The "solar cells" used are optimized for light in the relatively far infrared - heat radiation. One of the nicest things about this method is that it can recover energy from waste heat which would otherwise be unusable. If only the cells weren't so expensive and made from such toxic materials...
It is a standard endorsed by Intel and based on an AC-97 serial interface to the codec.
If this is the case it means that something else on the board is doing the actual DSP work and presenting the result to the CPU as a standard modem.
ZZ ----
Differences between Globalstar and Iridium
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 2
Globalstar satellites are much smaller (480kg) and cheaper. They are not switchboards in the sky with satellite cross-links like Iridium. They are just dumb frequency translators ("bent pipe" transceivers).
All the smarts are on the ground. You can think of them as antennas connected to the cellular base station with a really long cable. As a result, they will not work in places like the middle of the pacific ocean. You must be within about 1000km from a ground station. They will also not work in the polar regions. They orbits are inclined and do not cover the poles since there aren't that many customers there... Compare this with Iridum where the poles get the best coverage since all Iridium orbits intersect over the poles.
Globalstar uses CDMA. Your handset can communicate with two or more satellites simultaneously and actually sum their signals coherently before decoding (soft handoff). This should result in better coverage.
Globalstar uses a variation of IS-95 CDMA and probably has the same vocoder - variable rate QCELP at up to 9600 bps. Iridium is not GSM, it uses a low rate vocoder (2400bps).
Both Iridium and Globalstar have negligible propagation delay because of their low orbits. The vocoders cause most of the delay. ----
This means that anyone can execute arbitrary code on their compilefarm servers by including it in the build scripts. They need to make sure they have really good local security.
Another problem is that some software packages assume that "make install" will always be executed by root and include things like "install -o root" which will fail for non-root users. This is the most common reason for source RPMs which cannot be built by a non-root user.
I think it's part of a hacker mindset: doing things just because they are possible, doing things because they are interesting, doing things just because. And once you do it why not share it with others? Sharing is at least half the fun.
I wonder what will be Promise's response to this. I hope this won't turn into yes another conflict between industry and hackerdom over "information wants to be free".
is at the very last moment before the information is presented to the user. This minimizes the number of places where the unencrypted data may be intercepted.
Please note that I am treating it from a purely technical aspect. I will not get into whether content copy protection should or shouldn't be implemented.
Two issues, though: 1. Why just 56 bits? the new export regulations specifically exempt encryption used for copy protection from such limitations.
2. How will this interact with compression? Decryption is, by definition, not linear i.e. decrypt(decompress(x)) != decompress(decrypt(x)). Here they are talking about decrypting the high bandwidth raw video data
But the computer industry is all about momentum. How long will you wait for something which is "real soon now" for such a long time?
The real problem is not getting the bits from A to B. The software abstraction layers, descriptors and class definitions were the parts that took the most time in the USB standards commitees. Microsoft's insistence on making USB one more jewel on Windows 98's crown also contributed a significant delay.
But this is nothing compared to how long 1394 is taking. An environment with no single master is much more complex. But you should also take into account the commitee effect - they have vast plans with cute acronyms to make it take control of everything in your house. Yeah, sure.
USB 2.0 will be identical to 1.1 from the operating system's point of view. It will use the same class drivers and in some cases the same vendor-supplied drivers. This will enable it to reach the market in a relatively short time.
It's not that I'm "pro USB" and "anti 1394" - both have interesting features the the other lacks. It's just reality.
According to the wankel's statement CNN has called it a "prank" and said that they "were not hacked into". FoxNews are the ones who called it "vandalism" and "hacking".
This type of low cost high-speed connectivity could bring the benefits of a SAN (Storage Area Network) architecture to those who can't afford a FibreChannel based system.
The storage server can be based on PC architecture with a stripped-down linux kernel, emulating FibreChannel over gigabit ethernet. It has no notion or filesystems, users or anything like that - it is optimized to just ships disk sectors to the network at maximum performance.
The application servers can be diskless or use their local disks only for swap and caching. One ethernet interface will connect to the internet and another will support access to the SAN. Replacing or upgrading such servers is easy when they store no state information.
XFS is capable of letting two or more systems share access to the same disk at the sector level. I don't know if the linux port of XFS will support this feature, but assuming it does this could be very useful for this kind of applications.
It can cause massive damage and leave a general mess. It installs its own set of packages instead of looking at your RPM database and upgrading only the ones you actually have installed, allowing you to skip upgrading for specific packages you wish to keep at an older or customized version.
I have upgraded my sytem from RedHat 5.2 to Mandrake 5.3 to RedHat 6.0 to RedHat 6.1 without any problems whatsoever - because I didn't use RedHat's installer.
Instead, I boot single user, prepare a list of packages to upgrade using a set of quick-and-dirty scripts and just use rpm.
It's best to check your list and dependencies using rpm -test `cat packagelist` before doing the actual upgrade.
It is even quite easy to install a complete RedHat system without using RedHat's installer.
The goal here is to get root on a few hundred systems, or more
One of the most frightening things about these kinds of attacks is that there is no need to get root. In most cases any user account will do. Think about the big hosting providers: they have machines with excellent connectivity with thousands of users connecting with telnet, ftp and pop3 exposing their passwords to snooping. It doesn't help if the system has excellent local security against gaining root access and and the administrators use only ssh. The attacks look exactly like regular web traffic - connections from unprivileged ports to port 80 - any user can initiate such connections.
For the moment, I don't care if it's pseudo-science or not - it's interesting, it's intriguing and even has some entertainment value. I trust the system of scientific peer review enough to let it sort out the science from pseudo-science by itself. It doesn't really need me to strike at the infidels.
If you take the idea of interaction between living beings and quantum mechanics too far you end up with magick. I highly recommed the book Liber Kaos by Peter J. Carroll - just as long as you don't take it too seriously. Magick can get quite dangerous if you start believing in it.
Wine windows currently look like they don't really belong there, as if they have been transplanted from another system, erm... wait a second, they HAVE been transplanted from another system.
A KDE theme should help them blend in more nicely with my desktop. It would be really great if they could be made not only to look more like native windows but also cooperate more nicely with the window manager. I want them to appear on my taskbar, minimize using the window manager conventions instead of minimizing to a rogue desktop icon, etc. I guess the wine team have their own reasons for doing it the way they have, though.
I don't see a single book in that list which is not fit for a 13 year old person. I have read many of them at that age and earlier. As I read through the lists people post here I keep seeing comments about what is or isn't fit for a 13 year old and it simply makes me sick.
I have been reading science fiction without any selection by an adult since the age of 8. I can't think of a single SF book which I would not let a younger person read because it is somehow "harmful". The only thing these books may cause harm to is to your twisted image of what it is like to be 13. Have you all really forgotten what's it like? It was almost two decades ago but I still remember.
Aren't we going to have too many different printing solutions out there? This announcement follows Corel's announcement about their own linux printing system. They may both be great systems, but probably incompatible and will leave application developers confused.
Having multiple solutions for the same niche is normal for open source (KDE/Gnome and countless other examples) and for most cases I think it is actually a good thing. But somehow for printing I don't think this would be a good idea. I prefer to have just one way to print. Currently the de-facto standard is simply PostScript. It's not perfect but it works.
They cannot be played on a CD-ROM drive since it cannot read the table of contents. You can still rip the actual data but you need to know the block offsets and modify your ripper to ignore the error when reading table of contents.
My guess is that CD players and CD-ROM drives use the CD subcode channel differently. These disks probably trash the parts used by CD-ROM drives.
A simple modification to the CD-ROM firmware can probably fix it but I don't believe CDROM manufacturers would be inclined to do that.
My suggestion to the owner of the disk was to use the S/PDIF output of a DVD player and hook it to his S/PDIF interface card. Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
It's interesting to compare the weapons that govenrment and corporations have to exert their control over us.
Government power is ultimately underwritten by violence. If you don't pay your taxes they can use violent power to to put you in jail.
Corporate power is derived from the exact opposite- they control people by making them comfortable, by giving them exactly what they want. This is the reason why it is far more dangerous - it is much harder for most people to understand how much they are being controlled.
Large corporations have a life of their own - their officers are quite powerless to change them. Imagine a big corporation where someone tries to do what he believes to be the right thing but which also means less profits for the corporation. In a privately owned company it might be possible, but in large corporations you could get sued for not serving the interests of the stockholders. All decisions are made in the name of "the stockholders". So do the stockholders wield the ultimate power? Of course not. The big corporations have unblievably complex ownership compositions - they keep merging and buying each other with stocks rather than cash. In many cases no single stockholder has complete control. In the cases where a company is mostly owned by a single entity that entity is not a person - it is another corporation which cannot make the decision because of its obligations to its own stockholders.
As a result of this the corporations act almost as independent sentient beings. An individual within the organization is as powerless to change them as a single cell in your brain is powerless to change your decisions. Note that Microsoft is not quite at that stage - significant influence is still in the hands of Bill and Steve. But look at the big telecom companies - the mergers and acquisitions in this sector in the last years are proceeding at a frightening pace and soon there will be nobody left to merge with. These companies will soon have control over your combo PDA/cellphone/digital wallet. Do you really want them to have so much power?
I believe the battle between individualism and corporatism will be play a major part in the history of the 21st century. The weapon which gives individuals some chance in this struggle has appeared on the radar screens of corporations in the last few milliseconds of the 20th century: the Internet. Ironically, it is also the source of a lot of the cash infusion which makes these M&As possible. A mere ten years ago, who would have believed that one of the world's largest media companies would be bought by... an overgrown bulletin board?
It's going to be an interesting century. Pick your side. Choose your weapon. Decide how you will live this life .
The systems you mention may work very well but they have tremendous costs. I suggest you try calculating the cost of a weatherproof monitoring unit, communication and power infrastructure and of course the labour costs. Don't forget to multiply that by hundreds of units and add in the maintenance costs.
Now consider the alternative offered by RadioCamera: a relatively small number of units cover a large ares. Furthermore, they are installed in existing cell sites that have all the necessary infrastructure. These systems can easily be afforded by places that are not as well off as California.
I would expect that slashdot readers should know by now that silicon is cheaper than infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
The "solar cells" used are optimized for light in the relatively far infrared - heat radiation. One of the nicest things about this method is that it can recover energy from waste heat which would otherwise be unusable. If only the cells weren't so expensive and made from such toxic materials...
----
Could it be AMR? (=Audio/Modem Riser)
It is a standard endorsed by Intel and based on an AC-97 serial interface to the codec.
If this is the case it means that something else on the board is doing the actual DSP work and presenting the result to the CPU as a standard modem.
ZZ
----
Globalstar satellites are much smaller (480kg) and cheaper. They are not switchboards in the sky with satellite cross-links like Iridium. They are just dumb frequency translators ("bent pipe" transceivers).
All the smarts are on the ground. You can think of them as antennas connected to the cellular base station with a really long cable. As a result, they will not work in places like the middle of the pacific ocean. You must be within about 1000km from a ground station. They will also not work in the polar regions. They orbits are inclined and do not cover the poles since there aren't that many customers there... Compare this with Iridum where the poles get the best coverage since all Iridium orbits intersect over the poles.
Globalstar uses CDMA. Your handset can communicate with two or more satellites simultaneously and actually sum their signals coherently before decoding (soft handoff). This should result in better coverage.
Globalstar uses a variation of IS-95 CDMA and probably has the same vocoder - variable rate QCELP at up to 9600 bps. Iridium is not GSM, it uses a low rate vocoder (2400bps).
Both Iridium and Globalstar have negligible propagation delay because of their low orbits. The vocoders cause most of the delay.
----
The Iridium satellites are orbiting at 780km. This means they will stay up for thousands of years (at least) if they are not deorbited.
For an interesting discussion of the problem and a novel solution see the Terminator Tether.
----
This means that anyone can execute arbitrary code on their compilefarm servers by including it in the build scripts. They need to make sure they have really good local security.
Another problem is that some software packages assume that "make install" will always be executed by root and include things like "install -o root" which will fail for non-root users. This is the most common reason for source RPMs which cannot be built by a non-root user.
----
I think it's part of a hacker mindset: doing things just because they are possible, doing things because they are interesting, doing things just because. And once you do it why not share it with others? Sharing is at least half the fun.
I wonder what will be Promise's response to this. I hope this won't turn into yes another conflict between industry and hackerdom over "information wants to be free".
----
In more than one case I have found myself using the Red Hat install CD as a rescue disk whenever LILO failed for any reason.
I boot the CD, switch to the bash prompt on virtual console #1, mount my hard disk and chroot to it.
----
is at the very last moment before the information is presented to the user. This minimizes the number of places where the unencrypted data may be intercepted.
Please note that I am treating it from a purely technical aspect. I will not get into whether content copy protection should or shouldn't be implemented.
Two issues, though:
1. Why just 56 bits? the new export regulations specifically exempt encryption used for copy protection from such limitations.
2. How will this interact with compression?
Decryption is, by definition, not linear i.e. decrypt(decompress(x)) != decompress(decrypt(x)).
Here they are talking about decrypting the high bandwidth raw video data
----
But the computer industry is all about momentum. How long will you wait for something which is "real soon now" for such a long time?
The real problem is not getting the bits from A to B. The software abstraction layers, descriptors and class definitions were the parts that took the most time in the USB standards commitees. Microsoft's insistence on making USB one more jewel on Windows 98's crown also contributed a significant delay.
But this is nothing compared to how long 1394 is taking. An environment with no single master is much more complex. But you should also take into account the commitee effect - they have vast plans with cute acronyms to make it take control of everything in your house. Yeah, sure.
USB 2.0 will be identical to 1.1 from the operating system's point of view. It will use the same class drivers and in some cases the same vendor-supplied drivers. This will enable it to reach the market in a relatively short time.
It's not that I'm "pro USB" and "anti 1394" - both have interesting features the the other lacks. It's just reality.
----
According to the wankel's statement CNN has called it a "prank" and said that they "were not hacked into". FoxNews are the ones who called it "vandalism" and "hacking".
----
This type of low cost high-speed connectivity could bring the benefits of a SAN (Storage Area Network) architecture to those who can't afford a FibreChannel based system.
The storage server can be based on PC architecture with a stripped-down linux kernel, emulating FibreChannel over gigabit ethernet. It has no notion or filesystems, users or anything like that - it is optimized to just ships disk sectors to the network at maximum performance.
The application servers can be diskless or use their local disks only for swap and caching. One ethernet interface will connect to the internet and another will support access to the SAN. Replacing or upgrading such servers is easy when they store no state information.
XFS is capable of letting two or more systems share access to the same disk at the sector level.
I don't know if the linux port of XFS will support this feature, but assuming it does this could be very useful for this kind of applications.
----
It can cause massive damage and leave a general mess. It installs its own set of packages instead of looking at your RPM database and upgrading only the ones you actually have installed, allowing you to skip upgrading for specific packages you wish to keep at an older or customized version.
I have upgraded my sytem from RedHat 5.2 to Mandrake 5.3 to RedHat 6.0 to RedHat 6.1 without any problems whatsoever - because I didn't use RedHat's installer.
Instead, I boot single user, prepare a list of packages to upgrade using a set of quick-and-dirty scripts and just use rpm.
It's best to check your list and dependencies using rpm -test `cat packagelist` before doing the actual upgrade.
It is even quite easy to install a complete RedHat system without using RedHat's installer.
----
The goal here is to get root on a few hundred systems, or more
One of the most frightening things about these kinds of attacks is that there is no need to get root. In most cases any user account will do. Think about the big hosting providers: they have machines with excellent connectivity with thousands of users connecting with telnet, ftp and pop3 exposing their passwords to snooping. It doesn't help if the system has excellent local security against gaining root access and and the administrators use only ssh. The attacks look exactly like regular web traffic - connections from unprivileged ports to port 80 - any user can initiate such connections.
----
For the moment, I don't care if it's pseudo-science or not - it's interesting, it's intriguing and even has some entertainment value. I trust the system of scientific peer review enough to let it sort out the science from pseudo-science by itself. It doesn't really need me to strike at the infidels.
If you take the idea of interaction between living beings and quantum mechanics too far you end up with magick. I highly recommed the book Liber Kaos by Peter J. Carroll - just as long as you don't take it too seriously. Magick can get quite dangerous if you start believing in it.
----
Wine windows currently look like they don't really belong there, as if they have been transplanted from another system, erm... wait a second, they HAVE been transplanted from another system.
A KDE theme should help them blend in more nicely with my desktop. It would be really great if they could be made not only to look more like native windows but also cooperate more nicely with the window manager. I want them to appear on my taskbar, minimize using the window manager conventions instead of minimizing to a rogue desktop icon, etc. I guess the wine team have their own reasons for doing it the way they have, though.
----
...it was on the sub-ether radio this morning it said your were dead..."
"Yeah, that's right. I just haven't stopped moving yet"
----
I don't see a single book in that list which is not fit for a 13 year old person. I have read many of them at that age and earlier. As I read through the lists people post here I keep seeing comments about what is or isn't fit for a 13 year old and it simply makes me sick.
I have been reading science fiction without any selection by an adult since the age of 8. I can't think of a single SF book which I would not let a younger person read because it is somehow "harmful". The only thing these books may cause harm to is to your twisted image of what it is like to be 13. Have you all really forgotten what's it like? It was almost two decades ago but I still remember.
----
...this device should actually reduce VRD because it is synchronized to the visual stimuli.
Latency is an important issue but if this device's latency is synchronized to that of the display I don't see how it can make things worse
----
This is great news, but...
Aren't we going to have too many different printing solutions out there? This announcement follows Corel's announcement about their own linux printing system. They may both be great systems, but probably incompatible and will leave application developers confused.
Having multiple solutions for the same niche is normal for open source (KDE/Gnome and countless other examples) and for most cases I think it is actually a good thing. But somehow for printing I don't think this would be a good idea. I prefer to have just one way to print. Currently the de-facto standard is simply PostScript. It's not perfect but it works.
----
They cannot be played on a CD-ROM drive since it cannot read the table of contents. You can still rip the actual data but you need to know the block offsets and modify your ripper to ignore the error when reading table of contents.
My guess is that CD players and CD-ROM drives use the CD subcode channel differently. These disks probably trash the parts used by CD-ROM drives.
A simple modification to the CD-ROM firmware can probably fix it but I don't believe CDROM manufacturers would be inclined to do that.
My suggestion to the owner of the disk was to use the S/PDIF output of a DVD player and hook it to his S/PDIF interface card. Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
----
It's interesting to compare the weapons that govenrment and corporations have to exert their control over us.
Government power is ultimately underwritten by violence. If you don't pay your taxes they can use violent power to to put you in jail.
Corporate power is derived from the exact opposite- they control people by making them comfortable, by giving them exactly what they want. This is the reason why it is far more dangerous - it is much harder for most people to understand how much they are being controlled.
Large corporations have a life of their own - their officers are quite powerless to change them. Imagine a big corporation where someone tries to do what he believes to be the right thing but which also means less profits for the corporation. In a privately owned company it might be possible, but in large corporations you could get sued for not serving the interests of the stockholders. All decisions are made in the name of "the stockholders". So do the stockholders wield the ultimate power? Of course not. The big corporations have unblievably complex ownership compositions - they keep merging and buying each other with stocks rather than cash. In many cases no single stockholder has complete control. In the cases where a company is mostly owned by a single entity that entity is not a person - it is another corporation which cannot make the decision because of its obligations to its own stockholders.
As a result of this the corporations act almost as independent sentient beings. An individual within the organization is as powerless to change them as a single cell in your brain is powerless to change your decisions. Note that Microsoft is not quite at that stage - significant influence is still in the hands of Bill and Steve. But look at the big telecom companies - the mergers and acquisitions in this sector in the last years are proceeding at a frightening pace and soon there will be nobody left to merge with. These companies will soon have control over your combo PDA/cellphone/digital wallet. Do you really want them to have so much power?
I believe the battle between individualism and corporatism will be play a major part in the history of the 21st century. The weapon which gives individuals some chance in this struggle has appeared on the radar screens of corporations in the last few milliseconds of the 20th century: the Internet. Ironically, it is also the source of a lot of the cash infusion which makes these M&As possible. A mere ten years ago, who would have believed that one of the world's largest media companies would be bought by... an overgrown bulletin board?
It's going to be an interesting century. Pick your side. Choose your weapon. Decide how you will live this life .
----
This is further proof that CSS encryption has nothing to do with copy protection and everything with controlling the player market.
----
LinuxOne's true product appears to be their shares. They are perfectly targeted at investors who don't know better.
----
http://www.usw corp.com/USWCMainPages/Applications/its_whitepaper .htm
----
The systems you mention may work very well but they have tremendous costs. I suggest you try calculating the cost of a weatherproof monitoring unit, communication and power infrastructure and of course the labour costs. Don't forget to multiply that by hundreds of units and add in the maintenance costs.
Now consider the alternative offered by RadioCamera:
a relatively small number of units cover a large ares. Furthermore, they are installed in existing cell sites that have all the necessary infrastructure. These systems can easily be afforded by places that are not as well off as California.
I would expect that slashdot readers should know by now that silicon is cheaper than infrastructure.
----