Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Humorous, hidden and a cultural reference (Score 1) 458

My SSIDs are IThinkIHaveAGenitalWartKhaleesi for my "public" VLAN (only has access to the internet, can't access other devices on the same network, can't access the router, etc.) and BobDolesHouseOfPain for my own personal devices, I can access the router admin page from that interface as well as my desktop and server.

I've thought about setting up an unsecured honeypot called "I read your e-mail" and then redirecting all of the traffic to a splash page that runs a script to tick a counter on my server and log the traffic. Living in NYC I always wanted to know how many people are in range of my wireless networks and how many people just jump onto the first open network they see.

Comment Re:Circular Tube Map (Score 4, Insightful) 124

The subway map is roughly geographically correct while not being all squished together. It's easy to see what stops you need to get off when you need to transfer and also it works as a real map for most tourists since a lot of attactions are displayed on the map (Rockefeller Center, Natural History Museum, Central Park, etc.) As a native New Yorker that uses a subway map almost daily, this circular design doesn't seem to add any benefit.

Comment Re:Seems legit. . . (Score 1) 121

I work near Penn Station and it's pretty terrible but not nearly as bad asTimes Square. The obnoxious lights, the swarms of tourists, the constant noise. I know a few people who work overlooking Times Square and while it's a nice place to visit, you wouldn't want to deal with that every day. Plus to top it all off, everything around there is a tourist trap. There's practically no good food around (it's almost all chains since not many small places can afford the rent) and all of the prices are ridiculously jacked up. The best offices I've seen are around Chelsea and the West Village, and any place that overlooks the park.

Comment Can't you just detect the RF? (Score 1) 159

Don't drones blast RF on known frequencies? Unless they're flying with auto pilot and just collecting data, but that would be dangerous in an urban environment with lot's of air traffic. How much would it cost to build something with an antenna that's just listening for broadcasts on these frequencies? You could even measure the doppler shift to see if they're coming or going, and at what speed. Listening for audible noise just seems useless anywhere outside of a big empty desert with a large directional microphone.

Transportation

Speeding Ticket Robots — Laws As Algorithms 400

An anonymous reader writes "As the age of autonomous cars and drone surveillance draws nearer, it's reasonable to expect government to increasingly automate enforcement of traffic laws. We already deal with red light cameras, speed limit cameras, and special lane cameras. But they aren't widespread, and there are a host of problems with them. Now, Ars reports on a group of academics who are attempting to solve the problem of converting simple laws to machine-readable code. They found that when the human filter was removed from the system, results became unreasonable very quickly. For example, if you aren't shy about going 5 mph over the limit, you'll likely break the law dozens of times during an hour of city driving. On the freeway, you might break it continuously for an hour. But it's highly unlikely you'd get more than one ticket for either transgression. Not so with computers (PDF): 'An automated system, however, could maintain a continuous flow of samples based on driving behavior and thus issue tickets accordingly. This level of resolution is not possible in manual law enforcement. In our experiment, the programmers were faced with the choice of how to treat many continuous samples all showing speeding behavior. Should each instance of speeding (e.g. a single sample) be treated as a separate offense, or should all consecutive speeding samples be treated as a single offense? Should the duration of time exceeding the speed limit be considered in the severity of the offense?' One of the academics said, 'When you're talking about automated enforcement, all of the enforcement has to be put in before implementation of the law—you have to be able to predict different circumstances.'"

Comment Re:An important feature for me (Score 4, Insightful) 215

The way X11 does forwarding is very handy and useful, and I make use of it fairly often. But as usual, there's more than one proverbial way to skin the proverbial cat.

X11 forwarding is great for high speed and low latency connections such as a lan. Using it on anything else is asking for trouble, because if you lose your connection, you lose your app. Perhaps an improvement can be made to X11 forwarding in the new path forward (wayland) to make it more like screen where you can attach and detach to a running X11 app from a networked endpoint.

Remote desktop using RDP is superior to X11 forwarding for lossy connections because once the screen is loaded, very minimal draw/drag/etc communications are sent between the server and client for updates, X11 is far more data intensive for screen updates. And of course if you lose your connection (which I frequently do, trying to RDP from my cell phone), you'll get your apps back when you reconnect.

Having both X11 forwarding and RDP is a great choice, and I hope something similar to my aforementioned improvement makes it into the app.

Comment Re:I need new glasses. (Score 1) 214

Wisconsin is known for it's cheese. Or if you're in NYC I would visit the Cheese Factory on Bleecker street in the West Village. I'm not a big fan of cheese (except mild cheeses like Mozzarella) but they've got the best cheeses I've ever tried. The also have a cave downstairs for aged cheeses, didn't visit that since I'm not a fan. My roommates loved it (they're big cheese fans, got them some cheddar and gouda.)

Comment Re:not that great for home servers anymore (Score 1) 245

FreeBSD has the one killer feature for me: ZFS. It's portable in a pinch and ensure a decent amount of data integrity.

In theory.

In practice, a normal RAID10/RAID1 array is more reliable ...

I went through the same thing. I waited until freebsd 8 to try zfs after watching some videos about how awesome it was. I had been running multi TB storage arrays on lvm + raid1 on linux for years and decided to try and switch to ZFS. The lack of an fsck really shows when you get data corruption issues while resizing a pool. ZFS also lacks the capability of downsizing a pool, so when the upsize fails half way, you're fairly fscked. The recovery tools are just immature compared to even things like ext3. Trying to recover from the failed ZFS upsize involved raw disk editing to change uuids to try and move back to using an old drive that had good data.

I got the ZFS array working enough to pull off the new data and move back to an lvm append + raid1 setup. I've had failed lvm moves and failed lvm upsizes but the recovery is so easy because all the metadata about the array (and plenty of automatic backups) are stored in plain conf files. Ah the beauty of simplicity.

And speaking of bleeding edge, I've been playing with btrfs for some non-critical stuff and I've been very impressed. Much moreso than with ZFS.

Comment Why would we switch? (Score 4, Interesting) 269

Have you (or has your business?) moved to Windows 8?

I don't know why we would switch. Vista was such a shit show that Windows 7 was a blessing, but Windows 8 just seems to do nothing better than Windows 7 on a desktop compter (which is my primary use at home and at work) so why would I spend the money upgrading? I don't even want to pirate Windows 8 for my home computer just to play around. Used it a few times and I didn't like it, and I'm dreading not having Windows 7 included with our new computers.

Comment Re:Nothing new here (Score 1) 657

When did you last install Windows?

Probably after Windows 7, it installed very quickly and easily last time I installed it (probably a month or two ago, I build a lot of computers.) Plus, you're referencing a 6 year old bug from an OS that has been followed by 2 major releases. I'm generally a Windows hater (especially 7) but you're arguing just for the sake of arguing.

Comment Logitech remotes are worse... (Score 1) 249

The Logitech Harmony remotes require you to register online just to use them. There is no way to program the remote offline or without an account with Logitech. It makes sense that they don't want you having to download a massive database for every ir device you can posibly use but they should at least let you download a basic database for the devices you own.

Comment Brilliant law... (Score 1) 305

The law also states that the sex offenders must pinky promise not to make any new usernames or online aliases, or else!

This is a ridiculous law that can never be fully enforced and won't work the way people think it will. What the hell are they even trying to accomplish with it?

Slashdot Top Deals

Any program which runs right is obsolete.

Working...