The intense heat may have caused the towers to collapse which cause thousands of deaths, but the intense heat would also have sterilised any attempt at biological warfare which could have affected millions. This sprang to mind following the hype and the sales of gas masks etc when CNN was waffling about the threat of biological warfare regarding these attacks. Of course there are better methods (eg putting in water supply) but just a thought.
One thing I would like to see in a mail client is digital signatures incorporated more seamlessly. Then mails encrypted to my key would go to the top, digitally signed senders in my address book could go next, others digitally signed can go in under a lower priority, and the rest can go to a separate inbox. It would help if anonymous mailers such as Hotmail were configured to reject signed emails. This would stop important emails being lost in the noise, and make it computationally more expensive for spam to end up in my mail box.
How comes this comment is +2 informative and the parent comment to this +4, when the above is totally wrong? Don't the moderators even read what they are marking up?
If we are exchanging one-time pads then this appears to me to shift the weakness to how random your random-number generator really is (find a pattern allowing you to recreate the random number stream then the quantum crypto is useless). The other thing that springs to mind is that for a one-time pad to be totally secure it needs to be as long as the data itself and cannot be reused. This means extra latency as you set up a pad the same size as the data transfer for stateless communication (though for persistant connections I assume there will be a constant out-of-band stream topping up a large buffer to be used between end points).
These 'sleepers' that were planted lived ordinary lives, fitted in to their communities, and would have carried perfectly valid ID cards if national ID had existed. Don't get this siege mentality. There has been one massive devastating attack but this doesn't mean you have to permanently live under this fear. Take sensible measures to minimise the same thing happening again. US funded terrorists have been bombing British citizens for decades yet we haven't resorted yet to ID cards so I see no reason why it should be imposed on yourselves. Our current government is less democracy and more dictatorship but we will fight for our freedom. On the other hand, it will be useful to identify Jews so that we can round them up and ship them to concentration camps.. oh, isn't that the reason we got rid of these schemes in the first place?
... you may as well use one of the most commonly installed one. Using Ming you can generate Flash on the fly using PHP. Most popular plug-in + most popular scripting language = common sense to me!
Michael may be afraid, and think we should let the terrorists off, but I don't think the world should be so easily intimidated. It is mostly British troops already there, and ready for action. They are by a long way the best trained army in the world. Much as I don't trust Bush, I trust our military leaders (we, the British, lost hundreds in the terrible attack). All my support, and best wishes, are with them no matter how long this may take. Anyway, how can he criticise our actions before we've taken any?
I don't want to put a damper on your idealism, but if you "Pour money into the country in such a way that the people are no longer hopeless and no longer believe the have nothing to lose?" do you really thing the money will be used for 'transport' and 'communications' without removing the present dictatorship? I admire your thoughts but I can't se it happening. Sorry.
Whilst demand exceeded supply for programmers things were pretty cushy for those with tech skills. Those that took the risk and participated in the revolution reaped the rewards. Those who stayed in 'safe' jobs they hated busting their butt in 9-5 for little reward looked on in jealousy. At the company I worked for we had nerf wars, played footie in the office, had a company Nintendo/Playstation room, free beer and pizza from Fri 4pm onwards, bar tabs at the best bars in the city... and you know what? The work was challenging and fun. And we got responsibility we wouldn't have got working as a 'cog' in a large corporation. Personally I had an amazing time and still got to write some kick-ass content management systems. Then work slowed down so I moved to an established media company where they promised me more interesting work. But the office was still relaxed and we had fun. I now run my own company which is far tougher but the only way to make significant money. Should I have to go back to working for someone else then being good at my job I won't have any problems finding employment... despite having had all the 'superficial perks' and being 'bought off by the management'. And you can't take those days away from me:-P
To sum up, don't live in the past: just look back in wonder at the amazing time you had, it'll be something to tell your kids as they struggle to find work in a world recession. It'll never be as good again until the economy is.
Now that is a very good point. I also have a couple of very good domain names which I bought for A Great Idea(tm) during the Internet boom which I then never got around to doing. I would sell mine on for a very modest sum if anyone approached me. I bet there are thousands of us in the same boat. Those remaining cybersquatters must know that after the.com crash their dreams of making squillions from their domain names are long gone, and are probably prepared to be reasonable. I also think that in a year we will see a Renaissance of the.com, with an open market asking knock-down prices.
I think it people really were desperate for new TLDs then services such as ALTERNIC would be more popular. If the Linux browsers Mozilla and Konqueror were configured by default to also check an alternate nameserver then the Linux community could have fun by inventing their own TLDs which could then be accessed by everyone else in the community (http://news.linux/ anyone?)
Then, I suppose the many other thousands of latecomers to.name registration will be disappointed to find john.smith.name is already taken?
Congratulations, welcome to the world of marketing. You promote some bit of fluff as a 'must-have'. Then create an artificially scarce resource to scare consumers into purchasing in the offchance they may use it in case they 'lose out'. I doubt anyone will be disappointed to not get a.name, it's a pretty staid TLD and only of any use as a vanity address (for 99% of people their work email address is the only thing they'll ever need). Those that want vanity domains will probably rather think up imaginative names using the existing TLDs (not sure what my phillip.co.uk says about how imaginative I am:-))
The French don't trust their citizens and for years banned all encryption (except some businesses, with them having to hand over keys). They may have, as you allege, used the intelligence in an underhand way. However, I think your reason for 'relaxing' their stance on encryption is mistaken, or only part of the reason. Upon discovering all about Echelon, and the extent to which the USA have been gathering intelligence on French business (and allegedly lost billions due to NSA handing key data for US businesses), it brought about the greatest 180 degree turn in crypto politics seen to date. From a complete ban to full support of strong encryption, with the encouragement of open-source software. To think things had steadily been improving since this article 2 years ago. It would be a blow to the memories of those lost if their sacrifice failed to make the world a better place.
Phil Zimmerman makes the point far more effectively than I could ever do, but in summary: a potential message hidden being sent between two terrorists could also be the victim of human rights abuses trying to get a plea for help through to Amnesty International. Without secure encryption and tools such as stenagography those living in oppressed regimes would not be able to report the truth to the outside world without certain execution. Please consider the effects fully before making knee-jerk comments such as this.
I used to run Smoothwall, which was truly excellent. Then we got given a LinkSys which is fine, does the job, and as a lot of people say is quieter and takes less power. It also frees up an old machine to experiment with. I used to be able to consistently crash my LinkSys router requiring a power cycle, but a firmware upgrade (incredibly easy, took me 5 mins using a patch from their web site) solved this. So if you are using the LinkSys router then please make sure you are using the most recent firmware patch.
One of the problems in porting software to a platform is finding people with both the time *and the skills* to do it. If MacOS X becomes popular with developers, there will be a large base of people familiar with programming with the API. If a chunk of these people also play with Linux then you are increasing the chance of these people doing ports to your favourite platform.
(disclaimer) From news sources (/disclaimer) I read that those in one jet were encouraged to phone loved ones to tell them they were going to die by flying into the White House. This plane then flew into the Pentagon instead. Hence raising the White House as a target was merely a distraction from the REAL target. I've heard nothing about Airforce One from any source and it sounds incredibly improbable. I think you've made a mistake.
These are individuals? They don't represent any race or religion or country? Are you mad? You think a disparate group of people saw "Terrorism tonight" and decided to give it a go despite the warning "don't try this at home"? OF COURSE they did it in the name of a religion. They weren't crazy, they would have to be very intelligent to pull off such an attack. You may say they are a minority but please don't insult our intelligence.
You are naturally speaking from what you want as employee material in the post you are seeking to fill. If you want someone that can maintain a Unix/Win box, knows the main driver conflicts, and doesn't mind spending a lot of time under a desk then a BSc CompSci isn't going to be as useful. However if you want a programmer, or db guru, then it's pretty essential. The boom sucked many people into the industry that call themselves 'programmers' who don't know basic algorithms (yes, I've seen bubble-sort used in live code). I'm currently rewriting the backend for a retailer, cutting down their stock update time from over 12 hours to just over 5 minutes. All it took was some database knowledge and some simple routines (eg binary searches and trees). Most of it 1st year CompSci stuff. It is stuff however that needs to be *taught*. Of all the dot-commers that are going back to school, or unemployed, I bet virtually none of them are programmers with BSc in CompSci.
Don't look here to the UK for a shining example of honour. M$ are pretty much camped in 10 Downing Street, and Blair appeared on TV showing off WinXP (another src). All government services are due to be online 2005 but will only be accessibly by Microsoft browsers. The Register has good articles here and here. Makes me sick. Especially as we used to have a thriving computer business of our own (Acorn) which the government did nothing to help whilst it was killed off by M$ anti-competative practices. When will the UK government realise that 'IT' is not solely churning out secretaries that can use Word but to give encouragement to those that might become programmers or other similarly skilled professions instead of holding them back. Sorry to turn this post even more UK-centric, but we could mitigate some of Blair's damage if WE LET THE TEACHERS CHOOSE WHAT OS THEY WANT TO USE (instead of easily bought LEA officials). Oh and paying extra for teachers with industry experience so for a change the teacher knows more about IT than the pupils.
The despised Dr. Laurence Godfrey has already sued a Canadian for a Usenet posting. Here is a Wired article June 1998 discussing the case... and Godfrey won. The Canadian gentleman then replied to the court judgement saying he didn't give a toss about British law and they could go... well I'll let you use Google to find the exact language. The sad thing is I consider myself a top tech talent and am considering working abroad... and the two places I would like to visit don't seem to be suitable: the USA (with DMCA and anti-crypto) and Australia (too many Internet problems to list) are so backwards they make our problems (RIP, etc) seem trivial. If only Canada wasn't so cold...
There is no way I would use this services unless the following changes were made:
Drop the price 50%... why would I pay £2.75 when I can rent the DVD for £2?
Drop the 24hr window. Video rental stores need the physical media back quickly so they can rent it to someone else. There is no such imperative on data sitting on my hard drive. Also I'm not going to risk paying for something I may get half way through, and then if I get interrupted and want to finish the next evening, will have to pay a second time.
Release it the same time as the DVD rental comes out. I want to watch new films, and am not going to pay 50% more to watch it a second time in inferior quality.
Under those conditions it may be a service I might use.
Surely London, with its high population density, is ideal for cabling up? Why not carry out the trial in an area that is flat but sparsely populated hence uneconomic to run cable to households? And it won't be the whole of London as the franchaise there is split between NTL and Telewest (Cable London was bought by Telewest). Speaking as a consumer I am glad NTL is offering (or for now investigating) a greater choice of solutions.
I have their cable modem service which is *excellent*. My friend 1 mile away is green with envy as his long country road hasn't been cabled up. If they offered wireless here then he would be able to swap mixes with his fellow DJs over the 'net instead of burning CDs and petrol.
Slashdot Mirror
The intense heat may have caused the towers to collapse which cause thousands of deaths, but the intense heat would also have sterilised any attempt at biological warfare which could have affected millions. This sprang to mind following the hype and the sales of gas masks etc when CNN was waffling about the threat of biological warfare regarding these attacks. Of course there are better methods (eg putting in water supply) but just a thought.
Phillip.
One thing I would like to see in a mail client is digital signatures incorporated more seamlessly. Then mails encrypted to my key would go to the top, digitally signed senders in my address book could go next, others digitally signed can go in under a lower priority, and the rest can go to a separate inbox. It would help if anonymous mailers such as Hotmail were configured to reject signed emails. This would stop important emails being lost in the noise, and make it computationally more expensive for spam to end up in my mail box.
Phillip.
Read this comment before continuing this thread. Blah blah lameness filter won't let me post blah blah hope this is enough padding blah blah
Phillip.
How comes this comment is +2 informative and the parent comment to this +4, when the above is totally wrong? Don't the moderators even read what they are marking up?
Phillip.
If we are exchanging one-time pads then this appears to me to shift the weakness to how random your random-number generator really is (find a pattern allowing you to recreate the random number stream then the quantum crypto is useless). The other thing that springs to mind is that for a one-time pad to be totally secure it needs to be as long as the data itself and cannot be reused. This means extra latency as you set up a pad the same size as the data transfer for stateless communication (though for persistant connections I assume there will be a constant out-of-band stream topping up a large buffer to be used between end points).
Phillip.
These 'sleepers' that were planted lived ordinary lives, fitted in to their communities, and would have carried perfectly valid ID cards if national ID had existed. Don't get this siege mentality. There has been one massive devastating attack but this doesn't mean you have to permanently live under this fear. Take sensible measures to minimise the same thing happening again. US funded terrorists have been bombing British citizens for decades yet we haven't resorted yet to ID cards so I see no reason why it should be imposed on yourselves. Our current government is less democracy and more dictatorship but we will fight for our freedom. On the other hand, it will be useful to identify Jews so that we can round them up and ship them to concentration camps.. oh, isn't that the reason we got rid of these schemes in the first place?
Phillip.
... you may as well use one of the most commonly installed one. Using Ming you can generate Flash on the fly using PHP. Most popular plug-in + most popular scripting language = common sense to me!
Phillip.
Michael may be afraid, and think we should let the terrorists off, but I don't think the world should be so easily intimidated. It is mostly British troops already there, and ready for action. They are by a long way the best trained army in the world. Much as I don't trust Bush, I trust our military leaders (we, the British, lost hundreds in the terrible attack). All my support, and best wishes, are with them no matter how long this may take. Anyway, how can he criticise our actions before we've taken any?
Phillip.
I don't want to put a damper on your idealism, but if you "Pour money into the country in such a way that the people are no longer hopeless and no longer believe the have nothing to lose?" do you really thing the money will be used for 'transport' and 'communications' without removing the present dictatorship? I admire your thoughts but I can't se it happening. Sorry.
Phillip.
Whilst demand exceeded supply for programmers things were pretty cushy for those with tech skills. Those that took the risk and participated in the revolution reaped the rewards. Those who stayed in 'safe' jobs they hated busting their butt in 9-5 for little reward looked on in jealousy. At the company I worked for we had nerf wars, played footie in the office, had a company Nintendo/Playstation room, free beer and pizza from Fri 4pm onwards, bar tabs at the best bars in the city... and you know what? The work was challenging and fun. And we got responsibility we wouldn't have got working as a 'cog' in a large corporation. Personally I had an amazing time and still got to write some kick-ass content management systems. Then work slowed down so I moved to an established media company where they promised me more interesting work. But the office was still relaxed and we had fun. I now run my own company which is far tougher but the only way to make significant money. Should I have to go back to working for someone else then being good at my job I won't have any problems finding employment... despite having had all the 'superficial perks' and being 'bought off by the management'. And you can't take those days away from me :-P
To sum up, don't live in the past: just look back in wonder at the amazing time you had, it'll be something to tell your kids as they struggle to find work in a world recession. It'll never be as good again until the economy is.
Phillip.
Now that is a very good point. I also have a couple of very good domain names which I bought for A Great Idea(tm) during the Internet boom which I then never got around to doing. I would sell mine on for a very modest sum if anyone approached me. I bet there are thousands of us in the same boat. Those remaining cybersquatters must know that after the .com crash their dreams of making squillions from their domain names are long gone, and are probably prepared to be reasonable. I also think that in a year we will see a Renaissance of the .com, with an open market asking knock-down prices.
I think it people really were desperate for new TLDs then services such as ALTERNIC would be more popular. If the Linux browsers Mozilla and Konqueror were configured by default to also check an alternate nameserver then the Linux community could have fun by inventing their own TLDs which could then be accessed by everyone else in the community (http://news.linux/ anyone?)
Phillip.
Then, I suppose the many other thousands of latecomers to .name registration will be disappointed to find john.smith.name is already taken?
Congratulations, welcome to the world of marketing. You promote some bit of fluff as a 'must-have'. Then create an artificially scarce resource to scare consumers into purchasing in the offchance they may use it in case they 'lose out'. I doubt anyone will be disappointed to not get a .name, it's a pretty staid TLD and only of any use as a vanity address (for 99% of people their work email address is the only thing they'll ever need). Those that want vanity domains will probably rather think up imaginative names using the existing TLDs (not sure what my phillip.co.uk says about how imaginative I am :-))
Phillip.
The French don't trust their citizens and for years banned all encryption (except some businesses, with them having to hand over keys). They may have, as you allege, used the intelligence in an underhand way. However, I think your reason for 'relaxing' their stance on encryption is mistaken, or only part of the reason. Upon discovering all about Echelon, and the extent to which the USA have been gathering intelligence on French business (and allegedly lost billions due to NSA handing key data for US businesses), it brought about the greatest 180 degree turn in crypto politics seen to date. From a complete ban to full support of strong encryption, with the encouragement of open-source software. To think things had steadily been improving since this article 2 years ago. It would be a blow to the memories of those lost if their sacrifice failed to make the world a better place.
Phillip.
Phil Zimmerman makes the point far more effectively than I could ever do, but in summary: a potential message hidden being sent between two terrorists could also be the victim of human rights abuses trying to get a plea for help through to Amnesty International. Without secure encryption and tools such as stenagography those living in oppressed regimes would not be able to report the truth to the outside world without certain execution. Please consider the effects fully before making knee-jerk comments such as this.
Phillip.
I used to run Smoothwall, which was truly excellent. Then we got given a LinkSys which is fine, does the job, and as a lot of people say is quieter and takes less power. It also frees up an old machine to experiment with. I used to be able to consistently crash my LinkSys router requiring a power cycle, but a firmware upgrade (incredibly easy, took me 5 mins using a patch from their web site) solved this. So if you are using the LinkSys router then please make sure you are using the most recent firmware patch.
Phillip.
One of the problems in porting software to a platform is finding people with both the time *and the skills* to do it. If MacOS X becomes popular with developers, there will be a large base of people familiar with programming with the API. If a chunk of these people also play with Linux then you are increasing the chance of these people doing ports to your favourite platform.
Phillip.
(disclaimer) From news sources (/disclaimer) I read that those in one jet were encouraged to phone loved ones to tell them they were going to die by flying into the White House. This plane then flew into the Pentagon instead. Hence raising the White House as a target was merely a distraction from the REAL target. I've heard nothing about Airforce One from any source and it sounds incredibly improbable. I think you've made a mistake.
Phillip.
These are individuals? They don't represent any race or religion or country? Are you mad? You think a disparate group of people saw "Terrorism tonight" and decided to give it a go despite the warning "don't try this at home"? OF COURSE they did it in the name of a religion. They weren't crazy, they would have to be very intelligent to pull off such an attack. You may say they are a minority but please don't insult our intelligence.
Phillip.
You are naturally speaking from what you want as employee material in the post you are seeking to fill. If you want someone that can maintain a Unix/Win box, knows the main driver conflicts, and doesn't mind spending a lot of time under a desk then a BSc CompSci isn't going to be as useful. However if you want a programmer, or db guru, then it's pretty essential. The boom sucked many people into the industry that call themselves 'programmers' who don't know basic algorithms (yes, I've seen bubble-sort used in live code). I'm currently rewriting the backend for a retailer, cutting down their stock update time from over 12 hours to just over 5 minutes. All it took was some database knowledge and some simple routines (eg binary searches and trees). Most of it 1st year CompSci stuff. It is stuff however that needs to be *taught*. Of all the dot-commers that are going back to school, or unemployed, I bet virtually none of them are programmers with BSc in CompSci.
Phillip.
Don't look here to the UK for a shining example of honour. M$ are pretty much camped in 10 Downing Street, and Blair appeared on TV showing off WinXP (another src). All government services are due to be online 2005 but will only be accessibly by Microsoft browsers. The Register has good articles here and here. Makes me sick. Especially as we used to have a thriving computer business of our own (Acorn) which the government did nothing to help whilst it was killed off by M$ anti-competative practices. When will the UK government realise that 'IT' is not solely churning out secretaries that can use Word but to give encouragement to those that might become programmers or other similarly skilled professions instead of holding them back. Sorry to turn this post even more UK-centric, but we could mitigate some of Blair's damage if WE LET THE TEACHERS CHOOSE WHAT OS THEY WANT TO USE (instead of easily bought LEA officials). Oh and paying extra for teachers with industry experience so for a change the teacher knows more about IT than the pupils.
Phillip.
The despised Dr. Laurence Godfrey has already sued a Canadian for a Usenet posting. Here is a Wired article June 1998 discussing the case... and Godfrey won. The Canadian gentleman then replied to the court judgement saying he didn't give a toss about British law and they could go... well I'll let you use Google to find the exact language. The sad thing is I consider myself a top tech talent and am considering working abroad... and the two places I would like to visit don't seem to be suitable: the USA (with DMCA and anti-crypto) and Australia (too many Internet problems to list) are so backwards they make our problems (RIP, etc) seem trivial. If only Canada wasn't so cold...
Phillip.
Those eclectic sites that made us all laugh, which snowballed into popularity. I'll start the list:
* I kiss you - Mahir the Turkish stud
* hamster dance
* bonsai kittens
Any more?
Phillip.
Under those conditions it may be a service I might use.
Phillip.
Surely London, with its high population density, is ideal for cabling up? Why not carry out the trial in an area that is flat but sparsely populated hence uneconomic to run cable to households? And it won't be the whole of London as the franchaise there is split between NTL and Telewest (Cable London was bought by Telewest). Speaking as a consumer I am glad NTL is offering (or for now investigating) a greater choice of solutions.
I have their cable modem service which is *excellent*. My friend 1 mile away is green with envy as his long country road hasn't been cabled up. If they offered wireless here then he would be able to swap mixes with his fellow DJs over the 'net instead of burning CDs and petrol.
Phillip.
"I hear us Brits (particularly Londoners) get our picture taken by these cameras more frequently than most Americans"
:-)
Did any other Londoner misread this first time for "by most Americans"? Gentle tourist jibe, no offence meant
Phillip.