Palm (or any other handheld) is ideal solution, at least for us, techs. But for users it would be better to come up with USB keys instead of passwords. Insert it, get accces. Remove it, disconnect. Software DO exist. Any cheap USB keychain will do the trick. Just make users responsible for the key (i.e. if they loose the key they have to pay for the new one).
Unfortunately my boss refused this idea saying that it would be too expensive to build such infrastructure in our 500+ computers network...
Last thought: What gets my goat is how everyone's going after virus writers, but no one's touching these asshole spyware programmers. These programs DO interfere with system operations, are difficult to remove (some even actively interfere with ad-removal software), and run without the user's knowledge. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I simply must vent.
No one's toching them because they bring profit! Inderectly, but they do. Some of my clients asked me "my computer is too slow, should I buy new one?". All of them were infected with loads of spyware. And one of these poor guys bought new computer. Result: 1. manufacturers got their profit, 2. Microsoft got their profit too and 3. seller got his proft as well. Heh. Why they should kill the goose that lays goled eggs? And that computer got bogged down by spyware in two months and that guy was considering buying another computer!
I think Microsoft understands the situation and likes it.
Ditch IE for Firefox. I just did 2 clients' computers today (running slow, yadayada) and guess what? One had 18 spyware trojans installed, the other had 64 (as well as a couple of viruses). Firefox (any Gecko-based browser) is not vulnerable to the crap that IE is. I always tell my clients to not use IE anymore. When they listen, they always have a better overall experience.
Firefox is not MUCH more secure than IE. Wanna proof? What's the fucking difference between IE's box asking about installation and Firefox's one? Yes, I'm talking about.xpi files. How long it would take before spyware will distribute itself as.xpi files and users will happily click "yes" in these boxes?....
I love mozilla. It's a very good browser. But don't think that it's a magic cure for all spyware.
Yes, it's difficult at first, but when you learn the ropes it's the best language around. I wrote some utilities in Ada for my company (nobody cared how these are written, it was purely my initiative) and know what I'm talking about.
Oh well, the ter'rists have won. Let's all sit around and wait for the Sun to explode.
Seriously, who really needs nuclear ballistic missiles anyway? Why be so obvious? You can see those coming a mile off! A warhead in the back of a taxi would do the trick just fine, and wouldn't need expensive propellant or guidance systems either.
Meh, ballistics are yesterdays scaremongering. (Except for when I'm playing Civ 3, they're quite handy then.)
No. A warhead in the taxi will work once. Then roadblocks will be installed and borders will be patrolled (strict border patrols of USSR were almost 100% secure and certainly secure not to bring several hundred kilogram device). It did not take much resources from USSR and could be done in US.
But I'm not talking about terrorists at all. The technology of such missiles will spread wide enough to be replicated in third world, and we'll see a lot of new nuclear countries. And lesser countries will have LESS safeguards on these. And we'll see nuclear war between Syria and Israel...
Most countries don't pursue nuclear arms because they have nothing to reach their adversary. With cheap rockets... ewww.
No science, just commercial space travel. Yes, smashing crap into the moon is completely without merit, but to me it's exciting that it's even possible for someone with the $6M cash and no experience in rocketry to think "Hmm...I think I'll throw something at the moon today."
Go for it, guys. Run pointless, self serving commercial space launches. Make it cheap.
Yeah. Go for it, guys, make it cheap to build ballistic missiles. If you have a rocket with enough punch to reach the moon then you have a ballistic missile with enough punch to fly around the globe with most primitive nuclear warhed (gun type).
Sea water is a very aggressive thing. How they are going to keep mechanics oiled and sealed? How they are going to service these things, it won't be trivial. How they are going to transport electricity -- they'll need underwater high woltage power lines that don't suffer from salted water either.
It could work for small towns near the shoreline but no more...
I hate to be the one to point this out, but these aren't plans, these are "options". A plan would tell us where our power is going to come from. What you've given isn't much different than what I've given, which is a few things that we could do about it.
The plan is to try all of these. At once. We can't say right now what option really does work and what doesn't. But when the price will stay high and everyone will be sure that it doesn't go down all of these technologies will be tried and the best will survive.
Interesting that Germany fought using synthetic fuels in WWII, I was not aware of that.
Veterans said that it was easy to distingush destroyed German tanks from Russian ones from the distance because German tanks burned with thin blue smoke and Russian tanks burned with thick black smoke (because of diesel fuel)
I asked one (not ugly, but that guy was able to get any woman quckly -- and without spending money too). He tried to answer, but could not. Finally he said "I don't know, somehow it works".
After oil production peaks, expect the drop-off to be sharp, painful, and to create an economic catastrophe like nothing you'd ever imagine.
No, we have all solutions today. Ready, right now. They aren't profitable because it's cheaper to make $2/barrel hole in Saudi soil and suck oil there.
We have the technology for the car consuming 1 liter per 100 kilometers. Right now. Volkswagen's 1-liter car. It's almost consumer-grade. But nobody will buy it because everyone buys huge SUVs.
We can drive cars on methane. It cost about $600 to switch a truck from gasoline to methane here, in Russia and I doubt that it would be more expensive in U.S. or Europe. The only problem of switching to methane (any gasoline engine can run methane) is heavy baloons and even today you can buy kevlar-reinforced baloons with reasonable weight. But while methane is dirt cheap people rarely do this, it's easier to use benzine while it's more than twice expensive. And the Earth has enough methane to live for another hundred and half years (definitely enough to get cold fusion into production).
Germans fought during WWII using synthetic fuel. If the price of the oil barrel goes over $40 then the technology of the past becomes viable and we can start making fuel from coal -- and the Earth have enough coal for hundreds of years. Last synthetic fuel factory in Germany was closed in sixties because it was impossible to compete with dirt cheap oil.
So we have plans B-Z available right now. But oil is still cheap enough to keep these plans in archives...
This really isn't all that new. IBVA has been working with this for a while, and also does many other things. There are kits to use brainwave patterns to fastforward or rewind your VCR/DVD Player/CD Player, create midi compositions from your brainwaves while you sleep, and a game control system for consoles. You can also record brainwave patterns while you jog or do whatever else and aren't within range of the receiver.
Oh, and they also claim to have some Linux stuff in the pipe as well. Though, admittedly, I don't know how long it's been "coming soon"
There are a lot of working prototypes that allow you to control at least two analog signals and play STUPID GAMES (instead of doing something useful). Also there is a program called Dasher which is very useful to enter text. Now why there is still no mix of these two technologies? My RSI hurts and I tried a lot of alternatives, but nothing involving voice or feet works, at least nothing is enough to perform my usual sysadmin duties:(
"Given that one is convinced that nuking a city was necessary, was it necessary to nuke a second city?" Indeed, this question isn't heard often enough. imho, the first bomb at Hiroshima was an awe inspiring, history changing moment that must have taken great courage to go ahead with. Having seen what happened, the second bomb at Nagasaki was a disgusting war crime for which the commanding officers should have been publicly executed. (notwithstanding the fact that Japan did not immediately surrender)
US spent quite a lot of time fighting Japan, but then suddenly Soviet Army crushed big Japanese army and kicked them out of Korea in days, even not months. US was very, very afraid that Soviet Army would conquer Japan before US could do anything.
Now imagine Cold War with Soviet Japan joining Warsaw pact...
That's why US killed so many civillians. The intent was to horrify japanese and bring surrender immediately.
Freenet is out of question. It's main idea of storing information on other peers with limited lifetime is flawed.
Better system would be a network of p2p proxies. These proxies must work in chain so the original server is behind at least 5 proxies (with onion-like encryption it could be done securely). The only problem is routing requests to proxies...
why executables still allowed in e-mail after all YEARS of worm history? There are only a few legitimate reasons for them and everything could be done in other way. And it's obviously that education users and even presenting them a warning doesn't work.
Why nobody ever came up with default mail server configuration which prohibits any executable content? And not only.exe and.scr, but all a.out, elf and company too.
So far nobody. You have to patch qmail and add qmail-scanner if you want to do this. Is there a checkbox in microsoft exchange? An option in sendmail.cf?
Forget about speech recognition. Really. I suffer from RSI and I can tell you that today speech recognition is perfect. You can do almost anything with it at reasonable speed. The problem is that you can ruin your vocal cords much faster than your hands. Just one hour of talking to computer and I croak as raven. Speech recognition is okay if you want to dictate some tex, but unfortunately it is out of question when it comes down to programming.
Just take C or perl program and try to read it aloud. Really. Just one or two screens of text. Read it. Spell it as if you want to dictate it to computer using alpha-bravo. Don't forget you have to pronounce spaces, newlines and all tabs. You'll feel the problem with your vocal cords.
They'll want a standard wired mouse, thank you very much. All others risk downtime for battery changes.:)
Actually battery life is not the main problem of the wireless mouse. It's the wire itself that keeps mouse safely hanging if you drop it accidentaly. And if you drop your wireless mouse it will inevitably break upon the contact with hard floor.
Why your mail server allows executable attachments to pass through? I prohibited transferring ALL executable attachments (and executables inside archive files) when Sobig struck (antivirus update with Sobig came 20 minutes later and it was too late for our network with 300 computers on LAN and 40 shops around the city). But now I slept at home when MyDoom started to bounce around the internet instead of spending night cleaning everything. My boss called me yesterday and asked "I hear about horrible virus all around, why we aren't affected?" (funny, huh?) and I told him that's because I was firm when I said "fuck off, I won't allow executables in the mail ever".
By the way, antivirus update was late for MyDoom too by about 30 minutes.
There are NO legitimate reasons to allow executables, neither in attachments nor in archive files. Qmail-scanner and Nelson's patch do the trick.
There is a finite amount of fossil fuel on this planet. Once that's used up, that's it. We're screwed... BIG time.
Wrong point of view.
The problem is that fuel-efficient technologies alredy exist. And alternative fuel techniques exist too. But they don't make any sense if you look at money. As long as the oil is cheap enough to make $2/barrel hole in the earth and make $30/barrel profit we will never have hydrogen or other type of engine. Because it will never survive the competition.
On other hand, if the price of barrel goes over $40 and stays here (and banks will be sure that it never goes down) investments would be made into fuel factories that make sythetic fuel from coal. We have shitloads of coal around the world, AT LEAST several hundred years. This technology was developed by Germans during WWII, their tanks used synthetic fuel.
If the price goes over $50 and stays here (again, humans will have to build a lot of factories, so we must be sure that oil price doesn't go down and doesn't bankrupt biggest investments in the history) we can produce synthetic fuel from methane.
It's quite possible to produce fuel from plants, especially from hemp. Some people say that you burn more fuel during growing hemp than you get out ot it, but they don't realise that fuel consumption of farmer's vehicles is SHIT. Nobody ever tried to mandate fuel consumption of tractor. The room for improvement is enormous.
Now let's look at the fuel efficiency. This car http://www.autointell-news.com/european_companies/ volkswagen/vw_marke/volkswagen-1-liter/volkswagen- 1-literauto-02.htm consumens ONE liter per hundred km (230 MPG). Today nobody will buy this car, the will snuff at it and buy SUV because it's cheap to maintain. But if you fuel price jumps up 15 times, this 1-liter car will be the best selling car in US.
So don't scream "we are going to die". Let the economy sort things out. When oil price goes up high enough we'll switch to the best economy-wise option. May be it would be cars like Volkswagen's, may be something else. But no doomsday, sir.
it's so sad. especially considerring that if she needed help with some things she has two brothers to help her (ie maths, or whatever) whereas i (the elder child) got to struggle awkwardly through the mazes of thought afront of me
That's the problem. She did not have to struggle and find solutions as kid, she won't do that in the future. And you've got the crucial experience exactly because nobody helped you.
I thought this idea was put into the grave year ago. It required crazy plugin and of couse nobody had it.
Now to the problem. In Russian some letters look like latin and other don't. So if you type aroma.ru you get to the company site. Now imagine that they registered name apoma.ORG. In cyrillic. I.e. that 'p' is cyrillic 'r'. And other letters are cyrillic to. But.ORG ISN'T!
What I have to enter when I see (and remember later) that URL from street ad? If I see lats.ORG then the whole URL must be written in Latin letters (there are no 'R' or 'G' letters in Russian), no? I go to apoma.org and see something really different from Russian wine supplier.
Even if everyone got used that domain name contains both (and I don't know how to explain that to average dumb net user) the confusion will happen too often.
Both 1.0.1 and 1.1. It happens under stock Windows XP (Russian version). Also, openoffice sometimes displays everything in wrong encoding (i.e. non cyrillic, with lots of accent characters) and there is no way to change that.
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Unfortunately my boss refused this idea saying that it would be too expensive to build such infrastructure in our 500+ computers network...
No one's toching them because they bring profit! Inderectly, but they do. Some of my clients asked me "my computer is too slow, should I buy new one?". All of them were infected with loads of spyware. And one of these poor guys bought new computer. Result: 1. manufacturers got their profit, 2. Microsoft got their profit too and 3. seller got his proft as well. Heh. Why they should kill the goose that lays goled eggs? And that computer got bogged down by spyware in two months and that guy was considering buying another computer!
I think Microsoft understands the situation and likes it.
Firefox is not MUCH more secure than IE. Wanna proof? What's the fucking difference between IE's box asking about installation and Firefox's one? Yes, I'm talking about .xpi files. How long it would take before spyware will distribute itself as .xpi files and users will happily click "yes" in these boxes?....
I love mozilla. It's a very good browser. But don't think that it's a magic cure for all spyware.
Gtk bindings for Ada DO exist.
No. A warhead in the taxi will work once. Then roadblocks will be installed and borders will be patrolled (strict border patrols of USSR were almost 100% secure and certainly secure not to bring several hundred kilogram device). It did not take much resources from USSR and could be done in US.
But I'm not talking about terrorists at all. The technology of such missiles will spread wide enough to be replicated in third world, and we'll see a lot of new nuclear countries. And lesser countries will have LESS safeguards on these. And we'll see nuclear war between Syria and Israel...
Most countries don't pursue nuclear arms because they have nothing to reach their adversary. With cheap rockets... ewww.
Go for it, guys. Run pointless, self serving commercial space launches. Make it cheap.
Yeah. Go for it, guys, make it cheap to build ballistic missiles. If you have a rocket with enough punch to reach the moon then you have a ballistic missile with enough punch to fly around the globe with most primitive nuclear warhed (gun type).
Sea water is a very aggressive thing. How they are going to keep mechanics oiled and sealed? How they are going to service these things, it won't be trivial. How they are going to transport electricity -- they'll need underwater high woltage power lines that don't suffer from salted water either. It could work for small towns near the shoreline but no more...
Now carjackers won't bother about police being called by victim or nearby car -- they will jam cellphones around...
The plan is to try all of these. At once. We can't say right now what option really does work and what doesn't. But when the price will stay high and everyone will be sure that it doesn't go down all of these technologies will be tried and the best will survive.
Interesting that Germany fought using synthetic fuels in WWII, I was not aware of that.
Veterans said that it was easy to distingush destroyed German tanks from Russian ones from the distance because German tanks burned with thin blue smoke and Russian tanks burned with thick black smoke (because of diesel fuel)
I asked one (not ugly, but that guy was able to get any woman quckly -- and without spending money too). He tried to answer, but could not. Finally he said "I don't know, somehow it works".
No, we have all solutions today. Ready, right now. They aren't profitable because it's cheaper to make $2/barrel hole in Saudi soil and suck oil there.
We have the technology for the car consuming 1 liter per 100 kilometers. Right now. Volkswagen's 1-liter car. It's almost consumer-grade. But nobody will buy it because everyone buys huge SUVs.
We can drive cars on methane. It cost about $600 to switch a truck from gasoline to methane here, in Russia and I doubt that it would be more expensive in U.S. or Europe. The only problem of switching to methane (any gasoline engine can run methane) is heavy baloons and even today you can buy kevlar-reinforced baloons with reasonable weight. But while methane is dirt cheap people rarely do this, it's easier to use benzine while it's more than twice expensive. And the Earth has enough methane to live for another hundred and half years (definitely enough to get cold fusion into production).
Germans fought during WWII using synthetic fuel. If the price of the oil barrel goes over $40 then the technology of the past becomes viable and we can start making fuel from coal -- and the Earth have enough coal for hundreds of years. Last synthetic fuel factory in Germany was closed in sixties because it was impossible to compete with dirt cheap oil.
So we have plans B-Z available right now. But oil is still cheap enough to keep these plans in archives...
There are a lot of working prototypes that allow you to control at least two analog signals and play STUPID GAMES (instead of doing something useful). Also there is a program called Dasher which is very useful to enter text. Now why there is still no mix of these two technologies? My RSI hurts and I tried a lot of alternatives, but nothing involving voice or feet works, at least nothing is enough to perform my usual sysadmin duties :(
US spent quite a lot of time fighting Japan, but then suddenly Soviet Army crushed big Japanese army and kicked them out of Korea in days, even not months. US was very, very afraid that Soviet Army would conquer Japan before US could do anything. Now imagine Cold War with Soviet Japan joining Warsaw pact... That's why US killed so many civillians. The intent was to horrify japanese and bring surrender immediately.
Freenet is out of question. It's main idea of storing information on other peers with limited lifetime is flawed.
Better system would be a network of p2p proxies. These proxies must work in chain so the original server is behind at least 5 proxies (with onion-like encryption it could be done securely). The only problem is routing requests to proxies...
why executables still allowed in e-mail after all YEARS of worm history? There are only a few legitimate reasons for them and everything could be done in other way. And it's obviously that education users and even presenting them a warning doesn't work.
.exe and .scr, but all a.out, elf and company too.
Why nobody ever came up with default mail server configuration which prohibits any executable content? And not only
So far nobody. You have to patch qmail and add qmail-scanner if you want to do this. Is there a checkbox in microsoft exchange? An option in sendmail.cf?
Fuck.
Just take C or perl program and try to read it aloud. Really. Just one or two screens of text. Read it. Spell it as if you want to dictate it to computer using alpha-bravo. Don't forget you have to pronounce spaces, newlines and all tabs. You'll feel the problem with your vocal cords.
Actually battery life is not the main problem of the wireless mouse. It's the wire itself that keeps mouse safely hanging if you drop it accidentaly. And if you drop your wireless mouse it will inevitably break upon the contact with hard floor.
By the way, antivirus update was late for MyDoom too by about 30 minutes.
There are NO legitimate reasons to allow executables, neither in attachments nor in archive files. Qmail-scanner and Nelson's patch do the trick.
Wrong point of view.
The problem is that fuel-efficient technologies alredy exist. And alternative fuel techniques exist too. But they don't make any sense if you look at money. As long as the oil is cheap enough to make $2/barrel hole in the earth and make $30/barrel profit we will never have hydrogen or other type of engine. Because it will never survive the competition.
On other hand, if the price of barrel goes over $40 and stays here (and banks will be sure that it never goes down) investments would be made into fuel factories that make sythetic fuel from coal. We have shitloads of coal around the world, AT LEAST several hundred years. This technology was developed by Germans during WWII, their tanks used synthetic fuel.
If the price goes over $50 and stays here (again, humans will have to build a lot of factories, so we must be sure that oil price doesn't go down and doesn't bankrupt biggest investments in the history) we can produce synthetic fuel from methane.
It's quite possible to produce fuel from plants, especially from hemp. Some people say that you burn more fuel during growing hemp than you get out ot it, but they don't realise that fuel consumption of farmer's vehicles is SHIT. Nobody ever tried to mandate fuel consumption of tractor. The room for improvement is enormous.
Now let's look at the fuel efficiency. This car http://www.autointell-news.com/european_companies/ volkswagen/vw_marke/volkswagen-1-liter/volkswagen- 1-literauto-02.htm consumens ONE liter per hundred km (230 MPG). Today nobody will buy this car, the will snuff at it and buy SUV because it's cheap to maintain. But if you fuel price jumps up 15 times, this 1-liter car will be the best selling car in US.
So don't scream "we are going to die". Let the economy sort things out. When oil price goes up high enough we'll switch to the best economy-wise option. May be it would be cars like Volkswagen's, may be something else. But no doomsday, sir.
IR-invisibility cloak. Just wear it and be hidden from all IR eyes in the sky... neat.
Hell, why everyone thinks that maglev is difficult to derail?! 15 kg of TNT will do the trick.
That's the problem. She did not have to struggle and find solutions as kid, she won't do that in the future. And you've got the crucial experience exactly because nobody helped you.
They mature far too long :( It started a lot of time ago and still there is no usable program and no userbase.
FUCK!!!!!!
.ORG ISN'T!
.ORG then the whole URL must be written in Latin letters (there are no 'R' or 'G' letters in Russian), no? I go to apoma.org and see something really different from Russian wine supplier.
I thought this idea was put into the grave year ago. It required crazy plugin and of couse nobody had it.
Now to the problem. In Russian some letters look like latin and other don't. So if you type aroma.ru you get to the company site. Now imagine that they registered name apoma.ORG. In cyrillic. I.e. that 'p' is cyrillic 'r'. And other letters are cyrillic to. But
What I have to enter when I see (and remember later) that URL from street ad? If I see lats
Even if everyone got used that domain name contains both (and I don't know how to explain that to average dumb net user) the confusion will happen too often.
Both 1.0.1 and 1.1. It happens under stock Windows XP (Russian version). Also, openoffice sometimes displays everything in wrong encoding (i.e. non cyrillic, with lots of accent characters) and there is no way to change that.