I was waiting for a gig based solid state player from Apple. I'll definitely be buying one of these babies.
BTW, anyone look at the $5 yahoo music offer? It isn't worth it. Basically you pay the money to get extremely limited rights. But that's ok, I have exactly 1208 songs in my iTunes library right now that I can download to the Nano when I get it. Cool!
50L to go 500kM is 10kM to the liter. Or about 23MPG. Not good.
Unless we come up with a serious breakthrough on hydrogen production it'll never happen.
There are several groups working on describing how photosynthesis actually works in plants. It is theorized that the process would yield us all the hydrogen we wanted. But that is still a few years off.
First off, anyone who doesn't know how to change the AIM settings to say "Only allow people on my buddy list to add me to their buddy list." shouldn't be allowed to use AIM.
But his experiences are amusing. I would have played with it a bit more. Make the idiot invest that much more time to ultimately find out you're not some commonly known celebrity but the Ruler of the Universe instead.
I recall when the ALICE IRC bot was first getting rolled out. Everyone was so amazed and then I popped the question:
"Who is your creator?"
The bot then proceeded to tell me about Dr. so and so and his I.T. lab, etc. This was until the woman who was selling the bots to people discovered that I'd figured out how to get the bot to expose itself so to speak, and they changed the creator response to their own name.
Ah but without the pin it'd be useless. And encrypt the minutae of the thumbprint with the pin. Use challenge-response authentication on the pin.
But most importantly make sure the thumb, iris, etc. is attached to a living, breathing being. Most of the theft of credit/debit cards is non-violent anyhow. Most of it exploits technology or processes.
But signatures are worthless. The signature on my card and on my drivers license is far different from the way I actually sign things. It's why I always make it a point to ask how long a clerk has studied handwriting analysis when they make the effort to check my card signature against what I just signed.
Having once built POS systems using software and hardware I'm fully aware that a reader/writer is pretty short money.
And most banks haven't yet made the transition from mag-stripe to smart-chip. The entire infrastructure would have to be changed.
As to why there isn't any serious effort to combat fraudulent credit/debit usage that's simple. The people who suffer are the merchants and the card holders. The banks, card issuers, and card processors are competely off the hook when it comes to fraud.
A merchant pays a premium based on his credit rating, rate of charge backs, etc that can range from 2% to 10% of the transaction price. So lets say you swipe for $10.00 - and the merchant is paying that 10%. Then you charge it back and the merchant is out the whole amount but the processor and card issuer got their cut.
It's kind of like foreign ATM fees. I see BofA is now $2.00 per pop, or a full 10% of a $20 withdrawal. You can't tell me that their actual cost even approaches ten cents for the transaction. So it must be profit taking. Nice isn't it.
Most retailers now use a self-swipe card reader. They don't even look at the card.
Every once in a great while a clerk will ask to see my card at my local supermarket. But those occasions are few and far between.
They don't even cross match the store ID card with the card you swipe. I understand that there are flaws such as a spouse having a store card with the same number on it. But there has to be a better way of checking to be sure the credit/debit card holder is who they say they are.
This is why I'd be much more comforable with a card + thumb print + pin scenario.
So true. I wonder if the school administrators punished the people who were so ignorant as to leave passwords written on a label attached to the machine.
The sad part is, I've seen that behavior in many places I've worked. When I saw it I'd admonish the person and advise them on crafting passwords that would be hard to break yet easy to remember.
We're slowly moving away from MS apps in RI too. For example, most servers are now LAMP vs. being MS IIS, Exchange, etc. There are still a couple of Novell GroupWise servers but those are slowly being phased out.
For example, my agency has 60 users. For MS Office assuming a government discount that makes the end price $200 we'd be shelling out $12,000.
And lets not forget the obscene pricing of MS software for servers. A 50 user MS-SQL for instance would run you approximately $8K to $10K and that excludes the OS.
LAMP - server cost $5K. Cost of software $0, Cost of configuration time: $1K or so. So for the $20,000 above you could buy three new servers and have them congigured to do what you want them to.
And a desktop can be had for
So yes, it is a bottom line exercise and a clear signal to Microsoft that:
a) We won't pay bloated prices for sofware that we only use a small subset of features on, but isn't crippled from occasionally using the gee-whiz features.
and
b)Constant upgrade cycles in which we shell out full retail for something that is an upgrade.
They had better wake up and smell the coffee. As government goes, so goes business that interacts with government. Microsoft could be staring at a huge defection of customers in the near term.
Cutting off Chinese addresses plays right into the hands of the dinosaur that is the Chinese Communist Government.
At the same time we can take reasonable steps not to block but filter what they can and can't see from China, Russia, India, etc. Firewalls have gotten much more powerful and are able to reject attempts that would once have caused havoc.
Just leave port 80 open. Put your web servers in yoru DMZ, keep hot backups and just be ready for the day that your IIS box gets hacked again.
When it comes to servers I'm more likely to use Linux than buy an MS product at a bloated price.
LAMP + Samba suits my and my clients needs just fine.
But the holy grail has not yet come to fruition when it comes to messaging and collaboration tools ala MS Exchange server.
Forutnately there are several efforts ongoing to develope an Exchange killer but they aren't a high priority as yet. I know Mozilla foundation is going to really jump in in 2007. Can't wait.
Indeed, it's usually on the order of ten to fifteen years before it hits the general market.
Just think about this for a moment though. What entity would most oppose regenerative organs?
You guessed it, the pharmaceutical industry. After all, anti-rejection drugs are a tidy little market for them.
We're entering a brave new world though. Every day discoveries that will impact the human lifespan are made. Aubrey DeGrey is an interesting person whose work is a must follow.
But if it is anything like here in the northeast, tune anywhere on 2m or 70cm and it's a ghost town. 2m has pretty much become loaded with APRS trackers.
And one thing to consider is that even if you had a 2m radio, range on those is generally limited to about 5 miles or so. What makes them work is a network of repeaters all over the place. But if they don't have power you're pretty much stuck.
Would welcome not having to actively drive the car. For example, those with long commutes could read their document of choice, eat a meal, have sex with themselves or someone else, etc.
Why waste your time controlling a vehicle in traffic or on wide open highway when you can be doing so many things that are better for you and more enjoyable.
"Piracy has the very real potential of tipping movies into becoming an unprofitable industry, especially big-event films. If that happens, they will stop being made," said Mr. Jackson
Given that most of what happens to be out there over the past few years is crap would it be such a loss?
Until Hollywood gives us movies that we're willing to pay for I say let them starve.
I tend to use Linux for server side, Windows for the desktop simply because both myself and end users find KDE a little hard to get used to.
But sometimes Linux servers vex me. For example, my FreeBSD 5.4 server needs to proxy all it's command line FTP and wget things but for the life of me I cannot get a straight answer.
I went the degree route. Never bothered with certifications because quite frankly I've been dealing with Windows, Novell, etc. for longer than I care to admit.
But certifications do act as an initial filter. I've noticed the lower paying entry level jobs either require them or will provide them upon start of employment.
Nothing funnier than one family gathering I was at. Both my sisters brought their then boyfriends to dinner. One of them was a paper MCSE and didn't know shit. The other sister bf and I had a really good time ribbing him about it.
Unfortunately the wanker is now my brother-in-law. He's still a wanker by the way.
We use barcodes on forms so when scanning them it will pick up the id. But then we realized, new scanners scan to PDF and it's really easy to pick apart a PDF file so the bar code is redundant.
I just wonder about stray RF. As we amateur radio folks are well aware, consumer electronics and to a large part business electronics don't have spectacular shielding. Hell, I note that Nextel's iDen phones tend to spalsh over into the AM band if they're within a couple feet.
Simple. Make sure one is positively charged and one is negatively charged.:)
True - this weapon has too broad a hit field. But our military is learning the lesson that the British learned during the Revolutionary War. That is, you can conduct war by the rules.
The rules say you stay on one side and your enemy masses their forces on the other side. Then you fire mortars and progress forward with grenades and guns. Of course now we're moving toward energy weapons and all bets are off.
Of course as the British has foundout, the other side doesn't necessarily play by the rules. They can send suicide bombers, truck bombs and what not against your troops and your commanders.
Until we start fighting adapatively, we're going to lose. There isn't any weapon that will change that.
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I was waiting for a gig based solid state player from Apple. I'll definitely be buying one of these babies.
BTW, anyone look at the $5 yahoo music offer? It isn't worth it. Basically you pay the money to get extremely limited rights. But that's ok, I have exactly 1208 songs in my iTunes library right now that I can download to the Nano when I get it. Cool!
50L to go 500kM is 10kM to the liter. Or about 23MPG. Not good.
Unless we come up with a serious breakthrough on hydrogen production it'll never happen.
There are several groups working on describing how photosynthesis actually works in plants. It is theorized that the process would yield us all the hydrogen we wanted. But that is still a few years off.
First off, anyone who doesn't know how to change the AIM settings to say "Only allow people on my buddy list to add me to their buddy list." shouldn't be allowed to use AIM.
But his experiences are amusing. I would have played with it a bit more. Make the idiot invest that much more time to ultimately find out you're not some commonly known celebrity but the Ruler of the Universe instead.
I recall when the ALICE IRC bot was first getting rolled out. Everyone was so amazed and then I popped the question: "Who is your creator?"
The bot then proceeded to tell me about Dr. so and so and his I.T. lab, etc. This was until the woman who was selling the bots to people discovered that I'd figured out how to get the bot to expose itself so to speak, and they changed the creator response to their own name.
Nice try but I know a bot when I see one.
So sorry but I've had the chance to play with signature recognition equipment. I can confound it with ease.
Ah but without the pin it'd be useless. And encrypt the minutae of the thumbprint with the pin. Use challenge-response authentication on the pin.
.
But most importantly make sure the thumb, iris, etc. is attached to a living, breathing being. Most of the theft of credit/debit cards is non-violent anyhow. Most of it exploits technology or processes
But signatures are worthless. The signature on my card and on my drivers license is far different from the way I actually sign things. It's why I always make it a point to ask how long a clerk has studied handwriting analysis when they make the effort to check my card signature against what I just signed.
Having once built POS systems using software and hardware I'm fully aware that a reader/writer is pretty short money.
And most banks haven't yet made the transition from mag-stripe to smart-chip. The entire infrastructure would have to be changed.
As to why there isn't any serious effort to combat fraudulent credit/debit usage that's simple. The people who suffer are the merchants and the card holders. The banks, card issuers, and card processors are competely off the hook when it comes to fraud.
A merchant pays a premium based on his credit rating, rate of charge backs, etc that can range from 2% to 10% of the transaction price. So lets say you swipe for $10.00 - and the merchant is paying that 10%. Then you charge it back and the merchant is out the whole amount but the processor and card issuer got their cut.
It's kind of like foreign ATM fees. I see BofA is now $2.00 per pop, or a full 10% of a $20 withdrawal. You can't tell me that their actual cost even approaches ten cents for the transaction. So it must be profit taking. Nice isn't it.
Most retailers now use a self-swipe card reader. They don't even look at the card.
Every once in a great while a clerk will ask to see my card at my local supermarket. But those occasions are few and far between.
They don't even cross match the store ID card with the card you swipe. I understand that there are flaws such as a spouse having a store card with the same number on it. But there has to be a better way of checking to be sure the credit/debit card holder is who they say they are.
This is why I'd be much more comforable with a card + thumb print + pin scenario.
How very true. We run MySQL on Debian and RedHat servers.
I'm rather surprised that MySQL is joining one of the Evil Empire.
Their freebie product is fantastic. We host all sorts of databases using it and the only glitches we have are our fault, not that of the dbms.
So true. I wonder if the school administrators punished the people who were so ignorant as to leave passwords written on a label attached to the machine.
The sad part is, I've seen that behavior in many places I've worked. When I saw it I'd admonish the person and advise them on crafting passwords that would be hard to break yet easy to remember.
But there were always hardcases.
We're slowly moving away from MS apps in RI too. For example, most servers are now LAMP vs. being MS IIS, Exchange, etc. There are still a couple of Novell GroupWise servers but those are slowly being phased out.
For example, my agency has 60 users. For MS Office assuming a government discount that makes the end price $200 we'd be shelling out $12,000.
And lets not forget the obscene pricing of MS software for servers. A 50 user MS-SQL for instance would run you approximately $8K to $10K and that excludes the OS.
LAMP - server cost $5K. Cost of software $0, Cost of configuration time: $1K or so. So for the $20,000 above you could buy three new servers and have them congigured to do what you want them to.
And a desktop can be had for
So yes, it is a bottom line exercise and a clear signal to Microsoft that:
a) We won't pay bloated prices for sofware that we only use a small subset of features on, but isn't crippled from occasionally using the gee-whiz features.
and
b)Constant upgrade cycles in which we shell out full retail for something that is an upgrade.
They had better wake up and smell the coffee. As government goes, so goes business that interacts with government. Microsoft could be staring at a huge defection of customers in the near term.
Cutting off Chinese addresses plays right into the hands of the dinosaur that is the Chinese Communist Government.
At the same time we can take reasonable steps not to block but filter what they can and can't see from China, Russia, India, etc. Firewalls have gotten much more powerful and are able to reject attempts that would once have caused havoc.
Just leave port 80 open. Put your web servers in yoru DMZ, keep hot backups and just be ready for the day that your IIS box gets hacked again.
When it comes to servers I'm more likely to use Linux than buy an MS product at a bloated price. LAMP + Samba suits my and my clients needs just fine.
But the holy grail has not yet come to fruition when it comes to messaging and collaboration tools ala MS Exchange server.
Forutnately there are several efforts ongoing to develope an Exchange killer but they aren't a high priority as yet. I know Mozilla foundation is going to really jump in in 2007. Can't wait.
Indeed, it's usually on the order of ten to fifteen years before it hits the general market.
Just think about this for a moment though. What entity would most oppose regenerative organs?
You guessed it, the pharmaceutical industry. After all, anti-rejection drugs are a tidy little market for them.
We're entering a brave new world though. Every day discoveries that will impact the human lifespan are made. Aubrey DeGrey is an interesting person whose work is a must follow.
My experience has been that with an HT you don't generally get more than 2 or 3 miles.
Serious mileage takes 5W and up. And of course there's the gain depending on they type of antenna you use, usually in the 3db and up range.
But in my area of 1 land, 2m is dead.
True freedom of speech is being quashed at every opportunity by those who have a greater financial status.
Of course every once in a while David beats Goliath but on the whole we get squeezed tighter and tighter every day.
This is precisely why I use an alias on any blog I post to.
But if it is anything like here in the northeast, tune anywhere on 2m or 70cm and it's a ghost town. 2m has pretty much become loaded with APRS trackers.
And one thing to consider is that even if you had a 2m radio, range on those is generally limited to about 5 miles or so. What makes them work is a network of repeaters all over the place. But if they don't have power you're pretty much stuck.
Would welcome not having to actively drive the car. For example, those with long commutes could read their document of choice, eat a meal, have sex with themselves or someone else, etc.
Why waste your time controlling a vehicle in traffic or on wide open highway when you can be doing so many things that are better for you and more enjoyable.
"Piracy has the very real potential of tipping movies into becoming an unprofitable industry, especially big-event films. If that happens, they will stop being made," said Mr. Jackson
Given that most of what happens to be out there over the past few years is crap would it be such a loss?
Until Hollywood gives us movies that we're willing to pay for I say let them starve.
I tend to use Linux for server side, Windows for the desktop simply because both myself and end users find KDE a little hard to get used to.
But sometimes Linux servers vex me. For example, my FreeBSD 5.4 server needs to proxy all it's command line FTP and wget things but for the life of me I cannot get a straight answer.
I went the degree route. Never bothered with certifications because quite frankly I've been dealing with Windows, Novell, etc. for longer than I care to admit.
But certifications do act as an initial filter. I've noticed the lower paying entry level jobs either require them or will provide them upon start of employment.
Nothing funnier than one family gathering I was at. Both my sisters brought their then boyfriends to dinner. One of them was a paper MCSE and didn't know shit. The other sister bf and I had a really good time ribbing him about it.
Unfortunately the wanker is now my brother-in-law. He's still a wanker by the way.
At one place of employment we had a shredder that you could feed a good sized phone book into and get confetti out the other end.
I loved that machine, particularly when I left the job. All my file cabinets went through that shredder.
The only mod I'd make to the original is a cross cutter as strips can be re-assembled with a little bit of effort.
However, re-assembling confetti is a whole lot harder.
We use barcodes on forms so when scanning them it will pick up the id. But then we realized, new scanners scan to PDF and it's really easy to pick apart a PDF file so the bar code is redundant.
I just wonder about stray RF. As we amateur radio folks are well aware, consumer electronics and to a large part business electronics don't have spectacular shielding. Hell, I note that Nextel's iDen phones tend to spalsh over into the AM band if they're within a couple feet.
Simple. Make sure one is positively charged and one is negatively charged. :)
True - this weapon has too broad a hit field. But our military is learning the lesson that the British learned during the Revolutionary War. That is, you can conduct war by the rules.
The rules say you stay on one side and your enemy masses their forces on the other side. Then you fire mortars and progress forward with grenades and guns. Of course now we're moving toward energy weapons and all bets are off.
Of course as the British has foundout, the other side doesn't necessarily play by the rules. They can send suicide bombers, truck bombs and what not against your troops and your commanders.
Until we start fighting adapatively, we're going to lose. There isn't any weapon that will change that.
I think both RICO and DMCA are catch alls that do more harm than good.
Both are so ambiguous as to leave open holes that you could drive a semi through, which means you could twist the law to your desire.
Any site administrator worth their salt can protect images from being cross linked or copied.
Someone ought to write a friend of the defense brief about this. Maybe then we can stop this baloney before the web becomes completely useless.