I call foul,
While technically possible to get the 1/4 phase difference to do QAM from very stable lasers, with two optical paths very slightly different lengths, and amplitude modulation of both, transmission of such a signal over long distances is going to be impossible. QAM suffers very badly from multipath, where different parts of the signal travel different distances. In the case of light, if the route the light takes varies more than ~100nm, the signal will be unrecoverable.
Also, the laser must be fully stable and coherant for the full length of a transmission frame, and the optical path length must not change by more than ~100nm during the frame transmit time.
In addioion, I don't think there is currently a way to modulate light that fast. Normally it would be done by modulating the current to the laser diode, but that can't work if seperate modulation of two phases is required.
Theoretically, if this sort of thing was possible, my quick calculations indicate that making an assumption of 1 bit/Hz, and using approximately the entire visible spectrum, data rates of would be about ~300Tbits/sec. It's worth noting that due to the way current optical fibres are made, different frequencys travel at different speeds through the fiber, so QAM would never work using this much bandwidth. Instead, something like OFDM would be required on top of a lot of QAM channels.
I don't know much about radio and modulation, so if an expert wants to correct me, I'd be pleased to learn more from them...
It supports USB memory sticks and SD cards out of the box. You can install flash player easily (there's a guide on their site). You can also install a load more codecs so it can play pretty much any video, as out of the box it'll only play.ogg - again tutorial on their wiki.
Except the OLPC tinderbox (the system they use for performance and regression testing) is broken, and has been since March 07 - It's no wonder they're now miles over their power budget, even when idle!
Unfortunately, it looks like people from the community can't work on fixing it - access to the real hardware in cambridge, MA is needed.
Quick question:
Isn't a very easy way to do these captchas to redirect them to another site, so they're done by that sites users? Say for example you run a spamnet, and a popular forum. Each time someone on your forum tries to post something, you get your bot to go and get a captcha from someone elses site and serve it to the user on your forum. When they enter the code, that code is given to the bot to enter on the target site. Easy. For every post in your forum, you now get another paypal account, or spam post somewhere, or whatever you're after.
Whatever technology you use, this is impossible to stop, because if you asked the user a question, the bot could simply redirect that question to a real user on another site.
Has anyone thought of the possibility this is an IP ethernet printer, and it's firmware just isn't coded to tell the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 packets. Maybe alternatively, the printer, which has early alpha IPv6 support is trying to comunicate in IPv6, and fails due to a bug in the printer.
Both these things would be triggered by switching on the IPv6 in vista, but neither are any problem with vista (or even the PC).
When you get that, the trick is just tell them you've done what they said to do. when they say click start, click run, type ping their.server.com -t press ok, just do the equivilant on your OS, and tell them the results. Whenever it gets to "do a virus scan" or "run windows update", just tell them you've already done that.
If you end up in a loop in their script, just ring up again, and answer the questions differently till their flowchart tells them to check their own computer system and do something about it.
Sometimes, if you catch someone who's new on the job, you can get them to give you free stuff without knowing what their doing. For example:
Phone up AOL, and say you just spoke to an AOL engineer, and they said to phone AOL and tell the person on the tech support desk to adjust the PI of your account to 4000 (can't remember the number right now), and then to request a regrade on the line. If you get through to the right person, you'll have AOL's platinum service while still paying for their basic service - worked for me while I was still with them.
Using speech recognition to perform any task is like explaining to a new employee how to do something - it's much quicker to do it yourself, but you kind of hope the employee/computer will learn and do it without prompting next time - except the computer doesn't learn like that...
For example, consider doing a google search by speech: start (wait while it processes and does what you ask) firefox (wait while it processes and does what you ask) click address bar (wait while it processes and does what you ask) spell w w w dot g o o g l e dot c o m (wait while it processes and does what you ask) enter (wait while it processes and does what you ask) (wait while it loads page) type hello (wait while it processes and does what you ask) click google search (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
now compare that to the 4 mouse clicks and 21 keystrokes (inside 5 secs) that'd take to do it yourself.
52,000 trees must be false - think about what happens when you burn just one log in your fireplace - it gets very hot and burns for a few hours. Now consider leaving your computer on for a few hours - it gets quite hot. Where is there more energy - one computer running for a few hours, or a decent size chunk of wood burning for a few hours.
And if thats just 1 chunk of wood, then how much energy is there in 52,000 trees worth?
I don't have the data here to work it out precisely, since you didn't give much info in your post about your sources, but I'd say you are around a factor of 500,000 out in your calculations!
Maybe have a system that tracks users IP addresses, and make it 1 submission per person per day, unless they ask for your permission first in which case you make an exception.
Also, remember just by changing browsers and disabling browser add-ons things can speed up a lot.
When I was away (without my laptop), the only pc I could find was a windows 95 16MB ram pc, and after loading up firefox (took about 2 mins), the actual web browsing wasn't too bad.
Forgive me if I'm being stupid, but how do you get the IE icon back in 3 clicks? (without keyboard navigation). I thought that to get the actual IE icon back you needed TweakUI anyway, or the registry editor, although I spose you could just make a standard shortcut to iexplore.exe
Maybe HSBC UK is different - but I don't see any of that here
All I have to evter to do anything is:
Internet bank ID
Date of birth
3 random digits of my 6 digit passcode
it's got a horid interface mimicing office 97 it always seems to be one step behind in the office suite race it's compatibility is good, but not good enough with office files it has the open source "feel" - a slow responding ui (feels like java!), dialogs designed by programmers, not ui experts, and quite a lot of bugs or quirks. what about all my marcos written with custom activeX controls and vbscript that won't run in it.
oh yeah, and for enterprise it doesn't have intergration with all those MS server technologies, and no proper support.
I can see that some people on a budget like it, but other than price I don't think it can compete in most other areas.
Has anyone come across the newer spam ideas, where the spam message looks so much like a real message, I can sometimes have to spend a good few minutes looking at it to see if it's genuine - they use your nickname - eg. "Dear Bob", and end with the name of someone you know. They are usually about mundane things (eg. "do you want to come to a party on saturday?"), and the emails make good sense and have a suitable subject line. The only giveaway is that they all have a tinyURL link to the actual spam site - but how can I tell if a spammer is using tinyURL of if a friend of mine is using tinyurl? The annoying thing is each email has a unique tinyurl, so by clicking on the link they know it's an active address - and I made the mistake of clicking on the first oine I got.
One thing that concerns me is how certain fields are filled in, for example my nickname and a friends name at the bottom. Also, it seems to sometimes use my geographic location (nearest city - presumably from IP location) - eg. "Meet tomorrow in London, UK." I suspect the fields are filled in by some spyware on the pc reading previous emails and analysing them - All these emails appear on my vmware spyware/virus test machine. It's also possible the fields could be filled in by a hack of someone elses mailbox (mail server or PC), because as soon as they've got a mailbox full of email (including headers), they can auto-analyse it to find out nicknames etc. fairly reliably with a decent amount of mail.
Hate to say it, but a site like http://www.loginrecovery.com/ could crack that inside 5 mins with their server farm - go for something 18 chars+ to be secure.
It doesn't work at all with most controllers - while I can't see why it shouldn't work, there are some sata cards/chipsets that don't work with linux/windows/dos/freedos without extra drivers. Booting dos installed on a HD causes "Non system disk or disk error. Replace disk and press any key" errors - caused by the boot sector, which is loaded by BIOS, not being able to load IO.sys. Not sure how partition tables are handled though...
Also, can't install any DOS based windows on them (windows 95, 98, ME), as the installer reports that windows requires a hard disk drive to run. (dur...)
Trick I use to slow down old apps on old OS's (win95), is to fire up paint, make an image 99999pixels by 999999pixels, hit create, then play your game. The swapping into the swapfile of paint will slow the game down the perfect amount. you can also run more than one copy of paint to get even slower. If you get out-of-memory errors then up the swapfile to an unlimited size. I used it for "Risky woods" all the time...:)
An alternative method is to type "echo bigvideo.avi > LPT1:" at command prompt, and the PIO mode transfer to LPT1 uses so much CPU (even on modern machines like XP it still uses 100% CPU to copy at under 300 kbytes per sec) that all other apps slow down.
I use freedos on a floppy, with NTFSdos pro, to do some handy scripting changing registry entries on windows boxes without booting them. No other way I can thing of doing it, other than a liveCD of something, but that negates the point, as everything must fit inside about 4MB for my purposes. Also, occasionally, use a network freedos floppy, but I'm annoyed at the lack of a "universal" ethernet driver - even if performance is slow - rather like the universal 640x480 video driver in windows.
Also, support for SATA drives is poor at best - and I can't find a driver for most chipsets. (although having said that even the windows XP install doesn't find most right!)
Thats a really nice keyboard on that site - bets on how much it'll cost when it comes out?
With full software support, it'd be well worth having.
You could even play gams on it - press the lit key, or some game of tetris or something.
I can also see pranks where some malware swaps the keys around, so you type your bank pin into the wrong app...
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Um how exactly do you do this? How can I run a scan and get a list of all files on the entire system that don't match the MD5's in their packages?
Has anyone here on /. had any luck in just sending an invoice to these big companies for this sort of thing and have it paid?
I wonder if their accounts dept. just pay this sort of thing for small amounts without checking thoroughly?
I call foul, While technically possible to get the 1/4 phase difference to do QAM from very stable lasers, with two optical paths very slightly different lengths, and amplitude modulation of both, transmission of such a signal over long distances is going to be impossible. QAM suffers very badly from multipath, where different parts of the signal travel different distances. In the case of light, if the route the light takes varies more than ~100nm, the signal will be unrecoverable. Also, the laser must be fully stable and coherant for the full length of a transmission frame, and the optical path length must not change by more than ~100nm during the frame transmit time. In addioion, I don't think there is currently a way to modulate light that fast. Normally it would be done by modulating the current to the laser diode, but that can't work if seperate modulation of two phases is required. Theoretically, if this sort of thing was possible, my quick calculations indicate that making an assumption of 1 bit/Hz, and using approximately the entire visible spectrum, data rates of would be about ~300Tbits/sec. It's worth noting that due to the way current optical fibres are made, different frequencys travel at different speeds through the fiber, so QAM would never work using this much bandwidth. Instead, something like OFDM would be required on top of a lot of QAM channels. I don't know much about radio and modulation, so if an expert wants to correct me, I'd be pleased to learn more from them...
It supports USB memory sticks and SD cards out of the box. You can install flash player easily (there's a guide on their site). You can also install a load more codecs so it can play pretty much any video, as out of the box it'll only play .ogg - again tutorial on their wiki.
You just made an infinite loop in slashcode...
Except the OLPC tinderbox (the system they use for performance and regression testing) is broken, and has been since March 07 - It's no wonder they're now miles over their power budget, even when idle! Unfortunately, it looks like people from the community can't work on fixing it - access to the real hardware in cambridge, MA is needed.
Quick question: Isn't a very easy way to do these captchas to redirect them to another site, so they're done by that sites users? Say for example you run a spamnet, and a popular forum. Each time someone on your forum tries to post something, you get your bot to go and get a captcha from someone elses site and serve it to the user on your forum. When they enter the code, that code is given to the bot to enter on the target site. Easy. For every post in your forum, you now get another paypal account, or spam post somewhere, or whatever you're after. Whatever technology you use, this is impossible to stop, because if you asked the user a question, the bot could simply redirect that question to a real user on another site.
Has anyone thought of the possibility this is an IP ethernet printer, and it's firmware just isn't coded to tell the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 packets. Maybe alternatively, the printer, which has early alpha IPv6 support is trying to comunicate in IPv6, and fails due to a bug in the printer.
Both these things would be triggered by switching on the IPv6 in vista, but neither are any problem with vista (or even the PC).
When you get that, the trick is just tell them you've done what they said to do. when they say click start, click run, type ping their.server.com -t press ok, just do the equivilant on your OS, and tell them the results. Whenever it gets to "do a virus scan" or "run windows update", just tell them you've already done that. If you end up in a loop in their script, just ring up again, and answer the questions differently till their flowchart tells them to check their own computer system and do something about it. Sometimes, if you catch someone who's new on the job, you can get them to give you free stuff without knowing what their doing. For example: Phone up AOL, and say you just spoke to an AOL engineer, and they said to phone AOL and tell the person on the tech support desk to adjust the PI of your account to 4000 (can't remember the number right now), and then to request a regrade on the line. If you get through to the right person, you'll have AOL's platinum service while still paying for their basic service - worked for me while I was still with them.
Using speech recognition to perform any task is like explaining to a new employee how to do something - it's much quicker to do it yourself, but you kind of hope the employee/computer will learn and do it without prompting next time - except the computer doesn't learn like that...
For example, consider doing a google search by speech:
start (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
firefox (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
click address bar (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
spell w w w dot g o o g l e dot c o m (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
enter (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
(wait while it loads page)
type hello (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
click google search (wait while it processes and does what you ask)
now compare that to the 4 mouse clicks and 21 keystrokes (inside 5 secs) that'd take to do it yourself.
52,000 trees must be false - think about what happens when you burn just one log in your fireplace - it gets very hot and burns for a few hours. Now consider leaving your computer on for a few hours - it gets quite hot. Where is there more energy - one computer running for a few hours, or a decent size chunk of wood burning for a few hours.
And if thats just 1 chunk of wood, then how much energy is there in 52,000 trees worth?
I don't have the data here to work it out precisely, since you didn't give much info in your post about your sources, but I'd say you are around a factor of 500,000 out in your calculations!
Maybe have a system that tracks users IP addresses, and make it 1 submission per person per day, unless they ask for your permission first in which case you make an exception.
Also, remember just by changing browsers and disabling browser add-ons things can speed up a lot. When I was away (without my laptop), the only pc I could find was a windows 95 16MB ram pc, and after loading up firefox (took about 2 mins), the actual web browsing wasn't too bad.
Forgive me if I'm being stupid, but how do you get the IE icon back in 3 clicks? (without keyboard navigation). I thought that to get the actual IE icon back you needed TweakUI anyway, or the registry editor, although I spose you could just make a standard shortcut to iexplore.exe
There are probably no hard facts of how many were sent - maybe the numbers quoted are only what was received by a particular email provider.
new weapon of mass destruction here - brings a new meaning to car bombs - no extra explosives needed.
Maybe cos they've all got sticky labels on with product keys, and people have copied them onto paper and taken them home to use.
Maybe HSBC UK is different - but I don't see any of that here All I have to evter to do anything is: Internet bank ID Date of birth 3 random digits of my 6 digit passcode
I'm going to be modded to oblivion for this, but:
it's got a horid interface mimicing office 97
it always seems to be one step behind in the office suite race
it's compatibility is good, but not good enough with office files
it has the open source "feel" - a slow responding ui (feels like java!), dialogs designed by programmers, not ui experts, and quite a lot of bugs or quirks.
what about all my marcos written with custom activeX controls and vbscript that won't run in it.
oh yeah, and for enterprise it doesn't have intergration with all those MS server technologies, and no proper support.
I can see that some people on a budget like it, but other than price I don't think it can compete in most other areas.
Has anyone come across the newer spam ideas, where the spam message looks so much like a real message, I can sometimes have to spend a good few minutes looking at it to see if it's genuine - they use your nickname - eg. "Dear Bob", and end with the name of someone you know. They are usually about mundane things (eg. "do you want to come to a party on saturday?"), and the emails make good sense and have a suitable subject line. The only giveaway is that they all have a tinyURL link to the actual spam site - but how can I tell if a spammer is using tinyURL of if a friend of mine is using tinyurl? The annoying thing is each email has a unique tinyurl, so by clicking on the link they know it's an active address - and I made the mistake of clicking on the first oine I got.
One thing that concerns me is how certain fields are filled in, for example my nickname and a friends name at the bottom. Also, it seems to sometimes use my geographic location (nearest city - presumably from IP location) - eg. "Meet tomorrow in London, UK." I suspect the fields are filled in by some spyware on the pc reading previous emails and analysing them - All these emails appear on my vmware spyware/virus test machine. It's also possible the fields could be filled in by a hack of someone elses mailbox (mail server or PC), because as soon as they've got a mailbox full of email (including headers), they can auto-analyse it to find out nicknames etc. fairly reliably with a decent amount of mail.
Hate to say it, but a site like http://www.loginrecovery.com/ could crack that inside 5 mins with their server farm - go for something 18 chars+ to be secure.
It doesn't work at all with most controllers - while I can't see why it shouldn't work, there are some sata cards/chipsets that don't work with linux/windows/dos/freedos without extra drivers. Booting dos installed on a HD causes "Non system disk or disk error. Replace disk and press any key" errors - caused by the boot sector, which is loaded by BIOS, not being able to load IO.sys. Not sure how partition tables are handled though... Also, can't install any DOS based windows on them (windows 95, 98, ME), as the installer reports that windows requires a hard disk drive to run. (dur...)
Trick I use to slow down old apps on old OS's (win95), is to fire up paint, make an image 99999pixels by 999999pixels, hit create, then play your game. The swapping into the swapfile of paint will slow the game down the perfect amount. you can also run more than one copy of paint to get even slower. If you get out-of-memory errors then up the swapfile to an unlimited size. I used it for "Risky woods" all the time... :)
An alternative method is to type "echo bigvideo.avi > LPT1:" at command prompt, and the PIO mode transfer to LPT1 uses so much CPU (even on modern machines like XP it still uses 100% CPU to copy at under 300 kbytes per sec) that all other apps slow down.
I use freedos on a floppy, with NTFSdos pro, to do some handy scripting changing registry entries on windows boxes without booting them. No other way I can thing of doing it, other than a liveCD of something, but that negates the point, as everything must fit inside about 4MB for my purposes. Also, occasionally, use a network freedos floppy, but I'm annoyed at the lack of a "universal" ethernet driver - even if performance is slow - rather like the universal 640x480 video driver in windows. Also, support for SATA drives is poor at best - and I can't find a driver for most chipsets. (although having said that even the windows XP install doesn't find most right!)
Thats a really nice keyboard on that site - bets on how much it'll cost when it comes out? With full software support, it'd be well worth having. You could even play gams on it - press the lit key, or some game of tetris or something. I can also see pranks where some malware swaps the keys around, so you type your bank pin into the wrong app...