/Level 66
PDP 9/15
Digico Micro-16 (I know, you've never heard of it!)
Computer Technology Modular One
Atlas
Stretch (IBM 7030)
I suspect one or two of the above have been emulated - I doubt if more than 4 of them have been.
Even the technical manuals that - by modern standards - give extremely detailed information on these systems, almost all fail to be totally detailed about subtle points. (That is if any copies of the manuals still survive).
To be even more obscure consider the 35mm magnetic tapes used on the Elliot 803 and similar machines. ... I have no idea where I could find a working 7-track tape drive.)
(Actually I know where the latter can be found
If your old AGP card is more than about 3 years old (1x or 2x) it won't work on a current-model motherboard anyhow (4x or 8x 1.5v) ... and may even damage one.
One of my friends has a policy that the first thing he does when attempting to maintain some (usually badly written) program passed onto him is to strip out the comments so that he will not be misled.
I don't take such extreme measures myself - descriptions of procedure parameters and return values and references to unusual or clever algorithms are a good idea. Warnings like You are not expected to understand this or You are advised in your own best interests not to modify the following code without contacting ...* also have their uses.
* Most slashdotters will know the origin of the first of these quotations, but how many know where the second one comes from? (unless you have looked at an assembly language known as GIN5 you are unlikely to be even able to guess!).
Analogue signals are not great, but watchable. The better digital signals are mainly excellent, but with occasional "freezing" (that is possibly more annoying than the continuous "snow" on the analogue).
The multiplexes than use the higher density encoding (64 QAM) are only viewable in certain weather conditions.
Where will I stand when the analogue is cut-off?
(answer: probably using a satellite dish)
Now, of course, if this statement by MS is giving Carte Blanche for reverse engineering overiding their own licence agreements ...
Hey, but if you're playing with sparcs then a BSD or (free as in beer!) Solaris may be more in your style.