No you don't have to loose any calls. You don't have to hang up. any other action could be programmed, for example a distinctive ringtone for an incomming automated caller and another for family calling in. In fact anything you can think of. Asterix has a nice voice mail system. One thing it can do it send you an email for each voice mail. I like this because I can scan my email folder and decide which I want to listen to, no more having to listen to voicemail one at a time in the order recieved. I can take this one step farther. I can use my email systems sorting ability to sort voice mails into folders. One folders for calls with blocked caller ID, one for family and so on.
The system is completely configurable and it's free.
I built a system once that (1) puts all calls with caller ID blocked into voice mail without even ringing the phone. (2) a short list on "known good" caller IDs ring through (3) then it asks "If you are a telemmarketer please press 1, for surveys press 2...
But the good part is if they press 1 or 2 they get more questions like "if the item you are selling cost between $1 and $19.99 press 1, for $20 to 49.99 press 2. If they do press a key they get another question and it continues forever eventually getting to "please enter your shoe size then hit the pound key" Finally "we need to confirm information you have previously entered then it repeats. But at any time pressing zero gets you out of this. Give out the "zero" when you give your number to people.
So you put a Faraday cage around the car's ECM. Problem solved?
Easier said then done. the "ECM" is a distributed system with many wires and sensors spread out all over the drive train. And then there are some more wires going to the dashboard to run lights. Typically the way the system is damaged is that the wires act like antenna. So again you are right in theory but it is not practical. You can not have wires and cable running in and out of the "cage" or it stops being a "cage" Ok, you can add filter networks, just some inductors and capacitors, diodes and gas discharge tubes at the point were each wire enters your cages But this is expensive to engineer and would need some testing to get it right
Which also makes me wonder why, if someone were intent on illegality, they couldn't put their own little faraday cage around the car's ECU. A little box made of copper with a drain wire to the car frame too hard to implement?
The copper shield would work well but to make it work you would have to cut all the wires leaving the shield. You do NOT have a faraday cage if you don't cut the wires. So you've have to extend the copper sheild to enclose all the wires in the car too. Pretty much the entire car.
I used to work on the B1 bomer program. They came to the same conclusion, that you have to use the skin of the aircrft as the sheild. So they had these aluminum panels that are used to cover the windows in the cockpit. The crew places then inside the glass and there are fasteners to hold them. You could do the same with a car. If there is wire in the passenger compartment and the glass is not covered you do not have a sheild
Why is Oracle getting into so many new markets? I think it adds value to some of their customers. The reason is service contracts. Many companies will not buy software unless they can also get service with it. What they don't like is having to buy 15 different service contracts and then watch the various vendors all say "The problem is in the other guy's stuff, ours works fine." These customers want a single point of contact for software problems and Ocracle wants to be that single point.
I used to work with older CDC mainframe equipment. It really was nice. There were full time CDC customer engineers always right there on site. I think Oracle and many others would like to be able to get back to providing this level of customer service.
You forget why politicians do these things. They know darn well what they say is impractical and couldn't work but they want to be seen as "doing something". Also if you say something about a well known group, company or web site then you can get some free news coverage and your name and face all over the web and TV.
Yes there are poor people here but everyone who wants one can have a computer. We put many working computers in landfill every year. I've tried to give away working computers. The response is mostly "what's ionside? Oh it's three years old I can't use it."
I hate to argue but it IS a technical problem. I can think of a useful robot easy. How about one that can work in a fam and pick tomatoes or drive the tractor. Or a construction robot that can cut lumber and frame a house? Or re-stock shelves in a market? At home I want one that can move furniture and re-paint walls and fix plumbing. Heck I'd settle for a phone machine that could talk to the caller and decide if I should take the call or not.
It dead easy to think of tasks for a robot but no one knows how to build such a robot today. We will need for some fundamental breakthroughs in cognitive psychology and computer science.
It might have been multiple air bursts if the comet broke up first. Then you would have a fairly complex pattern. Likely not as simple as the ideal case there a point source blast all goes off at once. The chunk of ice was moving fast and exploded over a period of time. So the blast came from not a point but a few short line segments
Do lasers follow the inverse square law? Yes. The beam, even when "focused" is still "cone shaped" The apex of the code is at the transmitting laser and the angle is small but non-zero. The power density is simply the power of the laser divided by the area of the base of the cone. Notice that the base area depends on the square of the height of the cone. So yes, inverse square law applies as long as there is some "spread" in the beam and there always will be.
Alignment? Yes this is not easy but it is a common problem and has been solved many times. Almost any astronomical telescope will have a VERY smmall feild of view, measured in arc minutes or arc seconds Telescops all over the world have been tracking targets with arc-second accuracy for decades. Now days we have computers but back in the early 20th century we had precision gears and clockwork.
When you design a real system you need to balance some parameters. For example you can make the pointing eassier by making the beam wider but then you need more power. Possibly better pointing costs less them more power up to some point. The engineer's goal as always is to find the best balance of competing factors.
Yes the robot was more of a puppet then anything else. But the purpose was NOT to make useful machine. The purpose of the experiment was to determine just how interactive a robot would need to be before it was accepted by the children. For this a puppet is perfect. The reasearchers got their data and by using a puppet did not need to construct a sophisticated robot controller
Let's set, radio travels at the speed of light. In one year light travels (get's out calculator.) one light year. If there are any people there listening to Earth they are hearing what we heard in 1956.
When did we first build powerful transmitters? Comercial radio started in the 1920's so almost 90 years ago. Higher frequency VHF got beg after the war in the lat 40's when TV got popular.
Could they hear it? Only if they have invested in VERY sensitive receivers MUCH more sensitive then anything we have. Our current receivers could only hear a signal if it were from a very powerful beacon aimed right at us.
We do not currently have a system then could detect our own signals if they were coming from another star.
You see it used everywhare. What do you keep user data? A round here every PC has a network drive on it's desktop and that is where peole keep all their files. So when I log into another PC in the plant I get my files on the desktop. That "drive" is really a big disk array. How do they back it up? The company owns three geographically dispersed arrays and they keep them synchronized using high speed data lines. They also use tape.
Basically you would use a storage array any time you own more than a handfull of computers. If just makes sense to get the data off the desktop so it can (1) Be properly secured and backup up and (2) follow the user's login. This is such a good idea that storage companies are doing well.
It is over priced because it is a growing marget and everyone wants to buy in now before it gets even bigger
There is a good chance the disk drive or the networked computer is giving the finder an "OK I got it" signal BEFORE the data is actually written to the physical disk drive. So it gives this signal, then the finder deletes the old data and then the disk drive "goes away" before the data is written out of the cache and to the drive. Don't blame Finder, blame those huge disk caches where many megabytes sit and wait to be written to the drive.
If this is true then the bug is im the copy of Samba running on the file server. We do not yet have enough information to know.
I think it is, in a backwards kind of way. We are hard wired to learn language. We humans invented differential equations in a way that takes advantage of our language abilities. We use symbol strings to express math so we can then apply our abilities with grammar manipulation. So yes, I think we ARE hardwired to learn higher math but only because we invented a kind of math we can actually do.
So you buy a Lynksys "hardware" fire wall. What's inside? There is a CPU, some RAM, an operating system, likely VxWorks and some software. There are no truely hardware-only firewalls.
And then what does a fire wall do? If the computer is configured corectly there is no need for a firewall. Firewals are just the "suspenders" part of a "belt and suspenders" security system. And even then the virus comes in via email and the web which your fire wall lets in.
That said, I use redundant layers of protection and then tripwire-like detection
"The problem with NBC is that they drive shows into the ground. They're doing it with Deal or No Deal and Law & Order. They did it with Dateline before."
You don't understand how TV works. Some smart TV exec long ago noticed that viewers decide IN THIS ORDER (1) "I want to watch TV", (2) "What's on?" So because they operate in this order all you need is to have the show that sucks the least. They have already decided to watch something. it does not need to be good. To make money you want to spend the smallest amount of money and suck the least do that and you can get rich.
"The issue with recording on a physical medium - irrespective of type or method, is that the stylus (whatever it may be) has mass. As such it is subject to Newton's first law..."
It need not have mass. I know of one system that plays back records using a video camera in place of the needle. The groves are imaged via a micoscope and then sent to a computer. Yes very expensive but the point was so that old 78 RPM records that are broken can be recovered.
There is another system that uses a laser to track the groves.
Neither of these are common but it does show that Newton's laws are but a theoretical limit.
What if your desired orbit inclination is (say) 40 degrees? what is the best latitude to launch from in that case? What if you are wanting to do a polar orbit? If the goal is to overfly Russia, Europe or N. Americal you may not want an orbit that places you 200 miles up over the equator because those places you want to look at will be over the horizon
"Imagine how much work place productivity would suffer if every time an employee came back to work each morning they've spent a virtual 6-months away in paradise."
Imagine how much work place productivity would grow if every time an employee came back to work each morning they would a virtual 6-months in a virtual office. In other ords work 6 months every day. If the technology would allow a virtual vacation why not "virtual work"?
Gimp was never intended to be a PS clone
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
What people really want is Photoshop without having to pay for it.
All these Windows/Photoshop users will complain because Gimp is not an exact clone of PS so the user interface sucks. What's happened is that they have invested years learning Adobe's horrible interface and don't want to learn something new. Gimp is easy to use if yo are not already trained in Photoshop.
Very few of these winers care anyingh about Open Source or freedom they just want a free (as in free beer) Photoshop clone.
Well it's Open Source so you can fix it yourself if you like. If you want Photoshop then just go and get Photoshop.
That said Gimp does lack some features I'd like. First off is "deep color". Would be nce if they could do some "exotic" formats like Cinepaint. Floating point color would be outstanding.
There are three kinds of "technology "fluent": To use the old car analogy
1) Can drive a car, knows all about car companies and which models have leather seats and what "anti-skid brakes" do
2) can fix a car. Can figure out what part is broken and do a "remove and replace" repair
3) Can design a car. Knows how to design body sheet metal so that it absorbs energy in an impact. Can model flame propagation inside a combustion chamber,
With cars e have drivers, mechanics and engineers. With computers it is users, service techs and engineers. So what the article says is that even though many kids are computer users few want to become engineers. Well "good" the ratio of users to engineers should be about 100,000 to one or maybe 500K to 1. It only take 10 guys to set up a cool web site that a million people can use.
To be sustainable it does not have to be carbon free. Just "carbon net zero". For example diesel is "net zero" if you make it from corn oil. But right now It's more cost effective to pump to fuel out of the ground. Heck, you can get $70 per barrel for oil and it only costs you athe effort to colect it. It's like fishing. the fish are free, all you have to do is go get them.
"the real issue, which in this case is access to the memory space of another application without some sort of credential or approval."
What??? This problem was address ages ago by the people who came before Apple and even by those who came before UNIX. This is simply NOT the problem. What is the problem here is the typical buffer overflow. yes we should look for these and fix them but this randomization adds one more layer. Yes the exploit can search all of the process' RAM but that means the program must be larger
Chatching up with BSD? Mac OS is BSD. Most of what's in BSD makes it's way into Mac OS X. But Mac OS X does have a rather longer release cycle so things like this can take two years
Slashdot Mirror
No you don't have to loose any calls. You don't have to hang up. any other action could be programmed, for example a distinctive ringtone for an incomming automated caller and another for family calling in. In fact anything you can think of. Asterix has a nice voice mail system. One thing it can do it send you an email for each voice mail. I like this because I can scan my email folder and decide which I want to listen to, no more having to listen to voicemail one at a time in the order recieved. I can take this one step farther. I can use my email systems sorting ability to sort voice mails into folders. One folders for calls with blocked caller ID, one for family and so on.
The system is completely configurable and it's free.
I built a system once that (1) puts all calls with caller ID blocked into voice mail without even ringing the phone. (2) a short list on "known good" caller IDs ring through (3) then it asks "If you are a telemmarketer please press 1, for surveys press 2...
But the good part is if they press 1 or 2 they get more questions like "if the item you are selling cost between $1 and $19.99 press 1, for $20 to 49.99 press 2. If they do press a key they get another question and it continues forever eventually getting to "please enter your shoe size then hit the pound key" Finally "we need to confirm information you have previously entered then it repeats. But at any time pressing zero gets you out of this. Give out the "zero" when you give your number to people.
So you put a Faraday cage around the car's ECM. Problem solved?
Easier said then done. the "ECM" is a distributed system with many wires and sensors spread out all over the drive train. And then there are some more wires going to the dashboard to run lights. Typically the way the system is damaged is that the wires act like antenna. So again you are right in theory but it is not practical. You can not have wires and cable running in and out of the "cage" or it stops being a "cage" Ok, you can add filter networks, just some inductors and capacitors, diodes and gas discharge tubes at the point were each wire enters your cages But this is expensive to engineer and would need some testing to get it right
Which also makes me wonder why, if someone were intent on illegality, they couldn't put their own little faraday cage around the car's ECU. A little box made of copper with a drain wire to the car frame too hard to implement? The copper shield would work well but to make it work you would have to cut all the wires leaving the shield. You do NOT have a faraday cage if you don't cut the wires. So you've have to extend the copper sheild to enclose all the wires in the car too. Pretty much the entire car. I used to work on the B1 bomer program. They came to the same conclusion, that you have to use the skin of the aircrft as the sheild. So they had these aluminum panels that are used to cover the windows in the cockpit. The crew places then inside the glass and there are fasteners to hold them. You could do the same with a car. If there is wire in the passenger compartment and the glass is not covered you do not have a sheild
Why is Oracle getting into so many new markets? I think it adds value to some of their customers. The reason is service contracts. Many companies will not buy software unless they can also get service with it. What they don't like is having to buy 15 different service contracts and then watch the various vendors all say "The problem is in the other guy's stuff, ours works fine." These customers want a single point of contact for software problems and Ocracle wants to be that single point.
I used to work with older CDC mainframe equipment. It really was nice. There were full time CDC customer engineers always right there on site. I think Oracle and many others would like to be able to get back to providing this level of customer service.
You forget why politicians do these things. They know darn well what they say is impractical and couldn't work but they want to be seen as "doing something". Also if you say something about a well known group, company or web site then you can get some free news coverage and your name and face all over the web and TV.
Yes there are poor people here but everyone who wants one can have a computer. We put many working computers in landfill every year. I've tried to give away working computers. The response is mostly "what's ionside? Oh it's three years old I can't use it."
That's one idea that the size of a $100 dive falls. That means people want/need a larger drive but can only spend $100.
What's happened now is that the $100 drive has gotten larger than people need so finally that can drop down to the $80 drive
I hate to argue but it IS a technical problem. I can think of a useful robot easy. How about one that can work in a fam and pick tomatoes or drive the tractor. Or a construction robot that can cut lumber and frame a house? Or re-stock shelves in a market? At home I want one that can move furniture and re-paint walls and fix plumbing. Heck I'd settle for a phone machine that could talk to the caller and decide if I should take the call or not.
It dead easy to think of tasks for a robot but no one knows how to build such a robot today. We will need for some fundamental breakthroughs in cognitive psychology and computer science.
It might have been multiple air bursts if the comet broke up first. Then you would have a fairly complex pattern. Likely not as simple as the ideal case there a point source blast all goes off at once. The chunk of ice was moving fast and exploded over a period of time. So the blast came from not a point but a few short line segments
Do lasers follow the inverse square law? Yes. The beam, even when "focused" is still "cone shaped" The apex of the code is at the transmitting laser and the angle is small but non-zero. The power density is simply the power of the laser divided by the area of the base of the cone. Notice that the base area depends on the square of the height of the cone. So yes, inverse square law applies as long as there is some "spread" in the beam and there always will be.
Alignment? Yes this is not easy but it is a common problem and has been solved many times. Almost any astronomical telescope will have a VERY smmall feild of view, measured in arc minutes or arc seconds Telescops all over the world have been tracking targets with arc-second accuracy for decades. Now days we have computers but back in the early 20th century we had precision gears and clockwork.
When you design a real system you need to balance some parameters. For example you can make the pointing eassier by making the beam wider but then you need more power. Possibly better pointing costs less them more power up to some point. The engineer's goal as always is to find the best balance of competing factors.
Yes the robot was more of a puppet then anything else. But the purpose was NOT to make useful machine. The purpose of the experiment was to determine just how interactive a robot would need to be before it was accepted by the children. For this a puppet is perfect. The reasearchers got their data and by using a puppet did not need to construct a sophisticated robot controller
Let's set, radio travels at the speed of light. In one year light travels (get's out calculator.) one light year. If there are any people there listening to Earth they are hearing what we heard in 1956.
When did we first build powerful transmitters? Comercial radio started in the 1920's so almost 90 years ago. Higher frequency VHF got beg after the war in the lat 40's when TV got popular.
Could they hear it? Only if they have invested in VERY sensitive receivers MUCH more sensitive then anything we have. Our current receivers could only hear a signal if it were from a very powerful beacon aimed right at us.
We do not currently have a system then could detect our own signals if they were coming from another star.
"Is it for backups of corporate data centers?"
You see it used everywhare. What do you keep user data? A round here every PC has a network drive on it's desktop and that is where peole keep all their files. So when I log into another PC in the plant I get my files on the desktop. That "drive" is really a big disk array. How do they back it up? The company owns three geographically dispersed arrays and they keep them synchronized using high speed data lines. They also use tape.
Basically you would use a storage array any time you own more than a handfull of computers. If just makes sense to get the data off the desktop so it can (1) Be properly secured and backup up and (2) follow the user's login. This is such a good idea that storage companies are doing well.
It is over priced because it is a growing marget and everyone wants to buy in now before it gets even bigger
There is a good chance the disk drive or the networked computer is giving the finder an "OK I got it" signal BEFORE the data is actually written to the physical disk drive. So it gives this signal, then the finder deletes the old data and then the disk drive "goes away" before the data is written out of the cache and to the drive. Don't blame Finder, blame those huge disk caches where many megabytes sit and wait to be written to the drive.
If this is true then the bug is im the copy of Samba running on the file server. We do not yet have enough information to know.
I think it is, in a backwards kind of way. We are hard wired to learn language. We humans invented differential equations in a way that takes advantage of our language abilities. We use symbol strings to express math so we can then apply our abilities with grammar manipulation. So yes, I think we ARE hardwired to learn higher math but only because we invented a kind of math we can actually do.
So you buy a Lynksys "hardware" fire wall. What's inside? There is a CPU, some RAM, an operating system, likely VxWorks and some software. There are no truely hardware-only firewalls.
And then what does a fire wall do? If the computer is configured corectly there is no need for a firewall. Firewals are just the "suspenders" part of a "belt and suspenders" security system. And even then the virus comes in via email and the web which your fire wall lets in.
That said, I use redundant layers of protection and then tripwire-like detection
"The problem with NBC is that they drive shows into the ground. They're doing it with Deal or No Deal and Law & Order. They did it with Dateline before."
You don't understand how TV works. Some smart TV exec long ago noticed that viewers decide IN THIS ORDER (1) "I want to watch TV", (2) "What's on?" So because they operate in this order all you need is to have the show that sucks the least. They have already decided to watch something. it does not need to be good. To make money you want to spend the smallest amount of money and suck the least do that and you can get rich.
"The issue with recording on a physical medium - irrespective of type or method, is that the stylus (whatever it may be) has mass. As such it is subject to Newton's first law..."
It need not have mass. I know of one system that plays back records using a video camera in place of the needle. The groves are imaged via a micoscope and then sent to a computer. Yes very expensive but the point was so that old 78 RPM records that are broken can be recovered.
There is another system that uses a laser to track the groves.
Neither of these are common but it does show that Newton's laws are but a theoretical limit.
What if your desired orbit inclination is (say) 40 degrees? what is the best latitude to launch from in that case? What if you are wanting to do a polar orbit? If the goal is to overfly Russia, Europe or N. Americal you may not want an orbit that places you 200 miles up over the equator because those places you want to look at will be over the horizon
"Imagine how much work place productivity would suffer if every time an employee came back to work each morning they've spent a virtual 6-months away in paradise."
Imagine how much work place productivity would grow if every time an employee came back to work each morning they would a virtual 6-months in a virtual office. In other ords work 6 months every day. If the technology would allow a virtual vacation why not "virtual work"?
What people really want is Photoshop without having to pay for it.
All these Windows/Photoshop users will complain because Gimp is not an exact clone of PS so the user interface sucks. What's happened is that they have invested years learning Adobe's horrible interface and don't want to learn something new. Gimp is easy to use if yo are not already trained in Photoshop.
Very few of these winers care anyingh about Open Source or freedom they just want a free (as in free beer) Photoshop clone.
Well it's Open Source so you can fix it yourself if you like.
If you want Photoshop then just go and get Photoshop.
That said Gimp does lack some features I'd like. First off is "deep color". Would be nce if they could do some "exotic" formats like Cinepaint. Floating point color would be outstanding.
There are three kinds of "technology "fluent": To use the old car analogy
1) Can drive a car, knows all about car companies and which models have leather seats and what "anti-skid brakes" do
2) can fix a car. Can figure out what part is broken and do a "remove and replace" repair
3) Can design a car. Knows how to design body sheet metal so that it absorbs energy in an impact. Can model flame propagation inside a combustion chamber,
With cars e have drivers, mechanics and engineers. With computers it is users, service techs and engineers. So what the article says is that even though many kids are computer users few want to become engineers. Well "good" the ratio of users to engineers should be about 100,000 to one or maybe 500K to 1. It only take 10 guys to set up a cool web site that a million people can use.
To be sustainable it does not have to be carbon free. Just "carbon net zero". For example diesel is "net zero" if you make it from corn oil. But right now It's more cost effective to pump to fuel out of the ground. Heck, you can get $70 per barrel for oil and it only costs you athe effort to colect it. It's like fishing. the fish are free, all you have to do is go get them.
"the real issue, which in this case is access to the memory space of another application without some sort of credential or approval." What??? This problem was address ages ago by the people who came before Apple and even by those who came before UNIX. This is simply NOT the problem. What is the problem here is the typical buffer overflow. yes we should look for these and fix them but this randomization adds one more layer. Yes the exploit can search all of the process' RAM but that means the program must be larger
Chatching up with BSD? Mac OS is BSD. Most of what's in BSD makes it's way into Mac OS X. But Mac OS X does have a rather longer release cycle so things like this can take two years