If you are interested in military strategy or just read too many Tom Clancy novels this will appeal to you. It is Alex Wellerstein’s Nukemap.
Just for fun (likely not the best word…) I used a 10 kiloton surface burst in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, harbour. This is basically a highly enriched uranium terrorist weapon. You can see the results HERE.
I have my first Windows 8 tablet from work. It is an HP EliteBook Revolve 810 that replaces my old EliteBook 2740p. The old 2740p was starting to show its age – the battery only had two of three cells remaining and it had some sort of issue going on whereby at time I started to believe that:
The Revolve 810 is, well fffaaasssttt!!! I should not be surprised, it is an Intel® Core™ i7-3687U (2.1 GHz, 4 MB cache, 2 cores) with 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB mSATA SSD. The 11.6″ diagonal LED-backlit HD UWVA (1366 x 768) is beautiful. It is not an Apple Retina display but then again, I don’t like OSX, so…
It is not all sweetness and light: The 2740p had a built in stylus. I got the HP Executive Tablet Pen with the tablet. It does not have a nice little slot for the pen (grrrr…). Plus, it is – with the current drivers and other support software a piece of 5h1t. Really. The stylus with 2740p was really, really good for taking notes in OneNote. The Executive Tablet Pen looks like something from an, well, 1984 digitizer… a bad one at that. Hopefully this will improve because for me this is a big downer. I will put one qualifier on this: It could be Windows 8 – but likely not. I will be playing with the Revolve 810 for the next few days when I get a chance – I still have work to do! 🙂
PS – I booted Linux Mint 15 off a USB3 memory stick – the tablet has two USB3 ports; the dock four more USB4 ports – and it worked quite nice. I didn’t get around to seeing about getting the touch screen to work, but I’ll like find time to!
According to the article in Wednesday, 2013 October 30, of The Washington Post titled NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say this “back-of-the-cocktail-napkin” details how the NSA gets into Google’s data centres around the world.
Apparently “Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing.”
You’d have to be living in the middle of nowhere (e.g. central Siberia) and totally off the grid to have missed the news stories on the NSA data interception. Anyone in the data security world really just had their suspicions confirmed. Why else would the NSA be building bigger-and-bigger data centres? The NSA had to be collecting the data somewhere, didn’t they? Not surprisingly by collecting, note that I don’t say analysing!, the NSA is being overwhelmed by spam. 🙂 The NSA (and the CIA, and the DIA, and the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), and the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), and SIS/MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service), etc. not to mention Canada’s own CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada) are probably simply drowning in data. Not information since information is useful.
However, an article on CBC.ca’s news site, NSA spying on Merkel phone could get diplomats expelled, may put things in context – at least in the world of espionage:
Still, parties on all sides acknowledge that spy-versus-spy eavesdropping is widespread even among allies.
“The magnitude of the eavesdropping is what shocked us,” former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a radio interview.
“Let’s be honest, we eavesdrop too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don’t have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous.”
That is probably the greatest truth to the story…
…or as the Israeli’s might say “…so long as you don’t get caught…”
I read about the French Gendarmerie nationale beginning the switch from Microsoft to open source software some time ago. The first step was moving from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice starting back in 2004. They moved 35,000 (yes, thousand) users over to OpenOffice. They are in the process of upping this number to 72,000.
They also moved users to the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox.
Their next step, driven by the end-of-support of Windows XP, is to move 72,000 users to a customized version of Ubuntu Linux called GendBuntu – they are up to 35,000 according to this great article on ZDNet.
While I am no fan of Ubuntu – I hate the, ironic it would seem, lock-in to the Unity GUI – and use Linux Mint with the Cinnamon GUI – I am agnostic between the Red Hat Linux (actually CentOS) distribution and the Ubuntu distribution. Although, I admit, I do have to remember which distro I’m using from time-to-time.
This isn’t the first governmental organization to move away from Microsoft. The City of Munich move to a custom Linux distro – MiLux – starting back in 2004.
This is a great tweet from NASA’s Voyager 2 probe. Someone at NASA has a great sense of humour… But did I hear “Open the pod bay door, HAL”???
Due to government shutdown, we will not be posting or responding from this account. Farewell, humans. Sort it out yourselves
On Saturday afternoon (September 28th) I installed the new Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 (VP2) weather station with the IP-based WeatherLink IP data logger. I installed the Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS – Davis-speak for the combined rainfall and temperate sensor with the transmitter) and the anemometer (which is separate from the ISS and linked by cable) on the same rooftop pole the old Oregon Scientific WMR200 is still mounted. I left the WMN200 in place because I wanted to see the delta – there are difference between the VP2 and the WMN200 in all areas – I’m not sure about the rainfall: we haven’t had any rain since the installation, of course.
The change-over in the Cumulus weather station software was seamless. Of course I thought it would be – I have a VMware Workstation image of the weather station to do the initial testing. And given that that OS is a virtual machine running on VMware ESXi 5.1 I cloned the virtual machine – nice to have a good solid backup – and then changed the station type and communications mode to VP2 and IP. Actually, I initially forgot to change the communications mode to IP and was confused for a few minutes.
(ESXi is free as in free beer and if you are doing any development or simply want to consolidate your compute instances this is the way to go. You should have certified hardware but I have colleagues who what done it on non-certified hardware – network cards can be difficult but there are cheap cards that are supported.)
Everything is up-and-running just fine. Cumulus (Sandaysoft) recommends going to the beta 1.9.4 but I don’t see any problems yet. I don’t like running beat software on production systems. If there is a problem I guess that it is backup-and-upgrade.
Funny things happen when you are searching the Internet… You find funny things – and old things. I found this at the Internet Achive Wayback Machine; an old web page describing my computing environment. Back in the days when you did that 🙂
Dig those huge 9 GB SCSI drives!
| HELIOS – Mike’s System | |
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| APOLLO – RealProducer | |
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| VENUS – Paula’s System | |
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| MARS – Active Directory Domain Controller | |
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| CEREBUS – Firewall | |
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| NEPTUNE – Web, Mail and RealMedia Server | |
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Being a hard-core believer in Newfoundland and Labrador I was very much unimpressed with the article in the online version of the Financial Post entitled Northern Promise: Mining projects spark much-needed Sept-Îles port expansion where the author, Mr. Nicolas Van Praet states that “North America’s biggest primary aluminum smelter — Alouette, its hill-perched electrolytic pots powered by transmission wires stretching from Hydro Quebec’s massive Churchill Falls hydroelectric facility.” Where did he get the idea that Hydro Quebec owns Churchill Falls. Not being very impressed with this statement – which no one in the comments pickup up on – I sent the following email to Mr. Van Praet:
Mr. Van Praet:
In reference to your article Northern Promise: Mining projects spark much-needed Sept-Îles port expansion you state: “…powered by transmission wires stretching from Hydro Quebec’s massive Churchill Falls hydroelectric facility”.
This is factually incorrect. The Churchill Falls hydro facility is owned by the Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation (CF(L)Co) which is a subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. While Hydro-Quebec has a 34.2% ownership in the Corporation it is not their facility. Although one may argue that they feel that they own it.
Maybe you should consider correcting your article.
Sincerely,
Mike Pelley
I look forward to his response on the issue. Hopefully I will actually get a response.
I was reading today an article on ZDNet about how the state of how Maryland state security sloppiness exposes personal data. The article by Larry Selzer shows how, to quote him:
“Mustering all necessary resources” in this case means “cutting corners.”
This shows the dangers of lack of resources – time, expertise, money – that can point you in the direction of danger if you are not careful. One would think that if you are collecting drivers’ license numbers, social security numbers, addresses and other personally identifiable information you would carefully think about the implications of not having the information secure.
At first I was thinking that – hopefully – someone writing the solution was security-minded enough to raise the risk to management but then I realized that if this was indeed the case the problem is actually much worse: Either senior people did not recognize the issue or, worse yet again, they did not care about it. (I always think about these issues as “ignorance versus incompetence”.) Hopefully, there will be more digging into the issue to find out where the problem actually exists. Being an IT professional with security being one of my hats I find this troubling…
Here is a screen capture – the site is no longer publicly-accessible, thankfully, from ZDNet:
Screen capture of log of HTTP traffic from State of Maryland’s gun permit application site
NASAVoyager2@NASAVoyager2