Not to mention that other companies would not be allowed to lay their own infrastructure by the local governments. And if a local government did allow it, the local telco would be all over them with lawsuits.
If cable wasn't already established along with the telephone infrastructure, we would not have cable today. They snuck in when they weren't seen as a threat. As it is, the telcos are suing governments who allow wireless setups.
I don't think the majority of the readers here think all information should be free as in free speech or free beer. I think their concern is that ideas be free and that artwork, music, and programs are ideas.
The information is Microsoft's code for the.doc file format, the idea is the protocol. Most open source advocates could care less about the Microsoft code but given the fact that the file format is used widely, the protocol should be open so files meant to be shared by everyone, can be shared by everyone.
Personal information is not an idea. It is information that can be used to control or exploit in the wrong hands, however. And with digital manipulation and ID theft, it may cause serious consequences. We are seeing this already.
Governments should be as open as possible but I think most of us agree that there should be some information that is kept secret. I'm sure there is a wide view here on how much the government should keep secret as we are not all of the same mindset as is portrayed but some posters. On the other hand, if the government holds information that would serve the public interest, it's their duty to share it.
Most of us can form the distinction between information that should be shared, ideas and matters of public interest, and information that shouldn't such as private information, trade secrets, or matters of security. It is not a black and white world and it is especially grey regarding information. I don't see where the conflict in saying ideas should be free and personal information should be secret. That is about as black and white as it gets.
I agree, this is what I expected the judge to do. It's only 6 months and any trial is going to take years to settle anyway. I think the judge will bar him from working for the 6 months and then award a cash settlement to who ever wins and out of that, he should be paid.
I assume no matter what google is working on, MS is trying to copy it. It's going to come down to whether this guy was going to be working on a similar project or not.
Bravo. As a militant agnostic, I couldn't agree more. I do not mind what someone believes or does not believe as long as they keep that seperate from science and politics. Belief in a god or gods is based on faith alone and the same is true of believing there is no god. Until either is provable, they shouldn't be included in discussion of laws or science, especially religious ideas masquerading as science such as intelligent design.
You don't understand peer review when it comes to the scientific method. No one has said that peer review proves the author's conclusion. They only said his peers are better judges of his study than congressmen.
Peer review only means that the author provides all the methods and information he used to come up with his conclusion so that other scientists can look it over and repeat the experiment if they choose. They can then compare results and see if they come up with the same conclusions.
It's very much like open source where you have 1000 experienced eyes looking for mistakes rather than just 2. It's not likely most OSS users are going to parse all (or any) of the source code they use but they know there are many experienced programmers who will.
The fact that the author's peers didn't jump all over the article goes a long way towards at least confirming his methodology and without knowing his toilet paper budget. I would trust the author's peers over this congressman and his peers. He is free to repeat the study or fund his own but I doubt his study would release much more than the conclusion he wanted from the start. Asking for personal information outside the study is just meant for intimidation and to spread FUD.
I think this study was funded by big biodiesel, big solar and the powerful wind lobby. They are also behind the terrorist attacks and hurricanes to push up the price of oil making their products the more attractive choice. You have to watch your back around these freedom fry smelling sunburnt blow hards.
I think you missed the part of the article where he said this was at a university. That is a notoriously bad environment for computers in general but especially windows boxes. The only worse environment is highschools. Every hacker, wannabe hacker and script kiddy is having a go at the breadth of machines available to them.
For making his life simple and isolating his servers away from the rest of the school network, let alone the internet, a small linux box is suitable and much easier to obtain for his department than some expensive hardware solution. I don't know what these servers do and who needs access to them but all that can be taken care of with Linux or BSD.
I assume only admins have physical access to the servers so it would be up to them to be careful when they browse the net or download software. It's also up to them to keep up to date with OS patches and spyware/antivirus updates.
For securing the whole school, you are right, a more comprehensive solution needs to be hashed out. A firewall is only one small part of the equation But it's something he can control. It's something he can use to see whats comming in and out of his small part of the network and identify where trouble is coming from.
No reason for flaming that suggestion. It is fully capable as as the BSDs.
I wouldn't recommend using a full blown linux or BSD distro because they may have their own exploits. I would stick to one of the many distro's mentioned already that are designed for this application in mind. I currently use LEAF which I haven't seen mentioned. I've also used Coyote and plan to try M0n0wall. The basic setup is fine for simple home networks and they provide other packages for more complex situation.
While many say you can use any old 386, I recommend at least a 486 with more than one PCI slot. These are hard to find which is why I use a P100. This will allow you to use more modern network cards which are easier to find as well as easier to set up. Also, while some of them can run in 12 meg, give it 16 MB absolute minimum. M0n0wall requires 64. This will allow you more room to load packages and provide more room for logs. If you are getting hit quite a lot, you will want all that logging to help you identify problems within your network as well as block external problems. You can also set them up to send logs to a syslog server which may be a better solution for you.
The hardware I plan to use with m0n0wall is the WRAP from pcengines.ch. It's a little outside of your mentioned price range but very well suited to run off of a battery. With it's low power drain, it can run many hours off of a standard UPS battery or even longer off a car battery. And there is no loss or heat from the power inverter. I can attest to this from last year's hurricanes in Florida. I unforntunately didn't account for the cable node down the block losing power as I was prepared to stay connected the whole 7 days without service with 2 large and 2 smaller deep cycle batteries. This summer I'm prepared to go war driving to find a connection.
Opera has had that feature for years and they went a step farther. They bind a letter to a search engine so in the url bar you type "g item" to search google for item and "d word" to look up a word in dictionary.com I keep hoping for a firefox extension that does that.
This isn't limited to the slashdot crowd. It has become the norm everywhere, at least in the US. Sports, politics, religion, if you dont agree, there most be something wrong with you. Even if the discussion is about what your favorite color is, much like this discussion, if you dont like my color, your are an idiot.
BTW, it's blue and I do like blackbox and all the offshoots from it and currently use Waimea.
What's with the links in the story to advertisments rather than related information? I find it hard to believe the sub communicates using microsoft's IM.
With references like 'open sores software,' it's easy to believe that ADTI might be somewhat biased."
What's all this I hear about Open sores software? don't we have enough bad software out there? We have viruses and dirty worms, yuck. Some software has bugs in it. I'm sure that's not healthy. I think if we have open sores software, it will get infected and will die. I think we should put some ointment on open sores software and....
I'm sure there could be more to the story, like perhaps there were repeated log entries as if he had lynx in a script loop to do something as innocent as collect donation totals or something evil like password guessing. I wouldn't put it past the police/judges in any country of being largely ignorant of what a browser agent really means. It wouldn't take them much convincing to go busting down doors.
The suspicious part of the story is the sysadmin thinking something odd with the user agent of just that one person and calling the authorities. Looking at the logs from fairly small web sites you are lible to see all sorts of odd user agents. If something did stick out, I would think a sysadmin's first step would be to do a google search.
He is right, they have been available for at least 2 years for CD recorders. Sony had one for sale and I was torn between getting it or a DVD writer. I figured they would be out soon for DVD writers and be affordable by the time which ever I bought burned out.
Well that looks similar enough to warrant lawsuits. I give Google credit for showing restraint. I don't think that would be the case if the tabled were turned.
It is personal. It's tough for some to admit they made a mistake and voted in someone more stupid than themselves so they defy logic and reasoning to justify their decisions.
Regardless of whether there was an outright ban or not funding, and it was simply a funding ban on farther cell lines, it has cast a cloud over research in America. Many of the scientists working in the field have moved to China an India to be able to contunue work with less funds. Less companies are investing in research for fear it will be banned in the future as the neocons are still pushing for that.
First: I'm pretty sure linux has several desktops that can use 3d hardware acceleration already. I remember reading of a few but I can't remember which ones. I prefer light GUIs or console, not flashy memory hogs. Windows, OSX, and some linux desktops are flashy and pretty but you pay a price for that.
Second: I find X very responsive if it's not bogged down by a bloated desktop and running x apps off a headless server is the best of both worlds as x and the desktop use the ram and graphics ability of the workstation while the app uses the resources of the server. I would prefer to reserve any extra boost my graphics card provides for something that needs it, such as a game or graphic rendering. I don't need My 3d Documents folder taking away valuable FPS'.
Third: I think the big issue is choice. From what I gather, This version of windows will require you to have a 3d video card. I can appriciate that some people would like a flashy 3d desktop with all it's widgets and that using the graphics card would save regular CPU cycles while at the same time making the desktop more responsive. Not everyone would need or want that. While windows and OSX may be fine for some, I prefer linux for the choices I have.
fourth: Tweak factor, especially in a business setting. People already have too much to play with on their computers. They are already screwing up settings requiring someone to come down and reset them. Add to that the viruses and spyware that will take advantage of this. It's just another layer of crud that doesn't need to be there.
Fifth: Even a low end 3d card uses a lot of power and also gets quite hot. While we are getting more efficient computers with power saving modes and such, we will piss all that away if you need to suck up another 50-100 watts of power to write a slashdot reply. On the other hand, if all computers came with a water cooler and hot water reserve, it would save power and time making tea or instant coffee.
It's a fine idea, as long as it can be disabled.
Re:Alright! Another thread where we can bash Bush
on
Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Bush, America, Corporations and Fox News leave themselves open to bashing when they say things that totally contradict math and science. They are not the first to do this and they are not the only ones to do this but they are able to take it to the farthest and get away with it. They don't even attempt to explain their fuzzy science. They just belittle critics of their policies like they did the "armchair general, liberal pundits and anti-american's" leading up to the war in Iraq. Many people forget to notice those people were right and the Bush administration has been wrong at every step. I think it's time we listen to the intellectual elite instead of the intellectually and morally bankrupt.
http://wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62339,00.ht ml
There is a paper trail of sorts in the form of a roll of paper that can't be read by the voter. The problem is there is no way to assure that it is an accurate printout of the votes or a printout of the recorded votes after any kind of error or manipulation has occured.
Scary as that is, those rolls are also being mishandled to say the lease as documented by Bev Harris.
Network printers or print servers are the easiest to install. That all use tcp/ip and most have some web interface. You dont need to worry about different ports or conflicts. But even a local printer isn't that hard to connect in linux. And you dont need some bloated buggy driver. You just start cups, tell it what printer you have and what port it's hooked to and you can print a test page.
Its even easier than windows because the interface is the same for all printers and no reboots are involved. With windows you have a custom interface for all the printers so you have to go into each program and set them up as well and some programs wont work with some drivers, IE: AOL and HP printer drivers have problems. Not only does AOL not print right but after an AOL upgrade or reinstall, the printer driver doesn't work and you have to reinstall that. Both companies blamed each other and the problem for my customer was never fixed. I showed them how to not use the AOL browser.
Some of the extra features may not be available if the company doesn't release enough information on them to write a sutable driver to make use of them. That will change in time as consumers like the city of Munich start selecting printers based on how well linux is supported.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that other companies would not be allowed to lay their own infrastructure by the local governments. And if a local government did allow it, the local telco would be all over them with lawsuits.
6
If cable wasn't already established along with the telephone infrastructure, we would not have cable today. They snuck in when they weren't seen as a threat. As it is, the telcos are suing governments who allow wireless setups.
http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/municipal/48
I don't think the majority of the readers here think all information should be free as in free speech or free beer. I think their concern is that ideas be free and that artwork, music, and programs are ideas.
.doc file format, the idea is the protocol. Most open source advocates could care less about the Microsoft code but given the fact that the file format is used widely, the protocol should be open so files meant to be shared by everyone, can be shared by everyone.
The information is Microsoft's code for the
Personal information is not an idea. It is information that can be used to control or exploit in the wrong hands, however. And with digital manipulation and ID theft, it may cause serious consequences. We are seeing this already.
Governments should be as open as possible but I think most of us agree that there should be some information that is kept secret. I'm sure there is a wide view here on how much the government should keep secret as we are not all of the same mindset as is portrayed but some posters. On the other hand, if the government holds information that would serve the public interest, it's their duty to share it.
Most of us can form the distinction between information that should be shared, ideas and matters of public interest, and information that shouldn't such as private information, trade secrets, or matters of security. It is not a black and white world and it is especially grey regarding information. I don't see where the conflict in saying ideas should be free and personal information should be secret. That is about as black and white as it gets.
I agree, this is what I expected the judge to do. It's only 6 months and any trial is going to take years to settle anyway. I think the judge will bar him from working for the 6 months and then award a cash settlement to who ever wins and out of that, he should be paid.
I assume no matter what google is working on, MS is trying to copy it. It's going to come down to whether this guy was going to be working on a similar project or not.
Bravo. As a militant agnostic, I couldn't agree more. I do not mind what someone believes or does not believe as long as they keep that seperate from science and politics. Belief in a god or gods is based on faith alone and the same is true of believing there is no god. Until either is provable, they shouldn't be included in discussion of laws or science, especially religious ideas masquerading as science such as intelligent design.
You don't understand peer review when it comes to the scientific method. No one has said that peer review proves the author's conclusion. They only said his peers are better judges of his study than congressmen.
Peer review only means that the author provides all the methods and information he used to come up with his conclusion so that other scientists can look it over and repeat the experiment if they choose. They can then compare results and see if they come up with the same conclusions.
It's very much like open source where you have 1000 experienced eyes looking for mistakes rather than just 2. It's not likely most OSS users are going to parse all (or any) of the source code they use but they know there are many experienced programmers who will.
The fact that the author's peers didn't jump all over the article goes a long way towards at least confirming his methodology and without knowing his toilet paper budget. I would trust the author's peers over this congressman and his peers. He is free to repeat the study or fund his own but I doubt his study would release much more than the conclusion he wanted from the start. Asking for personal information outside the study is just meant for intimidation and to spread FUD.
I think this study was funded by big biodiesel, big solar and the powerful wind lobby. They are also behind the terrorist attacks and hurricanes to push up the price of oil making their products the more attractive choice. You have to watch your back around these freedom fry smelling sunburnt blow hards.
I think you missed the part of the article where he said this was at a university. That is a notoriously bad environment for computers in general but especially windows boxes. The only worse environment is highschools. Every hacker, wannabe hacker and script kiddy is having a go at the breadth of machines available to them. For making his life simple and isolating his servers away from the rest of the school network, let alone the internet, a small linux box is suitable and much easier to obtain for his department than some expensive hardware solution. I don't know what these servers do and who needs access to them but all that can be taken care of with Linux or BSD. I assume only admins have physical access to the servers so it would be up to them to be careful when they browse the net or download software. It's also up to them to keep up to date with OS patches and spyware/antivirus updates. For securing the whole school, you are right, a more comprehensive solution needs to be hashed out. A firewall is only one small part of the equation But it's something he can control. It's something he can use to see whats comming in and out of his small part of the network and identify where trouble is coming from.
No reason for flaming that suggestion. It is fully capable as as the BSDs.
I wouldn't recommend using a full blown linux or BSD distro because they may have their own exploits. I would stick to one of the many distro's mentioned already that are designed for this application in mind. I currently use LEAF which I haven't seen mentioned. I've also used Coyote and plan to try M0n0wall. The basic setup is fine for simple home networks and they provide other packages for more complex situation.
While many say you can use any old 386, I recommend at least a 486 with more than one PCI slot. These are hard to find which is why I use a P100. This will allow you to use more modern network cards which are easier to find as well as easier to set up. Also, while some of them can run in 12 meg, give it 16 MB absolute minimum. M0n0wall requires 64. This will allow you more room to load packages and provide more room for logs. If you are getting hit quite a lot, you will want all that logging to help you identify problems within your network as well as block external problems. You can also set them up to send logs to a syslog server which may be a better solution for you.
The hardware I plan to use with m0n0wall is the WRAP from pcengines.ch. It's a little outside of your mentioned price range but very well suited to run off of a battery. With it's low power drain, it can run many hours off of a standard UPS battery or even longer off a car battery. And there is no loss or heat from the power inverter. I can attest to this from last year's hurricanes in Florida. I unforntunately didn't account for the cable node down the block losing power as I was prepared to stay connected the whole 7 days without service with 2 large and 2 smaller deep cycle batteries. This summer I'm prepared to go war driving to find a connection.
Opera has had that feature for years and they went a step farther. They bind a letter to a search engine so in the url bar you type "g item" to search google for item and "d word" to look up a word in dictionary.com I keep hoping for a firefox extension that does that.
This isn't limited to the slashdot crowd. It has become the norm everywhere, at least in the US. Sports, politics, religion, if you dont agree, there most be something wrong with you. Even if the discussion is about what your favorite color is, much like this discussion, if you dont like my color, your are an idiot. BTW, it's blue and I do like blackbox and all the offshoots from it and currently use Waimea.
What's with the links in the story to advertisments rather than related information? I find it hard to believe the sub communicates using microsoft's IM.
What's all this I hear about Open sores software? don't we have enough bad software out there? We have viruses and dirty worms, yuck. Some software has bugs in it. I'm sure that's not healthy. I think if we have open sores software, it will get infected and will die. I think we should put some ointment on open sores software and....
What? Open source software?
Never mind.
I'm sure there could be more to the story, like perhaps there were repeated log entries as if he had lynx in a script loop to do something as innocent as collect donation totals or something evil like password guessing. I wouldn't put it past the police/judges in any country of being largely ignorant of what a browser agent really means. It wouldn't take them much convincing to go busting down doors. The suspicious part of the story is the sysadmin thinking something odd with the user agent of just that one person and calling the authorities. Looking at the logs from fairly small web sites you are lible to see all sorts of odd user agents. If something did stick out, I would think a sysadmin's first step would be to do a google search.
He is right, they have been available for at least 2 years for CD recorders. Sony had one for sale and I was torn between getting it or a DVD writer. I figured they would be out soon for DVD writers and be affordable by the time which ever I bought burned out.
Well that looks similar enough to warrant lawsuits. I give Google credit for showing restraint. I don't think that would be the case if the tabled were turned.
It is personal. It's tough for some to admit they made a mistake and voted in someone more stupid than themselves so they defy logic and reasoning to justify their decisions.
Regardless of whether there was an outright ban or not funding, and it was simply a funding ban on farther cell lines, it has cast a cloud over research in America. Many of the scientists working in the field have moved to China an India to be able to contunue work with less funds. Less companies are investing in research for fear it will be banned in the future as the neocons are still pushing for that.
First: I'm pretty sure linux has several desktops that can use 3d hardware acceleration already. I remember reading of a few but I can't remember which ones. I prefer light GUIs or console, not flashy memory hogs. Windows, OSX, and some linux desktops are flashy and pretty but you pay a price for that.
Second: I find X very responsive if it's not bogged down by a bloated desktop and running x apps off a headless server is the best of both worlds as x and the desktop use the ram and graphics ability of the workstation while the app uses the resources of the server. I would prefer to reserve any extra boost my graphics card provides for something that needs it, such as a game or graphic rendering. I don't need My 3d Documents folder taking away valuable FPS'.
Third: I think the big issue is choice. From what I gather, This version of windows will require you to have a 3d video card. I can appriciate that some people would like a flashy 3d desktop with all it's widgets and that using the graphics card would save regular CPU cycles while at the same time making the desktop more responsive. Not everyone would need or want that. While windows and OSX may be fine for some, I prefer linux for the choices I have.
fourth: Tweak factor, especially in a business setting. People already have too much to play with on their computers. They are already screwing up settings requiring someone to come down and reset them. Add to that the viruses and spyware that will take advantage of this. It's just another layer of crud that doesn't need to be there.
Fifth: Even a low end 3d card uses a lot of power and also gets quite hot. While we are getting more efficient computers with power saving modes and such, we will piss all that away if you need to suck up another 50-100 watts of power to write a slashdot reply. On the other hand, if all computers came with a water cooler and hot water reserve, it would save power and time making tea or instant coffee.
It's a fine idea, as long as it can be disabled.
Bush, America, Corporations and Fox News leave themselves open to bashing when they say things that totally contradict math and science. They are not the first to do this and they are not the only ones to do this but they are able to take it to the farthest and get away with it. They don't even attempt to explain their fuzzy science. They just belittle critics of their policies like they did the "armchair general, liberal pundits and anti-american's" leading up to the war in Iraq. Many people forget to notice those people were right and the Bush administration has been wrong at every step. I think it's time we listen to the intellectual elite instead of the intellectually and morally bankrupt.
t ml
http://wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62339,00.h
There is a paper trail of sorts in the form of a roll of paper that can't be read by the voter. The problem is there is no way to assure that it is an accurate printout of the votes or a printout of the recorded votes after any kind of error or manipulation has occured.
Scary as that is, those rolls are also being mishandled to say the lease as documented by Bev Harris.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Network printers or print servers are the easiest to install. That all use tcp/ip and most have some web interface. You dont need to worry about different ports or conflicts. But even a local printer isn't that hard to connect in linux. And you dont need some bloated buggy driver. You just start cups, tell it what printer you have and what port it's hooked to and you can print a test page.
Its even easier than windows because the interface is the same for all printers and no reboots are involved. With windows you have a custom interface for all the printers so you have to go into each program and set them up as well and some programs wont work with some drivers, IE: AOL and HP printer drivers have problems. Not only does AOL not print right but after an AOL upgrade or reinstall, the printer driver doesn't work and you have to reinstall that. Both companies blamed each other and the problem for my customer was never fixed. I showed them how to not use the AOL browser.
Some of the extra features may not be available if the company doesn't release enough information on them to write a sutable driver to make use of them. That will change in time as consumers like the city of Munich start selecting printers based on how well linux is supported.