This particular database has no relation with tracking terrorists.
The proposal you refer to, does. You are right, we have a problem with politicians like Balkenende and Donner, who believe that they can control everything when they can monitor everyone.
But even more of a problem is that they believe that there is a war on terror to be fought against a hostile community. This belief came upon them when they had too close contact to the current president of the US. Said person indoctrinated them that troups should be sent to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, to support a war against a phenomenon that they do not understand (and do not bother to understand). As they really like to please people that appear to be powerful, the troups were sent. And now, they are faced with a "terror threat to the country". Instead of admitting that this is their own stupid fault, they try to cover their asses by inventing all kinds of stupid laws and regulations like the one you are referring to.
In fact: - they are the real cause of the terror threat. when we had remained neutral there would have been no threat. - they are exaggerating the threat, scaring people more than necessary - the are introducing extra measures to constantly monitor people just in case
All in all they are just giving the terrorists what they want. First, give them a reason to attack. Then, scare their own people and take freedom-limiting measures. Terrorists must be delighted by such a (mis)government! Everyone scared without having to throw a single bomb.
This system is not intended to track bad behavior of the child, but to detect bad behavior against the child. So it is not a record of what he did in school, but what possible child-abuse has been reported about him.
This still could be of use in later life, but not in the way it is pinctured above.
ou might manage to fry only the I/O circuits, while leaving the storage core intact.
In that case it does not prove anything. But it could also be that it remains accessible but reads as garbage, or all zeroes or ones. That could mean the actual memory is erased or destroyed. Of course it does not guarantee the same thing happened on the original key.
It happened to me with a harddisk. The disk became defective and I wanted to return it under guarantee. But what would happen to my data? Fortunately it was a mechanical failure. The heads were broken off, or somesuch. The drive scratched when spinning. I think it has simply been discarded. With an electronic failure they could simply swap the electronics board and read it.
Moral: use encrypted filesystem. When the disk crashes, the data is worthless and there is no need to overwrite etc. Same can be used on USB key.
A disk drive is an analog device that stores digital data. Digital ones and zeroes are stored as magnetic reversals (just like music on a tape recorder), and some readback amplifier and decision threshold decides if it is a 0 or a 1.
The idea is that a 0 overwritten with a 0 has a different analog value than a 1 overwritten with a 0. The logic built into the drive will recognize both as 0 and output that to the computer, but a modified read amplifier can tell the difference and recover the data.
It is like recording over an old tape and still hearing the previous recording in the background.
Last year a public prosecutor discarded his virus-infected PC at the curbside, and it was picked up by a cabdriver who sold it to someone running a tv show.
Lots of interesting data was extraced from the drive. Documents about legal cases, account information of his personal e-mail account, kiddieporn, the works.
There seems to be a possibility but it is hard to find. When there is an obvious improvement to be made I would expect a user interface to be available in YaST (SuSE is a big advocate of Reiserfs), but I have not found it.
I like Reiserfs in general, I have installed many systems and never lost a filesystem, and my own system has over 1TB in Reiserfs disks, but the write problem has always been present...
The problem is not really related to large files. When you copy a big tree from one disk to another, where the destination is Reiserfs (source may be Reiserfs as well) it is going to be slow. There is something in Reiserfs that causes the system to keep too much filedata in memory during writes. At some point it even starts to swapout running programs to make room for buffers for the writing, instead of just writing them to disk and freeing for new operations. The result is the "freeze" problem: everything you touch happens to be swapped out and needs to be brought back in, and all system RAM is used for useless buffers.
Try copying something like 20-30GB on a system with 1GB or less of RAM, that should show the problem.
I think firefox has succeeded because the times have changed, not because the program changed. There was a place in the market for a different browser and for differently made software, and firefox was there and was marketed to fill this place. That same place could have been filled with a browser-only mozilla install.
When the same effort to create firefox was spent into improving and facelifting mozilla, all in all we would have a better product. The fact that it is a resource monster is no longer relevant. Most programs and operating systems are resource monsters these days, this includes Windows XP, Linux with graphical desktop, OpenOffice etc. It is no problem because today's PCs are performance monsters.
I think what we have lost is integration, ease of configuration management, and all in all probably even resources. When I look at Mozilla as it is used at work, we heavily use the browser and mailer and some people use the composer. (In fact everyone uses the composer as the way to enter mail messages. Yes, we use HTML mail. We are no religious fanatics that stick to old habits like text mail.)
To move on, we will need to install Firefox, Thunderbird and NVU. The latter is not even a Mozilla foundation product, we introduce another dependency, on a company with a loud-voiced owner. The three programs do not share a single configuration file, and they do not use the Windows registry. So to automatically maintain configuration data (from a logon script) we now need to keep data in three files instead of one. They do not even use the same subdirectory structure for placing that file!
And when installing updates, how do we ensure that the programs keep using one shared Gecko library and do not install their own copy? Doing so would waste more resources.
How did forking help the project? IMHO it didn't. The option to install only the browser has always been there.
Now we are stuck with forks, always confusing about what problem is caused by what part and appears in what versions, and even more wasted work on releases, internationalisation, etc.
How are we going to explain to the employees that this "non-standard" browser/mailer Mozilla (most businesses use IE and Outlook, so that is what most people think of as the standard) that we use is going to be replaced by Firefox and Thunderbird? Or is going to be called Seamonkey next week?
No, I think it was a bad idea. Open Source does not have the resources and credibility to spill them this way.
I hope something like that goes in Mozilla 1.8, if it ever appears.
I still find it regrettable that Mozilla development was forked into separate browser and mailer (leaving the composer in the dust). We like the Mozilla suite, yet we are more or less forced to migrate to a separate browser and mailer, split the user configuration files, and decide whether to install an html editor, and which one.
What a nice product would we have had when all the effort spent on Firefox/Thunderbird was actually spent on the suite...
The Mozilla team should start thinking about a security patch feature. We have had a lot of security releases in Mozilla where the change probably affected only one or two small files, yet the user is forced to re-install the whole package.
At least in Mozilla (don't know about Firefox) there is the issue that default browser, default mailer, and desired file associations in Windows are lost even when the new version is installed directly over the existing one. We use Mozilla in a corporate environment, and those updates are a lot more work (and more risky to go wrong) than the monthly IE update.
You might think that such behaviour is typical for communist governments, but please note that many western countries are rapidly moving into the same direction.
For a while, we had "freedom". But governments never have become completely comfortable with it. From the viewpoint of a government, it is always better when you can monitor your citizens.
Now, many countries are using the "terrorism threat" excuse to tighten the rules again. We are facing large-scale registration and monitoring (including all-covering camera surveillance, obligation to log and keep all phone and internet traffic data, etc). All of these are threats to the individual's freedom.
Of course, once it is apparent that the general public can subvert this monitoring by using encryption, it will be forbidden.
Instead of "fighting threats" by suppressing citizens, governments better look at the nature and cause of the threats, and do something about that. Terrorism exists for a reason, and "fighting" it is likely to increase the number of terrorists and attacks.
My 7k400's are only a few weeks old. I expect them to get louder, but not very much. The Maxtor did not change that much either, I think. It is just our expectations that change.
I have a set of 120GB WD drives as well (WD1200JB), I don't think they were ever claimed to be ultra quiet, but in any case they are louder than both the Maxtor and the Hitachi's. They also run as hot as the Maxtor.
However, about 12 years ago I used an IBM 62RW100. 820MB, 5 inch full height, SCSI. All my current drives together (well over a terabyte) use less power and generate a lot less heat than that single drive did. Of course it was much larger and much faster than the average PC disk at that time.
I think not many people claim the actual artists are greedy or don't deserve any money. In fact, when you buy a CD completely legally, there aren't getting much of the money.
The ones that are greedy are the record companies. They have had years of success, have failed to move with the changed times, and now are stuck with a business model unsuitable for modern times. They need to change that. Maybe they need to adjust their idea of a good profit downwards. Probably they can be labeled "greedy".
Over here (Netherlands), several Internet providers are openly advertising their product as very suitable for downloading music, movies, etc. Often they show happy families all gathered around the PC downloading things, and cheering at the speed this downloading is going.
A similar decision here would certainly get a lot of those ISPs in trouble. They are in fierce competition over download speeds, and they very well realize that their customers only want (or need) this capability for illegal fileswapping. Legal music downloads are almost nonexistent here, and legal movie downloads don't exist at all.
Of course with "a good browser", you can select the stylesheet to use when alternative stylesheets are available. In IE you can't. But even "good browsers" like Firefox, Mozilla and Opera don't handle this correctly. When you click on a link that fetches the next page from the same site, the style sheet selection is undone and you again need to pull out the same 3-level menu selection to switch style to the one you want.
Only Konqueror handles this "correctly", by remembering the style you selected for tht site. However, solutions using a cookie are available, like the one describled in this article on A list Apart: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/
When using this method, some clickable widget on the page can be used to select style, while the menu item still works. Slashdot should incorporate something like this, or the stylesheet selection will be useless to 99% of its users.
IMHO this was a strong point in Mozilla that is now weakened by Firefox, Thunderbird etc.
Especially in the way these programs are packaged now, you cannot upgrade them (and Gecko) independently. Configuration management in a business network has also been made even more complicated.
I like integrated software. Users often like it, too. Especially in the field of open source and non-M$ software, as integration between different programs is often a lot weaker than integration within such a large package.
This subsidized price is only offered on a phone with accompanying subscription. When your phone is stolen, you don't get a new phone for that same price. You have to pay the full price or else you will be paying out the contract term for your original subscription.
So, the operator is not going to lose a dime on this new phone, and the store will make its usual profits on selling equipment. The only one losing here is the customer.
Slashdot Mirror
This particular database has no relation with tracking terrorists.
The proposal you refer to, does. You are right, we have a problem with politicians like Balkenende and Donner, who believe that they can control everything when they can monitor everyone.
But even more of a problem is that they believe that there is a war on terror to be fought against a hostile community. This belief came upon them when they had too close contact to the current president of the US. Said person indoctrinated them that troups should be sent to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, to support a war against a phenomenon that they do not understand (and do not bother to understand).
As they really like to please people that appear to be powerful, the troups were sent. And now, they are faced with a "terror threat to the country". Instead of admitting that this is their own stupid fault, they try to cover their asses by inventing all kinds of stupid laws and regulations like the one you are referring to.
In fact:
- they are the real cause of the terror threat. when we had remained neutral there would have been no threat.
- they are exaggerating the threat, scaring people more than necessary
- the are introducing extra measures to constantly monitor people just in case
All in all they are just giving the terrorists what they want. First, give them a reason to attack. Then, scare their own people and take freedom-limiting measures.
Terrorists must be delighted by such a (mis)government! Everyone scared without having to throw a single bomb.
GMail is also the free email service that does not handle abuse mail messages.
Briljant. Continue like this and it will be a free email service that everyone blocks at their perimeter.
This system is not intended to track bad behavior of the child, but to detect bad behavior against the child.
So it is not a record of what he did in school, but what possible child-abuse has been reported about him.
This still could be of use in later life, but not in the way it is pinctured above.
Thanks, I'll try that
ou might manage to fry only the I/O circuits, while leaving the storage core intact.
In that case it does not prove anything.
But it could also be that it remains accessible but reads as garbage, or all zeroes or ones. That could mean the actual memory is erased or destroyed.
Of course it does not guarantee the same thing happened on the original key.
It happened to me with a harddisk. The disk became defective and I wanted to return it under guarantee. But what would happen to my data?
Fortunately it was a mechanical failure. The heads were broken off, or somesuch. The drive scratched when spinning. I think it has simply been discarded.
With an electronic failure they could simply swap the electronics board and read it.
Moral: use encrypted filesystem. When the disk crashes, the data is worthless and there is no need to overwrite etc.
Same can be used on USB key.
In the Netherlands.
This news item will give you names and links: http://www.nu.nl/news.jsp?n=423176&c=50
A disk drive is an analog device that stores digital data. Digital ones and zeroes are stored as magnetic reversals (just like music on a tape recorder), and some readback amplifier and decision threshold decides if it is a 0 or a 1.
The idea is that a 0 overwritten with a 0 has a different analog value than a 1 overwritten with a 0. The logic built into the drive will recognize both as 0 and output that to the computer, but a modified read amplifier can tell the difference and recover the data.
It is like recording over an old tape and still hearing the previous recording in the background.
And made it easier to delete...
In early Windows versions (and DOS) that was almost impossible.
But does that destroy the data? Did you check that on anohter key?
Last year a public prosecutor discarded his virus-infected PC at the curbside, and it was picked up by a cabdriver who sold it to someone running a tv show.
Lots of interesting data was extraced from the drive. Documents about legal cases, account information of his personal e-mail account, kiddieporn, the works.
Of course he had to step down.
There seems to be a possibility but it is hard to find.
When there is an obvious improvement to be made I would expect a user interface to be available in YaST (SuSE is a big advocate of Reiserfs), but I have not found it.
I like Reiserfs in general, I have installed many systems and never lost a filesystem, and my own system has over 1TB in Reiserfs disks, but the write problem has always been present...
The problem is not really related to large files.
When you copy a big tree from one disk to another, where the destination is Reiserfs (source may be Reiserfs as well) it is going to be slow.
There is something in Reiserfs that causes the system to keep too much filedata in memory during writes. At some point it even starts to swapout running programs to make room for buffers for the writing, instead of just writing them to disk and freeing for new operations.
The result is the "freeze" problem: everything you touch happens to be swapped out and needs to be brought back in, and all system RAM is used for useless buffers.
Try copying something like 20-30GB on a system with 1GB or less of RAM, that should show the problem.
I think firefox has succeeded because the times have changed, not because the program changed.
There was a place in the market for a different browser and for differently made software, and firefox was there and was marketed to fill this place. That same place could have been filled with a browser-only mozilla install.
When the same effort to create firefox was spent into improving and facelifting mozilla, all in all we would have a better product.
The fact that it is a resource monster is no longer relevant. Most programs and operating systems are resource monsters these days, this includes Windows XP, Linux with graphical desktop, OpenOffice etc. It is no problem because today's PCs are performance monsters.
I think what we have lost is integration, ease of configuration management, and all in all probably even resources. When I look at Mozilla as it is used at work, we heavily use the browser and mailer and some people use the composer.
(In fact everyone uses the composer as the way to enter mail messages. Yes, we use HTML mail. We are no religious fanatics that stick to old habits like text mail.)
To move on, we will need to install Firefox, Thunderbird and NVU. The latter is not even a Mozilla foundation product, we introduce another dependency, on a company with a loud-voiced owner.
The three programs do not share a single configuration file, and they do not use the Windows registry. So to automatically maintain configuration data (from a logon script) we now need to keep data in three files instead of one.
They do not even use the same subdirectory structure for placing that file!
And when installing updates, how do we ensure that the programs keep using one shared Gecko library and do not install their own copy? Doing so would waste more resources.
All in all I don't think it is an improvement.
How did forking help the project?
IMHO it didn't.
The option to install only the browser has always been there.
Now we are stuck with forks, always confusing about what problem is caused by what part and appears in what versions, and even more wasted work on releases, internationalisation, etc.
How are we going to explain to the employees that this "non-standard" browser/mailer Mozilla (most businesses use IE and Outlook, so that is what most people think of as the standard) that we use is going to be replaced by Firefox and Thunderbird? Or is going to be called Seamonkey next week?
No, I think it was a bad idea. Open Source does not have the resources and credibility to spill them this way.
I hope something like that goes in Mozilla 1.8, if it ever appears.
I still find it regrettable that Mozilla development was forked into separate browser and mailer (leaving the composer in the dust). We like the Mozilla suite, yet we are more or less forced to migrate to a separate browser and mailer, split the user configuration files, and decide whether to install an html editor, and which one.
What a nice product would we have had when all the effort spent on Firefox/Thunderbird was actually spent on the suite...
The Mozilla team should start thinking about a security patch feature. We have had a lot of security releases in Mozilla where the change probably affected only one or two small files, yet the user is forced to re-install the whole package.
At least in Mozilla (don't know about Firefox) there is the issue that default browser, default mailer, and desired file associations in Windows are lost even when the new version is installed directly over the existing one.
We use Mozilla in a corporate environment, and those updates are a lot more work (and more risky to go wrong) than the monthly IE update.
You might think that such behaviour is typical for communist governments, but please note that many western countries are rapidly moving into the same direction.
For a while, we had "freedom". But governments never have become completely comfortable with it. From the viewpoint of a government, it is always better when you can monitor your citizens.
Now, many countries are using the "terrorism threat" excuse to tighten the rules again.
We are facing large-scale registration and monitoring (including all-covering camera surveillance, obligation to log and keep all phone and internet traffic data, etc). All of these are threats to the individual's freedom.
Of course, once it is apparent that the general public can subvert this monitoring by using encryption, it will be forbidden.
Instead of "fighting threats" by suppressing citizens, governments better look at the nature and cause of the threats, and do something about that. Terrorism exists for a reason, and "fighting" it is likely to increase the number of terrorists and attacks.
My 7k400's are only a few weeks old.
I expect them to get louder, but not very much. The Maxtor did not change that much either, I think. It is just our expectations that change.
I have a set of 120GB WD drives as well (WD1200JB), I don't think they were ever claimed to be ultra quiet, but in any case they are louder than both the Maxtor and the Hitachi's. They also run as hot as the Maxtor.
However, about 12 years ago I used an IBM 62RW100. 820MB, 5 inch full height, SCSI. All my current drives together (well over a terabyte) use less power and generate a lot less heat than that single drive did. Of course it was much larger and much faster than the average PC disk at that time.
So, progress is certainly being made.
My 7200 RPM 7k400 (400GB) is even less noisy, and a lot cooler, than a 5400RPM 120GB Maxtor drive I used before that.
He once was a vice president of the USA. He ran for presidency after that, but he lost due to electoral fraud in Florida.
Or wait... I may be confusing him with someone else.
I think not many people claim the actual artists are greedy or don't deserve any money.
In fact, when you buy a CD completely legally, there aren't getting much of the money.
The ones that are greedy are the record companies. They have had years of success, have failed to move with the changed times, and now are stuck with a business model unsuitable for modern times.
They need to change that. Maybe they need to adjust their idea of a good profit downwards. Probably they can be labeled "greedy".
Over here (Netherlands), several Internet providers are openly advertising their product as very suitable for downloading music, movies, etc.
Often they show happy families all gathered around the PC downloading things, and cheering at the speed this downloading is going.
A similar decision here would certainly get a lot of those ISPs in trouble. They are in fierce competition over download speeds, and they very well realize that their customers only want (or need) this capability for illegal fileswapping.
Legal music downloads are almost nonexistent here, and legal movie downloads don't exist at all.
Of course with "a good browser", you can select the stylesheet to use when alternative stylesheets are available. In IE you can't.
But even "good browsers" like Firefox, Mozilla and Opera don't handle this correctly. When you click on a link that fetches the next page from the same site, the style sheet selection is undone and you again need to pull out the same 3-level menu selection to switch style to the one you want.
Only Konqueror handles this "correctly", by remembering the style you selected for tht site.
However, solutions using a cookie are available, like the one describled in this article on A list Apart: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/
When using this method, some clickable widget on the page can be used to select style, while the menu item still works.
Slashdot should incorporate something like this, or the stylesheet selection will be useless to 99% of its users.
IMHO this was a strong point in Mozilla that is now weakened by Firefox, Thunderbird etc.
Especially in the way these programs are packaged now, you cannot upgrade them (and Gecko) independently. Configuration management in a business network has also been made even more complicated.
I like integrated software. Users often like it, too. Especially in the field of open source and non-M$ software, as integration between different programs is often a lot weaker than integration within such a large package.
This subsidized price is only offered on a phone with accompanying subscription.
When your phone is stolen, you don't get a new phone for that same price. You have to pay the full price or else you will be paying out the contract term for your original subscription.
So, the operator is not going to lose a dime on this new phone, and the store will make its usual profits on selling equipment.
The only one losing here is the customer.