Slashdot Mirror

about page home page

about page home page

* Camino 0.7
* Mac IE 5.1 & 5.2
* IE 5 Windows (and presumably higher)
* MoZilla 1.3
* OperaSix

Is it actually part of the standard

The class attribute, on the other hand, assigns one or more class names to an element; the element may be said to belong to these classes.

To match a subset of "class" values, each value must be preceded by a ".", in any order.

Example(s):

For example, the following rule matches any P element whose "class" attribute has been assigned a list of space-separated values that includes "pastoral" and "marine":

p.pastoral.marine { color: green }

This rule matches when

class="pastoral blue aqua marine"

but does not match for

class="pastoral blue"

.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:HaRYQqPANzcJ: labs.google.com/googlex/+&hl=en Google Cache of the page =D

You can see a working version (minus the images) at the google cache of the page. It is really neat. Sucks that it was taken down.

Google Cache: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:OY5Ph7dWELUJ: panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations_media.h tml+&hl=en

Trailers (All of them are quicktime trailers):

Large (13 MB)

http://panicstruckpro.com/revelations/video/web_tr ailer_II_larger.mov

Medium (11 MB)

http://panicstruckpro.com/revelations/video/web_tr ailer_II_large.mov

Small (9.16 MB)

http://panicstruckpro.com/revelations/video/web_tr ailer_II_small.mov

Looking at this article there is indeed a native OS X port coming. Woo-hoo!

with its Spyware Assassin site

I'm getting a blank page with the title "New Page 1"
Here is a google cache.

here

According to my old AQFL story and Dark Horizons, there was a WMV trailer on Screen Rant but the Web site seems to be down. You can look at Google's cached Web page. And here is the original Web site that hosted it (still works for now).

You are so full of shit as to boggle the mind. How do you do it?

One more post of insults, and you can expect this discussion to terminate immediately. Got it?

OK, your source is one sentence from a two year old popular science article on a general news website.

Amusing. You claim that scientific organizations don't want it. I give an example. You complain that two years is too old? Or that something is wrong with the magazine (what, you think they misquoted her?). What, do you want me to stalk her until she changes her opinion? Or do you think that it changed on its own in two years? Who would *you* recommend, if not the National Osteoporosis Foundation, that I quote on osteoporosis research? Or would you rather I get a quote on a different type of research? If so, name the subject, and I will.

I would also say that Dr. Cosman is a moron

I'll be sure to pass that on to the clinical director at the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Apparently you're an expert in osteoporosis now, as you seem to want to give her a run for her money on the subject.

No, human recombinant insulin was first developed in the late 1970s and approved by the FDA in 1982. It was developed by Genentech and was the first product of recombinant DNA research approved for human therapeutic use. Claiming that the Shuttle and ISS had anything to do with it is like claiming that NASA invented Velcro (they didn't). It's a lie.

Wrong. An insulin hexamer called T6 was developed in 1982. Real insulin in the human body, however, has three different hexamers. While we had been able to haphazardly produce the others (T3R3 and R6), we were unable to understand why it flipped forms (and thus how to control this). Of the three forms, T3R3 was the most desirable. In the body, it is carefully regulated by a series of proteins that control what form it takes. Because of the ability of insulin to slightly shift forms, its crystals tend to be rather disordered. The crystals brought back on STS-60, however, were large enough (over 30 times larger) that X-ray crystallography provided accurate structural representations.

Modern insulin sold for diabetics is a more natural mix. They now use two zinc ions per hexamer to encourage and stabilize the T3R3 form. This provides a much longer time release and much more stable levels of insulin; while the old form was unlike what is normally found in the pancreas, the new form is a much closer analogue. Brand names are humulin, novolin, lletin, velosulin; it's also called lente insulin, NPH insulin, regular insulin, semilente insulin, ultralente insulin, buffered human insulin, extended insulin zinc, and a number of other names.

You also don't answer the question as to what the names of these drugs are?

I just named some for insulin. Want more? Just name the chemical I discussed, and I'll give you them. Or, you could actually take the time and do the work yourself :P I'm not your slave here.

If NASA has made so many contributions to molecular biology then why is it that the American Association of Cell Biology recommended in 1998 that NASA cancel their crystal research program.

Yes. It's a controversial topic. ASCB (American Society of Cell Biology) weighed in again it. On the other hand, the director of the Center for Macumolecular Crystallography at the University of Alabama at Birmington weighed in for it (and pointed out that the ASCB report was factually incorrect in a number of cases), and points out that industry pays for far more of the research than NASA. They also mention some new drugs. Want to know what references ASCB used? There wasn't a single peer-reviewed scientific paper

Here's the same page as seen by user and from the Google cache.
As seen by user
From Google cache

I don't think Google should give preference to their own pages in their search engine.

The page was a google cache page. Have you ever been served a google cache page as part of a Google search? I am fairly certain I haven't so I don't believe that this page would be a 'preference' in their search engine.

Second, does anyone have ANY evidence that this page only has the keywords in the title BECAUSE it is cached. This could very easily be what the page WAS when it was cached, and someone changed the title at some point.

• I don't see this effect generated in other google caches:
• http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:desktop.googl e.com/
• http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:64.233.161.10 4/ads/

The whole article sounds like FUD to me.

By the way, to quickly get to a Google cache, try this bookmarklet:
NAME:
::Google Cache for this page
LOCATION:
javascript:document.location.href= 'http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:' +document.location.href.replace(/http:\/\//,'')

I don't think Google should give preference to their own pages in their search engine.

The page was a google cache page. Have you ever been served a google cache page as part of a Google search? I am fairly certain I haven't so I don't believe that this page would be a 'preference' in their search engine.

Second, does anyone have ANY evidence that this page only has the keywords in the title BECAUSE it is cached. This could very easily be what the page WAS when it was cached, and someone changed the title at some point.

• I don't see this effect generated in other google caches:
• http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:desktop.googl e.com/
• http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:64.233.161.10 4/ads/

The whole article sounds like FUD to me.

By the way, to quickly get to a Google cache, try this bookmarklet:
NAME:
::Google Cache for this page
LOCATION:
javascript:document.location.href= 'http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:' +document.location.href.replace(/http:\/\//,'')

Google's cache of the page (no pictures): http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:u23RUTZ-vBAJ: www.europhysicsnews.com/full/30/article10/article1 0.html+&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&strip=1 --kbitz

If that fails, as it did for me, you could also try the Google cache

Where is this "free beer" everyone is always talking about? I must be getting screwed...even Keystone Light is costing me 15+...

Looks like you'll have to go to the European Union, which is promising both free beer and strong economic growth, so you won't have a problem.

I wonder if this petition has anything to do with this decision? For the uninitiated, Russ wrote on his blog (and since removed it) about corporate black culture, in an article titled "Blacks are Lazy."
Here's the google cache of the withdrawn article.

Uh? Google cache is runned by bbernal.com not Google. This is a little better: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:64.233.161.10 4 but still not surprising if you think about it for a while.

The technology that is truly asstounding, is Google's ability to cache itself. Yeah, think about THAT one for a while.

Google Cache

Since the introduction of the FreeBSD-5 branch, FreeBSD enthusiasts have been eagerly awaiting the day when the new codebase would stabilize. After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems.

FreeBSD is a complete Unix-like operating system entirely developed by a single large team of programmers. This is in stark contrast to GNU/Linux which, as a complete operating system, has no central, cohesive developer base and is packaged in myriad different ways by myriad different distribution projects and companies; and proprietary Unixes, which are closed-source, restrictively licensed, and work on a comparatively small number of usually proprietary hardware architectures. FreeBSD has historically been clean, fast, reliable, and scalable. It's easy to use, learn, set up, and navigate from the command line, has more than 10,000 software programs in the Ports system, runs on a wide variety of hardware, and can easily be used for either a desktop or a server.

The transition to 5.x

Until the release of 5.3, the most recent "production release" was the FreeBSD-4 series, which is presently at version 4.10 and has been deemed the "Legacy" release in the wake of the 5.x branch going to STABLE. FreeBSD-5 was supposed to be a grand introduction of new technology -- a revolutionary improvement to the tried and true 4.x branch -- but soon after it left the gate, it got caught up in developer politics and failed implementations of too-ambitious theories among other questionable design decisions, causing some developers to fork the FreeBSD-4 project into a separate and more focused operating system.

The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned. The mix of threading subsystems still yields problems with efficiency and stability. Also, the networking subsystem may now be multithreaded and therefore faster on SMP systems, but users with some implementations of the 3Com (SysKonnect/Yukon) gigabit LAN chip are now unable to access their network at all because of new bugs that have popped up in the driver; other SysKonnect/Yukon users have problems under heavy network traffic, along with those using Intel Pro/1000 chips. Unfortunately all of our test systems use these network chips for onboard LAN; coincidentally they are two of the most popular gigabit LAN chipsets used on modern motherboards from major manufacturers. We also experienced lockups during boot if a custom-compiled kernel did not have SMP enabled on a Hyper-Threaded computer. A list of these and other errata can be found right here.

Considering the long list of significant problems in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, it would seem irrational to recommend that anyone switch a production server from 4.x or any previous known-working 5.x release to 5.3. Just the same, the FreeBSD project maintains a migration guide for this purpose.

A lost lead

Since the introduction of the FreeBSD-5 branch, FreeBSD enthusiasts have been eagerly awaiting the day when the new codebase would stabilize. After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems.

FreeBSD is a complete Unix-like operating system entirely developed by a single large team of programmers. This is in stark contrast to GNU/Linux which, as a complete operating system, has no central, cohesive developer base and is packaged in myriad different ways by myriad different distribution projects and companies; and proprietary Unixes, which are closed-source, restrictively licensed, and work on a comparatively small number of usually proprietary hardware architectures. FreeBSD has historically been clean, fast, reliable, and scalable. It's easy to use, learn, set up, and navigate from the command line, has more than 10,000 software programs in the Ports system, runs on a wide variety of hardware, and can easily be used for either a desktop or a server.

The transition to 5.x

Until the release of 5.3, the most recent "production release" was the FreeBSD-4 series, which is presently at version 4.10 and has been deemed the "Legacy" release in the wake of the 5.x branch going to STABLE. FreeBSD-5 was supposed to be a grand introduction of new technology -- a revolutionary improvement to the tried and true 4.x branch -- but soon after it left the gate, it got caught up in developer politics and failed implementations of too-ambitious theories among other questionable design decisions, causing some developers to fork the FreeBSD-4 project into a separate and more focused operating system.

The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned. The mix of threading subsystems still yields problems with efficiency and stability. Also, the networking subsystem may now be multithreaded and therefore faster on SMP systems, but users with some implementations of the 3Com (SysKonnect/Yukon) gigabit LAN chip are now unable to access their network at all because of new bugs that have popped up in the driver; other SysKonnect/Yukon users have problems under heavy network traffic, along with those using Intel Pro/1000 chips. Unfortunately all of our test systems use these network chips for onboard LAN; coincidentally they are two of the most popular gigabit LAN chipsets used on modern motherboards from major manufacturers. We also experienced lockups during boot if a custom-compiled kernel did not have SMP enabled on a Hyper-Threaded computer. A list of these and other errata can be found right here.

Considering the long list of significant problems in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, it would seem irrational to recommend that anyone switch a production server from 4.x or any previous known-working 5.x release to 5.3. Just the same, the FreeBSD project maintains a migration guide for this purpose.

Since the introduction of the FreeBSD-5 branch, FreeBSD enthusiasts have been eagerly awaiting the day when the new codebase would stabilize. After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems.

FreeBSD is a complete Unix-like operating system entirely developed by a single large team of programmers. This is in stark contrast to GNU/Linux which, as a complete operating system, has no central, cohesive developer base and is packaged in myriad different ways by myriad different distribution projects and companies; and proprietary Unixes, which are closed-source, restrictively licensed, and work on a comparatively small number of usually proprietary hardware architectures. FreeBSD has historically been clean, fast, reliable, and scalable. It's easy to use, learn, set up, and navigate from the command line, has more than 10,000 software programs in the Ports system, runs on a wide variety of hardware, and can easily be used for either a desktop or a server.

The transition to 5.x

Until the release of 5.3, the most recent "production release" was the FreeBSD-4 series, which is presently at version 4.10 and has been deemed the "Legacy" release in the wake of the 5.x branch going to STABLE. FreeBSD-5 was supposed to be a grand introduction of new technology -- a revolutionary improvement to the tried and true 4.x branch -- but soon after it left the gate, it got caught up in developer politics and failed implementations of too-ambitious theories among other questionable design decisions, causing some developers to fork the FreeBSD-4 project into a separate and more focused operating system.

The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned. The mix of threading subsystems still yields problems with efficiency and stability. Also, the networking subsystem may now be multithreaded and therefore faster on SMP systems, but users with some implementations of the 3Com (SysKonnect/Yukon) gigabit LAN chip are now unable to access their network at all because of new bugs that have popped up in the driver; other SysKonnect/Yukon users have problems under heavy network traffic, along with those using Intel Pro/1000 chips. Unfortunately all of our test systems use these network chips for onboard LAN; coincidentally they are two of the most popular gigabit LAN chipsets used on modern motherboards from major manufacturers. We also experienced lockups during boot if a custom-compiled kernel did not have SMP enabled on a Hyper-Threaded computer. A list of these and other errata can be found right here.

Considering the long list of significant problems in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, it would seem irrational to recommend that anyone switch a production server from 4.x or any previous known-working 5.x release to 5.3. Just the same, the FreeBSD project maintains a migration guide for this purpose.

A l

I am agnostic - I do not believe that in the absense of any evidence in either direction that we can make statements about a deity or deities. Of course, many people try to spin scientific discovery (or lack thereof) to suit their own interpretation of the facts but the bottom line is that no one has ever proven or disproven the validity of any religion. To do so would really cheapen the whole thing, because it's not about fact but about faith.

You're absolutely right that no one has ever proven or disproven the validity of any religion. However, facts and faith are not mutually exclusive. I have faith in many things because of past experience or facts that have been taught to me. For instance, I have faith that things in the physical universe (such as gravity and mass) will continue to work the way I've experienced before or how others have observed them (and expressed in laws of physics). When I observe something that doesn't fit in my mental model, I don't throw out the laws, but try to find where my observation or interpretation was flawed.

Some people seem to need something to cling to, and there is always a religion around waiting to take advantage of and profit from that particular element of the human condition. In return the religion offers the sheeple a support network and a sense of well-being. Basically every organization exists to fulfill this purpose. The thing I find amusing about religion is that it asks you to accept something unprovable. In other words it operates on the irrational side of existence which makes it particularly attractive to those who are experiencing a life crisis.

However, every time someone engineers some system like this, there are people who are taken advantage of. And, of course, there is stratification. If the goal of Catholicism were as stated, to save souls and help people, then there wouldn't need to be a pope dressed up in gold and silk. You might still have a pope but he could be in an office building for all that matters. The most important realization to come to about religion is that it is not about spirituality when it is wrapped up in complex trappings. It's about control, and the people on top getting what they want. You don't need all that shit to make a statement about spirituality. I'm not sure what's so special about gold and jewels that they should adorn religious icons anyway; they're pretty but most precious metals have only specialty uses. Using them for corrosion protection seems a bit excessive and, well, arrogant.

I agree with that analysis for most religious organizations. However, please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crud", which applies to religions just like anything else.

Are you saying that it could never be valid for an organization to ask people to accept something unprovable? Do you think no one should accept anything as true unless it is an absolutely hard, provable fact? I don't think it's humanly possible to operate that way. Consider how much progress in science and technology has taken place based on Newtonian mechanics, which we now know to be false (or at least incomplete). Though F=MA was once thought to be an absolutely proven fact, it has since been disproven.

Even religions which do not amass wealth like the Catholic church are still about controlling people and making them behave in the way the founder(s) desire(d). Do you really need someone else to tell you how to connect with your spiritual self?

Though most religions are indeed about control (as are most large human organizations), a valid religion, IMHO, is one that has as its goal to connect people to God, and therefore with their spiritual selves. Christ

Believe it or not, a 14 story Tetris was made.

Thirteen execs, three traders, and two accountants have been endicted.

You can't just round up a lynch mob for these kinds of crimes. First, you plea bargain with the little fish so you have plenty of evidence to use against the big fish. its common practice in any attempt to bring a down an organized criminal establishment, which is basically what the higher levels of Enron were.

Let me be the first to say, "Thank you Mirrordot!" and "Thank you Google Cache!"

Lack of bandwidth appears to have stopped him already. Here's Google's cache:

Google Cache

Is there something more to this than an uninteresting thought experiment in regard to IP and DRM?

They list the Zenith Space Command TV Remote from 1956 as the first wireless remote. This was a great remote that gave us the word 'clicker' due to the way that it used ultrasonics to send the signal to the tv. However, the Philco Mystery Control from 1939 is the first real 'wireless' remote that was made. It operated much like a rotary telephone control and sent its signal by radio. (Links go to google cache).

(From the Google Cache, couldn't find it on onion.com)

Microsoft Patents Zeroes, Ones

Question - don't you think a UPS system would also be a wise investment?

How about some figures/links to back that up? I'm not saying that it's not the case, just that as stated it's no more convincing than the OP.

I loathed responding to this, because critical thinking skills are still required to realize the truth.

They've already recouped their production costs in broadcast advertising.

I can't help you if you can't understand this concept. If a TV show doesn't make money for a TV network, they eventually kill the show. The only exception to this is NFL games for a network, or a cable network that will prolong a critically acclaimed show in order to secure visibility.

If you think their manufacturing and distribution costs are $22 per box, you're truly clueless

According to the DVD FAQ, the cost of pre-production for a two-hour movie is roughly $20K. That cost is spread across every DVD box set you manage to sell. Even presuming that rate is maintained through for a TV series (no way, the original mastered media was already formatted for TV), that translates to $166/minute. A complete TV season of Buffy (22 eps * 43 mins * 166) could be calculated to cost $157036 to preproduce. (And then its $1/disk to create the disk.) If you were to pretend that a TV production company would put out a box set and only expect to sell 10K units, that would get you a production cost of $22/box.

No, according to TV Guide, "While the biggest hit movies on DVD can sell in the millions, a TV series just has to do a few hundred thousand units to be successful -- a fraction of the audience for a moderately successful prime-time show. The biggest sellers -- Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Family Guy and Chappelle's Show -- are in the 2 million range." So, its more like USD $7.50 to manufacture a box set. I don't have references to generalize "distribution costs" (that would have to vary by residuals arrangements, packaging, and advertising strategy), but its not going to come close to $22/box. That might have prompted an actor for Babylon 5 to muse, "If they want to do 20 years of Babylon 5, they recoup their entire production cost just one box set run of DVDs." That's certain to be an exaggeration, but certainly the idea is there that the DVD income helps immensely.

These companies are making a killing on DVD sets; the profit margin is unreal. And that's why I disagreed with the original poster's sentiments that these companies can't reduce the price on a $60 box set.

Here's the google link of the "replacement to Dan Rather" link that we so beautifully slashdotted.

Copy/Paste from Google Cache (Scroll to the bottom-third of the page)

Note: Sorry the tables aren't lined up.

February 11, 2005
Eight years of email stats, pass 1
Posted by Marc Eisenstadt
What's the reality behind the 'email overload' talk? Let's look at some numbers... personal numbers.

To kick things off, I've got a huge email archive. I started emailing in the early ArpaNet days, around 1972, and haven't stopped since. My archive has been extremely thorough for at least the past 12 years (and, in case you think I'm nuts for keeping all of these, my actual regret from a scientific/archive perspective is that I don't have the earlier ones too!). Why? Let's just say that one day I planned to do an analysis of it all... types of mails, social networks, the whole works. But things got a little out of hand.... (anyone lookin' for some data, give me a shout... but first read on)...

Most of this 'storage mania' was triggered by a casual comment in around 1992 or 1993 by Ron Baecker, of the University of Toronto, a longtime research colleague and acquaintance and someone whose work I have long admired and respected. Ron asked me, "given ultra-cheap storage and ultra-fast search, both clearly on their way, why would you ever need either to delete or indeed to accurately file/categorize your emails?"

OK, so as a little personal experiment, I decided to keep 'em, and to see what happened. The quick story is that migrating across machines, operating systems, and preferred email clients, plus being a bit cavalier about the whole thing, has meant that although all the emails are 'there' in various archive files, it takes a little work to get 'em all back in a harmonious form, that is with all headers intact and no duplicates (the main formats are Vax mails, Unix mails, Mac Eudora, PC Eudora, Outlook Express, and Outlook).

The longer story, with some data and preliminary analysis, begins like this:

Even though I haven't had the time or motivation thus far to put in the harmonization work required to get all the data in one format and with duplicates eliminated, I nevertheless thought that a little 'first pass' set of totals (with my estimate of their accuracy) would be interesting, and maybe even provide a little coarse empirical support for Stowe's "Just Say No To Email" campaign.

So I quickly eyeballed-and-tallied the most coherent of the archives, spanning eight years of emails, from January 1st 1997 to December 31st 2004. The totals are real enough, but the 'eyeballing' was needed to assess the approximate propotion of spam and duplication involved in the emails. A more detailed analysis later will enable me to do these more accurately. I've indicated my estimate of the margin for error in the third column, and my estimate for the percentage of spam received (and I mean real spam: i.e. either 'greedily-lookin-for-suckers' or 'low-down-mean-and-nasty spam', not conference announcements - you know what I'm talkin' about). For 2003, this number is precise, because I filtered off such spam using SpamAssassin, and counted them! 2004 spam numbers are an extrapolation, but the totals are accurate, as explained below. Here goes:

TABLE 1: Eisenstadt's 1997-2004 email totals

Year Emails received Est. Error Est. Spam

1997
4320 20%
2%
1998 3996 20% 3%
1999 6821 10% 5%
2000 7580 5% 6%
2001 6125 5% 7%
2002 6497 5% 10%
2003 13092 1% 37.6%
2004 13889 1% 40%

2003 is the most accurate, because (unlike earlier years when I was changing clients and machines) I have all emails in one clean format and all spam preserved, auto-filtered by SpamAssassin into a folder that I look at only a few times a year, scanning rapidly for false rejections. Incidentally, that falsely rejected email rate appears to be roughly 1 in 5000: good enough for me! By 2004, although I kep

It's not a reasonable comparison to say "look what they did to SNET", because I seriously doubt SNET (being just another RBOC) was sitting on a huge pile of historical artifacts that SBC tossed in a dumpster.

"Even more egregiously, SBC fully admits that these layoffs are not due to SNET's operations, but rather blames overly burdensome regulations in other states. SBC is holding Connecticut workers and customers hostage in attempting to pressure federal and state regulators into relaxing regulations so that SBC can hike its rates in other states," Blumenthal added. "Connecticut workers and customers should not be forced to suffer for SBC's problems elsewhere."

Does anybody remember Kevin Kelly's All Species Foundation? Within the last month or so the website has gone down.

Although the odds of getting caught with unlicensed software are slim, the

consequences are grave. Companies face year-long investigations, fines as high as $500,000 and bad publicity when a settlement is announced.

How much does a year-long investigation cost a company in employee time costs and legal fees?

Chris Piccirilli, MIS director at Turnberry Isles Resort and Club, says that with 20 years in the IT business he thought he was up to speed on software licensing.

"I always preached that we needed to be in compliance, and we still got in trouble," he says.

Following an upgrade from DOS to Windows, the Florida resort was hit with a BSA investigation. An internal audit showed that Turnberry Isles was missing licenses for 20 copies of Office and 25 copies of Windows running on its 150-computer network. The resort paid an $85,000 fine in June.

"We're doing internal audits twice a quarter"' says Piccirilli, who keeps detailed records and invoices in a safe.

Do Microsoft TCO studies include twice quarterly audit costs? The tools I've seen online for figuring out costs of upgrading to Windows 2003 from 2000 take into account all kinds of labor costs, yet nothing on audit compliance costs that I've seen. Did I miss a page?

"We have a letter going out to employees three times a year that says anybody caught loading software will be terminated."

...

Few network professionals realize that

their companies are liable for $150,000 in damages for each unlicensed software package. They certainly don't see themselves as criminals when they get behind on purchasing software licenses. And they find maintaining up-to-date licenses to be a tricky and time-consuming task , particularly for far-flung and fast-growing organizations.

Time-consuming? Does Microsoft figure time-consuming tasks as free from cost? Or does Microsoft figure time-consuming audit compliance costs into TCO studies?

"

Our top management is now extremely, painfully aware of software licensing,'' Underwood says, adding that the BSA settlement affected the firm's profitability last year. Being out of compliance "has the potential to put you out of business. . . . This is one of those hidden threats to your company."

Is above paragraph included as part of TCO in Microsoft's TCO studies? If not, why not?

Last year (2001), the BSA settled with more than 200 U.S. violators and identified 34 of them, including Temple University, the City of Issaquah, Wash., and a Pepsi-Cola

Although the odds of getting caught with unlicensed software are slim, the

consequences are grave. Companies face year-long investigations, fines as high as $500,000 and bad publicity when a settlement is announced.

How much does a year-long investigation cost a company in employee time costs and legal fees?

Chris Piccirilli, MIS director at Turnberry Isles Resort and Club, says that with 20 years in the IT business he thought he was up to speed on software licensing.

"I always preached that we needed to be in compliance, and we still got in trouble," he says.

Following an upgrade from DOS to Windows, the Florida resort was hit with a BSA investigation. An internal audit showed that Turnberry Isles was missing licenses for 20 copies of Office and 25 copies of Windows running on its 150-computer network. The resort paid an $85,000 fine in June.

"We're doing internal audits twice a quarter"' says Piccirilli, who keeps detailed records and invoices in a safe.

Do Microsoft TCO studies include twice quarterly audit costs? The tools I've seen online for figuring out costs of upgrading to Windows 2003 from 2000 take into account all kinds of labor costs, yet nothing on audit compliance costs that I've seen. Did I miss a page?

"We have a letter going out to employees three times a year that says anybody caught loading software will be terminated."

...

Few network professionals realize that

their companies are liable for $150,000 in damages for each unlicensed software package. They certainly don't see themselves as criminals when they get behind on purchasing software licenses. And they find maintaining up-to-date licenses to be a tricky and time-consuming task , particularly for far-flung and fast-growing organizations.

Time-consuming? Does Microsoft figure time-consuming tasks as free from cost? Or does Microsoft figure time-consuming audit compliance costs into TCO studies?

"

Our top management is now extremely, painfully aware of software licensing,'' Underwood says, adding that the BSA settlement affected the firm's profitability last year. Being out of compliance "has the potential to put you out of business. . . . This is one of those hidden threats to your company."

Is above paragraph included as part of TCO in Microsoft's TCO studies? If not, why not?

Last year (2001), the BSA settled with more than 200 U.S. violators and identified 34 of them, including Temple University, the City of Issaquah, Wash., and a Pepsi-Cola

Although the odds of getting caught with unlicensed software are slim, the

consequences are grave. Companies face year-long investigations, fines as high as $500,000 and bad publicity when a settlement is announced.

How much does a year-long investigation cost a company in employee time costs and legal fees?

Chris Piccirilli, MIS director at Turnberry Isles Resort and Club, says that with 20 years in the IT business he thought he was up to speed on software licensing.

"I always preached that we needed to be in compliance, and we still got in trouble," he says.

Following an upgrade from DOS to Windows, the Florida resort was hit with a BSA investigation. An internal audit showed that Turnberry Isles was missing licenses for 20 copies of Office and 25 copies of Windows running on its 150-computer network. The resort paid an $85,000 fine in June.

"We're doing internal audits twice a quarter"' says Piccirilli, who keeps detailed records and invoices in a safe.

Do Microsoft TCO studies include twice quarterly audit costs? The tools I've seen online for figuring out costs of upgrading to Windows 2003 from 2000 take into account all kinds of labor costs, yet nothing on audit compliance costs that I've seen. Did I miss a page?

"We have a letter going out to employees three times a year that says anybody caught loading software will be terminated."

...

Few network professionals realize that

their companies are liable for $150,000 in damages for each unlicensed software package. They certainly don't see themselves as criminals when they get behind on purchasing software licenses. And they find maintaining up-to-date licenses to be a tricky and time-consuming task , particularly for far-flung and fast-growing organizations.

Time-consuming? Does Microsoft figure time-consuming tasks as free from cost? Or does Microsoft figure time-consuming audit compliance costs into TCO studies?

"

Our top management is now extremely, painfully aware of software licensing,'' Underwood says, adding that the BSA settlement affected the firm's profitability last year. Being out of compliance "has the potential to put you out of business. . . . This is one of those hidden threats to your company."

Is above paragraph included as part of TCO in Microsoft's TCO studies? If not, why not?

Last year (2001), the BSA settled with more than 200 U.S. violators and identified 34 of them, including Temple University, the City of Issaquah, Wash., and a Pepsi-Cola

I guess they saw it coming., the page was different this morning

Here's the Google cache for your viewing pleasure.

Bon apetit.

It looks like even the mirror is down, but here is the Google Cache of the article.

Now here's a question... Or an insight; whatever... I have been using my GPRS data connection for a while, through my cell, to make data connections. While being slower then wifi of any sort (except for these damn congested hotel networks), it is a great tool for say, traveling on a train, and making my connection. Cingular does not make this a vey easy thing to do, but thanks to a lot of patience, and research, i found a few web sites that really helped me out with getting this connection made. With Cingular/AT&T, the data package for full on GPRS all the time is 20 dollars a month, and it's always on as long as your in the GPRS network. The speed seems to be higher then regular dial up, and keeps me connected.

Link:
http://www.taniwha.org.uk/gprs.html Great link to scripts to make this possible in many ways with many phones.

Now the future as I see it is using something similiar to Skype, or VOIP technology to enable this as a way that i can be making calls through my computer, and paying for a GPRS connection that is always on. While it's nice to be able to just ring through on the cell, I think 20 dollars a month for a VOIP connection anywhere I can recieve GPRS would be FINE and Dandy! Feel free to add to this if anyone has done any other legwork into this idea.
Now, I figure this might be rate as offtopic, in fact, I fear it, but I see this as being related to some of the other things people have said so far on this topic. Now, I have looked at this product, (thank you anonymous coward for the easy link to the cached site
(here) http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:ZWgMwpNIwucJ: www.cellsocket.com/+cellsocket&hl=en

Now this is interesting.. This was mentioned in an earlier article, on Nov 22, 03.
Are we behind in the times?
http://boogle.cc/index.php?blogid=1&archive=2003-1 1 Gotta search for the word cellsocket, can't seem to find an anchor to sink my digital teeth into.

I guess this seems like a neat product, but I want more. And I also question why this wasn't released as ?news? on slashdot till now? Hmmmmm
Well, let me know if anyone has any ideas on the other stuff I went rambling off on. Always on VOIP everywhere would rock my world harder then any hardline home phone thingamajig... Let's make the most of our collective brains, and start up the saucestorm of knowledge.. let it flow free :)

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:ZWgMwpNIwucJ: www.cellsocket.com/+cellsocket&hl=en

With vulnerability scanning there are a few different aspects to consider. the most important feature of a scanner (aside from speed and accuracy) is the level of updates. An out of date scanner is only mildly better then no scanner at all. In this regard commercial software has some advantage for the consumers (IT organizations). It's not that they can blame anyone (as was mentioned in several posts) but there is someone to yell "hey! where the hell is my signature for Vuln XYZ?" With open source there isn't a guarentee that the signature will be made quickly enough. Even nessus (as I pointed out in another post here somewhere) has moved to a pay model for plugins because of the cost of keeping those signatures up to date.
Now one can also take the Open Source approach here and write their OWN signatures but many companies just don't have the staff for that type of thing. The vulnerabilty details are so sparse these days (not so open disclosure rules) that recreating the actual exploit never mind finding a way to detect it remotely is beyond the skill of most teams in the limited timeframe that it's of vital importance. A team will have around 24-48 hours after a patch is released until some evil doer[s] have reverse engineered the patch and created an exploit out of it, slipped in a pre packaged payload and owned 3 out of your 7 class B segments. Sometimes less. I think the ISS worm last year was the record, something like > 20 hours from patch to worm [witty worm i think].
Some intersting article on scanning here and here

Just one other side note about the articles, Foundstone was purchased by McAfee last year so disregard those.

No, they don't. I keep making this point, but it keeps getting missed. Company X need not take the affirmative, expensive step of invalidating Microsoft's patent. (Maybe this is impossible, because the patent is valid.) It need not do anything. It can go ahead and keep using it.

Company X has no incentive to act - it should just keep doing what it's doing. Even if it finds out that Company X is using the ISNOT operator, Microsoft has no reason to stop them from doing so, and doing so would be an awful PR move. Both parties do nothing, and this is a win/win result.

There's nothing "illegal" about this, by the way. Microsoft has the legal right to stop them, but no legal obligation. Unless Microsoft asserts the patent, the university has done nothing wrong.

What do you make of open source software, and its viability in the face of such an extensive body of software patents? It seems that software patents have the potential to simply terminate open source software development and distribution.

I have several responses.

First, if it had the power to do so, Microsoft would have done so already. They've viewed Linux as a gathering threat for at least five years, and as you may have noticed, they're not keen on the concept of competition.

Second, Microsoft would have an affirmative duty to show which patents Linux violated, and how. Linux could respond by taking those technologies out of the kernel. Certainly the inventive power of the Linux army can invent around anything Microsoft can throw their way.

Third, if Microsoft tried to do so, it would face a commercial behemoth with an equally foreboding arsenal: IBM, which, in fact, is the world's largest software patentee. And IBM is Linux's big brother. Microsoft stands to lose much more than Linux in a patent gunfight.

Fourth, Linux has its own pony in this show - not software patents, but defensive publication. Arguably, open-sourcing the Linux kernel blocks anyone else from patenting anything it contains (unless they can prove they invented it first, and that's an uphill battle.)

Finally, it's noteworthy that Linus Torvalds doesn't seem concerned. (Link goes to Google archive of a thread originally on kerneltrap.org, which sadly is no longer available.) To wit:
Dan Phillips: I suggest all vm hackers have a closer look at this [software patent]. It's stupid, but we can't just ignore it.
Linus Torvalds: Actually, we can, and I will. ... The fact is, technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git.

- David Stein

As I understand it, matching wavelets with motion compensation is very computationally intensive.

Snow (cached) is the most promising attempt.

Of traditional block-based MPEG codecs, Nero Recode's H.264 implementation is by far the best for low bitrates.
For high bitrate archival purposes, XviD might be better.

Because both adobe and pdfs suck donkey nutz.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:oeWOnurxhUcJ: nvl.nist.gov/pub/nistpubs/jres/109/5/j95sla.pdf+&h l=en

Just one particular DVD in Japan, The Matrix, had its release date moved up a week to match the PS2's launch date in Japan, and sold 600,000 copies in its first 2 weeks. Previous DVD movies in Japan were considered hits if they hit 10,000 copies sold.

According to a spokesperson for one such company, "The size of the DVD recording market was about 30 billion yen [286 million dollars] in 1999, but in 2000 it is sure to expand to 100 billion yen [952 million dollars]." From this google cache.

An expected increase of over 3x for the whole market in 2000, and one movie selling 60x the amount that was condiered to be "hit" material within 2 weeks of the Japanese PS2 launch should tell you something.

The PS2 also only sold around 1 game per system in March 2000 in Japan. While that's still a lot of games, a mere 1:1 sales ratio isn't what cosnole manufactures want--especially because of the massive loss Sony took on the PS2 at launch-- since they make the money back on game royalties; meanwhile the sales of DVD movies went though the roof, as evidenced by just one movie out of the tons of other DVDs that ended up selling way more than the games for the PS2 at the time.