It's amazing to see how far we've come these past 18 years.
It's also incredible how little we archived during this period. It really amazes me that it takes more than 20 seconds to change your IP address (on windows) or 30 seconds to load the system preferences (in vista on hardware wich comes with it). It also applies to other platforms: Word 6.0 for DOS was snappier than Office 2008 on the Mac (comparing a 25 MHz 486 without a mathematical co-processor and a C2D running at 2GHz with a very advanced instruction set).
Of course the benefits* are way higher than the downsides - I don't make coffee anymore after starting a complex task. Especially disk space and read/write times have improved significantly. But I'm still waiting way to much time for trivial tasks and compared to hardware achievements most new software performs pretty bad.
*If it wasn't for the fact that MS changes the doc format every product cycle I'd stick to Office 97 - I don't see any innovation in newer versions - they just cause more trouble.
The government's not providing it, they're selling the spectrum to someone who has to offer free internet on it.
Ok, but that's pretty much the same, isn't it? A private company has to follow their guidelines as if they provided the service themselves.
Who the heck would agree to that offer? Yes I will pay you money to be forced to offer free services. What?
Good question. I can only imagine one scenario which would work for both sides: The buyer injects ads into the normal http stream and gains money by doing so. Any other approach would fail for obvious reasons...
The FCC are talking about providing free, nationwide wireless internet.. Damn them to hell!
Let's assume China would do the same thing - imagine the outrage. First of all it's hard for competitors to deal with a free service - there is no reason to invest in infrastructure if some part of government is providing the service free of charge. This will hurt in the long run. Secondly it's the gateway to censorship per se. The first step is to allow people to access restricted content for free, which will drive many people away from neutral ISP's. The next step is to make blacklists mandatory for all. In the end the majority will accept those measures and a few people will use proxies to circumvent it (sounds like China, doesn't it?).
Slashdot users in general, it seems, cannot distinguish between creator and creation. Bad things are created by bad producers, who will only ever produce bad things. Good things are created by good producers, who will only ever produce good things.
Huh? Maybe I'm not the average reader or I don't understand it because I am. I'm totally unfamiliar with the creator - creation and bad producers - good producers reasoning.
I was working for an insurance company around '99 which only granted internet access to those dual-booting. You had your normal NT domain to log on to or if you really needed to get online you could restart your box on whatever system you would prefer. I thought it was kind of silly back then (if one OS is infected it's pretty pointless to assume that the other system is safe if it's running on the same hardware). However, the idea to separate systems isn't wrong at all. If the job is that crucial it might be a good idea to provide two PCs on different networks and a monitor which accepts 2 signals. It's simple solution to a very complex problem.
That would be a fist timer - but maybe Comcast can provide some experience. The Chinese government is way more busy blocking public sources. It means that certain sites will be blocked by the great firewall (which can be circumvented by a simple proxy outside of China). From my ex-expat point of view that's nothing to worry about. If you really want to know you'll get the news regardless of censorship. In the TV domain it might be different, but I've seen many Chinese with dishes in Shanghai (providing CNN etc.) and I'm seriously in doubt that CCTV's coverage will be taken without a grain of salt. Even on the countryside I'm sure that most people see the difference between propaganda and actual news - they were trained on more than one occasion (great famine, Cuba missile crisis, breakdown of the SU and so on).
"Understanding How CAPTCHA Is Broken" is catchier than "Anti-Captcha and spamming strategy well explained!", guess that's why this article was chosen. The article's summary itself shows that it's not mainly about CAPTCHAs, otherwise fast-flux wouldn't show up there.
I could as well be from Asia - the Yen has reached record rates this year. Or from Brazil: Gaining over 100% seems to be quite extreme for the last 5 years. Even in China the dollar lost value, despite the efforts of the government to keep the exchange rate between RMB and USD constant.
Nevertheless you are right that I'm from Europe. I have to remind everyone that:) =!;)
The correct way to handle this is to set up your system so that the user cannot ACCIDENTALLY execute any external code.
Would be rather trivial to implement in XP or Vista (and I'd love it, because it would reduce the number of calls off duty. On the other hand every employee would hate it and they might call me even more because they can't download "useful" stuff). But in the end this is not the most common source of malware/virii anymore. Cross-site-scripting accompanied by security holes in common plugins causes way more compromised systems. Bugs in Flash or quicktime in earlier versions make it extremely easy to infect a system without the user noticing. When I look at the stats of my website I could infect 50 visitors by week without much effort, because they run old versions of Flash (I'm not talking about the website I list in my profile). The so called "Russian Business Network" offered $ 0.10 per infected user last year. Might be just 5 bucks per week for my small site, but in the end I must say that it has never been easier and more profitable to infect IT systems (and no, I didn't take the money).
Like I said I'm not to serious about distcc in this case.
Having one or two antique machines around to act as specialized servers can be useful - a DNS/DHCP box, a print server, whatever.
The energy bill will most likely exceed the price for a dedicated device within less than 5 years (in some cases even just one year). Just take into account that a laptop consuming 50W results in 438 kWh on your energy bill. I pay around.30 per kWh, so that's $131.4 per year for me. In that light I'll buy any router consuming less than 25W right away. I'm aware that the energy price I pay is quite extreme, but even for those paying.20 or.15 it's basically the same equation - it just takes a little longer.
At least they can be reused as excellent chess computers. I'd say it will take a long time until such flaws are history. Personally I wouldn't support any closed-source solution and even OSS should be tested for an extensive period of time before I'd trust it. Till then I'll stick to voting by mail in case online voting becomes mandatory (which is possible and easy in the country I live in).
Might sound like a contradiction, but online votes might be even safer in the long run. It's not like paper votes are more secure per se - we just have more experience with it. A centralized system which encrypts everything up to one institution on top might be easier to control than all those humans reporting from polling places. But the current systems work differently and as I said I have doubts that there'll be an electronic system I'd trust.
One could also build a distcc farm, however, I doubt it will be faster or more energy efficient than compiling everything on a C2D. And first of all you'll net lots of stuff to compile, so you'll 'have' to switch to Gentoo. Sounds like I found a solution to problem I just created.
I had the same problem with a Netgear router I bought in '98. Back then consumer routers where not designed to handle hundreds of simultaneous connections (there was simply no reason). I don't know what caused it to choke first: CPU load or dropped connections caused by NAT-table overflow (I suspect the latter because some connections were just dropped). I assume that many cheap models still don't perform well in the 100+ area.
Just checked that my wrt54gl running DD-WRT supports up to 4096 connections in theory. However, I don't have much incentive to test it. Plus I would need a torrent with more than 4096 seeds first and I don't think Azureus would really connect to them all. The more I think about it the less I consider it doable. I set the limit to 250 and don't see a reason to change the value right now.
I don't want to look at it from a certain angle. I'm just trying to explain the difference between things which happen in public and things which can be covered because they happened in public and there is a justified public interest to make them available. Unfortunately it doesn't work any more to refer to a universal right we have as long as we don't give it away intentionally.
It can temporarily - or permanently - deafen them, depending on the setting. It's a weapon, plain and simple.
If that's the case it's a weapon - plain and simple. But I think its impact is rather minor compared to other american technologies already in place. For some reason nobody thinks it's bad that companies like Cisco provide hardware for the so called "Great Firewall". Instead we focus on a dubious sound weapon and the fact that google is abiding local law (like there's any choice you have if you do business in a foreign country). Mind-boggling...
The use of loudspeakers was very common at the end of WWII ("Stop fighting, you will just prolong the suffering of your people", "we won't hurt you if you put down your weapons", and sometimes just very annoying sounds for hours). I guess nobody considered this a weapon back then. What's new about this device is that it can target people selectively. As long as it does not physically stun people for minutes it's not a weapon, but part of the propaganda machinery.
Who the fuck keeps modding up these moronic "This is old news!!!" posts from AC's.
Yes, they are boring, but someone has to state the obvious and there's nothing wrong about imforming everyone about prior coverage in the media.
It might have been the first official flight, but I can recall at least 3 TV "infotainment" shows (non-US) covering this in recent years. Afterall it's just the economy of the mass media industry: Some major media agency publishes this and every news source copies it ad nauseam, because the journalists in charge haven't heard of it before or they simply are in need of content. Or they feel that not covering it will make their clientele think that they are not aware of an issue important to their particular target group*.
Two anecdotes: I know someone in the healthcare industry who hired a pr agency to promote his product. They scheduled a press conference in spring. Maybe 5 journalists of unimportant newspapers showed up. However, the press-kit they send to every major news source really paid off: In the silly season (over here that's around July) many newspapers wrote a feature about said product. Some even copied the euphemistic phrases of the press kit: "Breakthrough in hip surgery", "Uncle John can finally walk again" and so on. On another occasion I wrote to a major energy supplier requesting material about their view on nuclear power. They send me many articles and 2 months later I read one of them again in my favorite newspaper word-by-word (it was about a new generation of nuclear plants somewhere in scandinavia). Both examples show that we have to pay attention to how we read news and who has interest in making it public. It also shows that journalists do not only cover interesting stories, but also copy material because of laziness or cost pressure.
For those reasons I like it when someone shouts "old news" in such discussions. It's a kind reminder that the news isn't newsworthy. And if I haven't heard about it before I can still read on, but I'll take it with a grain of salt.
*Not a problem as long as they mention that it has been covered before.
Makes me wonder how those involved in the Council thought about the so called Cadaver Synod (interesting story btw).
Ignoring ex cathedra papal infallibility is not very convincing given the history of contradictions between popes and their predecessors. But maybe my (lutheran) mindset is missing the magic involved;)
One advice to those having way too much time at work: Read the list of popes one by one on wikipedia. You'll read about dozen forms of heresy and how they've been busy fighting it. To me it seems they've been busy with keeping the church together for most of the time and maybe the First Vatican Council was a sign of delayed gratification. Just a theory from someone who has no clue in this field...
Walking by a brothel or sitting in a park (half-)naked also happens to be in public.
Happens to be in public, but not "for the public". Makes a big difference if public means 'the people around you' or '1.23 billion people connected to the same network'.
But they do. They pay for the fuel (that produces the CO2 and the energy) used to make the item, transport it, run the machines that build the factories, warehouses etc. That fuel is not free, it is cheap but the price is going up.
They are paying for the fuel, but they are most certainly not paying for the CO2 produced. Clean air is a public good. I don't like to explain it in detail. This article covers most of it ad nauseam.
What I like about/. is that people are instantly thinking the obvious. There are other places where it takes hours to explain the general problem and the majority simply isn't informed enough to get it. I don't like to drop names, but it's stunning to read Mac related forums for example (I'm using a Mac myself so I can say this:D )
It's not a club for smart people, but it's a place to discuss basic ideas without slapping marketing statements at each other. Of course there are lots of people I strongly disagree with, but I have a chance to tell them how much I dislike their concept way after the article was on the main-page.
(and please don't mod me for this - I'm writing this because it's the way I feel. It would be rather awkward to state this just for the purpose of gaining mod-points)
Ignoring the sarcasm: There's a big difference between a country requesting to blur out parts and individuals not wanting to appear in certain areas. It's a good thing that they blur out faces and I was quite surprised that they didn't consider it before Street View launched.
IMO governments have to be as transparent as possible for a good reason. It's a different story if you as a "normal" person walk by a brothel or sit in a park (half-) naked. It all depends on the time the google truck passes and I don't see a reason why we have a right to see these people the moment they were photographed...
"The only reason why we usually consider new hardware to be cheaper is that it's not produced where we use it"
If that's true manufacturers would in effect be giving $$$ to you when you buy stuff. They aren't.
Let me put it in other words: There are costs which are not paid by the producer but by the general public. Pollution is a classic example of this problem: The production of a new CPU often produces more CO2 than what it saves by virtualization or higher general efficiency (also applies to cars, TVs and so on). However, neither the producer nor the buyer pays for the additional CO2 output. Those living next to the factory pay the price and we all do in the end due to the effects of global warming. There have been efforts to internalize such "external effects" (Kyoto, trade of emission certificates and so on), but those countries which produce most of the hardware we buy are not involved. China for example is sacrificing most public goods for a larger piece of the trade pie right now. I've worked in Shanghai recently and I'm still amazed how the general public is suffering from pollution. It wasn't possible to dry the laundry outside and many people walked around with masks. Since being outside is such a health hazard I spent most time at home where we had an air con. When it got colder we used the same air con to heat this place. In the end I consumed unreasonable amounts of energy to avoid the environment caused by unreasonable pollution, thereby making it only worse.
So nobody is giving us $$$, but we'll pay anyways. Of course it's cheaper to replace things if the new gear is more energy efficient. It directly affects your individual energy bill, but you are not paying for the harm done by manufacturing it. In the long run we should focus on charging manufacturers for the harm they do to the environment. If we archive this we'll see truly green products. Otherwise we'll ruin it all while feeling really good about all the new energy saving stuff we buy.
PS: Don't bother me with accountants. Their responsibility ends way below the chimney;)
Sorry to hear about the trouble getting a license in Germany.
Regarding speed limits in Australia I can only refer to hearsay - my relatives in Melbourne complained some years ago that they lowered the limit on highways. The logic was that there are less deadly accidents if people drive insanely slow. However, I don't remember any details and I'm sure you are much more informed than me...
Like I said I have very ambivalent feelings regarding drunk driving in Germany. I'm no angel in this regard: Since I don't need a license I used to ignore limits quite often. It simply doesn't affect me if I lose it for 3 months or even a year, because I usually drive to work by bike or take the subway. But then I realized that it's a crime over here to drive with more than 1.1 in your blood. This is quite important because a criminal record isn't so desirable if you are looking for a new job. Since then I only go by bike if I plan to drink. First of all bikes are rarely controlled and secondly the limit is 1.6 before the police does anything. Makes it quite easy to cycle home without any doubts.
For statistics I'd look at 3 groups: Those between 0.0 and 0.5, those between 0.5 and 1.1 and those above. I'm quite sure every state has numbers regarding this.
Your description of rural Australia reminds me of a trip to the outback somewhere in the Cape Tribulation area, but that's a different story. On the other hand it also reminds me of the loosely-populated areas in Germany, where it's not possible to head to the next pub without a car. I'm suspecting that you are living in a more crowded area thus thinking that the attitude over here is quite well regarding this issue...
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Of course the benefits* are way higher than the downsides - I don't make coffee anymore after starting a complex task. Especially disk space and read/write times have improved significantly. But I'm still waiting way to much time for trivial tasks and compared to hardware achievements most new software performs pretty bad.
*If it wasn't for the fact that MS changes the doc format every product cycle I'd stick to Office 97 - I don't see any innovation in newer versions - they just cause more trouble.
I was working for an insurance company around '99 which only granted internet access to those dual-booting. You had your normal NT domain to log on to or if you really needed to get online you could restart your box on whatever system you would prefer. I thought it was kind of silly back then (if one OS is infected it's pretty pointless to assume that the other system is safe if it's running on the same hardware). However, the idea to separate systems isn't wrong at all. If the job is that crucial it might be a good idea to provide two PCs on different networks and a monitor which accepts 2 signals. It's simple solution to a very complex problem.
"Understanding How CAPTCHA Is Broken" is catchier than "Anti-Captcha and spamming strategy well explained!", guess that's why this article was chosen. The article's summary itself shows that it's not mainly about CAPTCHAs, otherwise fast-flux wouldn't show up there.
I could as well be from Asia - the Yen has reached record rates this year. Or from Brazil: Gaining over 100% seems to be quite extreme for the last 5 years. Even in China the dollar lost value, despite the efforts of the government to keep the exchange rate between RMB and USD constant.
:) =! ;)
Nevertheless you are right that I'm from Europe. I have to remind everyone that
Given the current trend in exchange rates the government seems to be ahead ;)
At least they can be reused as excellent chess computers. I'd say it will take a long time until such flaws are history. Personally I wouldn't support any closed-source solution and even OSS should be tested for an extensive period of time before I'd trust it. Till then I'll stick to voting by mail in case online voting becomes mandatory (which is possible and easy in the country I live in).
Might sound like a contradiction, but online votes might be even safer in the long run. It's not like paper votes are more secure per se - we just have more experience with it. A centralized system which encrypts everything up to one institution on top might be easier to control than all those humans reporting from polling places. But the current systems work differently and as I said I have doubts that there'll be an electronic system I'd trust.
One could also build a distcc farm, however, I doubt it will be faster or more energy efficient than compiling everything on a C2D. And first of all you'll net lots of stuff to compile, so you'll 'have' to switch to Gentoo. Sounds like I found a solution to problem I just created.
I had the same problem with a Netgear router I bought in '98. Back then consumer routers where not designed to handle hundreds of simultaneous connections (there was simply no reason). I don't know what caused it to choke first: CPU load or dropped connections caused by NAT-table overflow (I suspect the latter because some connections were just dropped). I assume that many cheap models still don't perform well in the 100+ area.
Just checked that my wrt54gl running DD-WRT supports up to 4096 connections in theory. However, I don't have much incentive to test it. Plus I would need a torrent with more than 4096 seeds first and I don't think Azureus would really connect to them all. The more I think about it the less I consider it doable. I set the limit to 250 and don't see a reason to change the value right now.
I don't want to look at it from a certain angle. I'm just trying to explain the difference between things which happen in public and things which can be covered because they happened in public and there is a justified public interest to make them available. Unfortunately it doesn't work any more to refer to a universal right we have as long as we don't give it away intentionally.
The use of loudspeakers was very common at the end of WWII ("Stop fighting, you will just prolong the suffering of your people", "we won't hurt you if you put down your weapons", and sometimes just very annoying sounds for hours). I guess nobody considered this a weapon back then. What's new about this device is that it can target people selectively. As long as it does not physically stun people for minutes it's not a weapon, but part of the propaganda machinery.
It might have been the first official flight, but I can recall at least 3 TV "infotainment" shows (non-US) covering this in recent years. Afterall it's just the economy of the mass media industry: Some major media agency publishes this and every news source copies it ad nauseam, because the journalists in charge haven't heard of it before or they simply are in need of content. Or they feel that not covering it will make their clientele think that they are not aware of an issue important to their particular target group*.
Two anecdotes: I know someone in the healthcare industry who hired a pr agency to promote his product. They scheduled a press conference in spring. Maybe 5 journalists of unimportant newspapers showed up. However, the press-kit they send to every major news source really paid off: In the silly season (over here that's around July) many newspapers wrote a feature about said product. Some even copied the euphemistic phrases of the press kit: "Breakthrough in hip surgery", "Uncle John can finally walk again" and so on.
On another occasion I wrote to a major energy supplier requesting material about their view on nuclear power. They send me many articles and 2 months later I read one of them again in my favorite newspaper word-by-word (it was about a new generation of nuclear plants somewhere in scandinavia). Both examples show that we have to pay attention to how we read news and who has interest in making it public. It also shows that journalists do not only cover interesting stories, but also copy material because of laziness or cost pressure.
For those reasons I like it when someone shouts "old news" in such discussions. It's a kind reminder that the news isn't newsworthy. And if I haven't heard about it before I can still read on, but I'll take it with a grain of salt.
*Not a problem as long as they mention that it has been covered before.
Makes me wonder how those involved in the Council thought about the so called Cadaver Synod (interesting story btw).
;)
Ignoring ex cathedra papal infallibility is not very convincing given the history of contradictions between popes and their predecessors. But maybe my (lutheran) mindset is missing the magic involved
One advice to those having way too much time at work: Read the list of popes one by one on wikipedia. You'll read about dozen forms of heresy and how they've been busy fighting it. To me it seems they've been busy with keeping the church together for most of the time and maybe the First Vatican Council was a sign of delayed gratification. Just a theory from someone who has no clue in this field...
What I like about /. is that people are instantly thinking the obvious. There are other places where it takes hours to explain the general problem and the majority simply isn't informed enough to get it. I don't like to drop names, but it's stunning to read Mac related forums for example (I'm using a Mac myself so I can say this :D )
It's not a club for smart people, but it's a place to discuss basic ideas without slapping marketing statements at each other. Of course there are lots of people I strongly disagree with, but I have a chance to tell them how much I dislike their concept way after the article was on the main-page.
(and please don't mod me for this - I'm writing this because it's the way I feel. It would be rather awkward to state this just for the purpose of gaining mod-points)
Ignoring the sarcasm: There's a big difference between a country requesting to blur out parts and individuals not wanting to appear in certain areas. It's a good thing that they blur out faces and I was quite surprised that they didn't consider it before Street View launched.
IMO governments have to be as transparent as possible for a good reason. It's a different story if you as a "normal" person walk by a brothel or sit in a park (half-) naked. It all depends on the time the google truck passes and I don't see a reason why we have a right to see these people the moment they were photographed...
So nobody is giving us $$$, but we'll pay anyways. Of course it's cheaper to replace things if the new gear is more energy efficient. It directly affects your individual energy bill, but you are not paying for the harm done by manufacturing it. In the long run we should focus on charging manufacturers for the harm they do to the environment. If we archive this we'll see truly green products. Otherwise we'll ruin it all while feeling really good about all the new energy saving stuff we buy.
PS: Don't bother me with accountants. Their responsibility ends way below the chimney
Sorry to hear about the trouble getting a license in Germany.
Regarding speed limits in Australia I can only refer to hearsay - my relatives in Melbourne complained some years ago that they lowered the limit on highways. The logic was that there are less deadly accidents if people drive insanely slow. However, I don't remember any details and I'm sure you are much more informed than me...
Like I said I have very ambivalent feelings regarding drunk driving in Germany. I'm no angel in this regard: Since I don't need a license I used to ignore limits quite often. It simply doesn't affect me if I lose it for 3 months or even a year, because I usually drive to work by bike or take the subway. But then I realized that it's a crime over here to drive with more than 1.1 in your blood. This is quite important because a criminal record isn't so desirable if you are looking for a new job. Since then I only go by bike if I plan to drink. First of all bikes are rarely controlled and secondly the limit is 1.6 before the police does anything. Makes it quite easy to cycle home without any doubts.
For statistics I'd look at 3 groups: Those between 0.0 and 0.5, those between 0.5 and 1.1 and those above. I'm quite sure every state has numbers regarding this.
Your description of rural Australia reminds me of a trip to the outback somewhere in the Cape Tribulation area, but that's a different story. On the other hand it also reminds me of the loosely-populated areas in Germany, where it's not possible to head to the next pub without a car. I'm suspecting that you are living in a more crowded area thus thinking that the attitude over here is quite well regarding this issue...