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Please please please don't tell me The Onion is fake!!!!

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

What many people fail to realize is that when you mass distribute the *same* image (ie. CD). So long as that is the case, copy protection is always going to fail horribly.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Sadly, its these big operations that are making the industry groups crack down hard. I am somewhat in awe at the effort that was clearly put into this. Now that we have that terrorism thing behind us, we've moved on to more important things.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

They say they're dealing with it, but I really have to wonder how they slow to a resonable speed to land. It seems to me that the "pilot" would be moving at a good clip most of the time. Maybe they have a way to modify the aerodymanics of the wings to slow down + add lots of lift, like flaps on an airplane.
Cool stuff, though. I won't be trying it.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

IT doesn't make sense that Wal Mart would continue to hold the Jan 1 deadline when they can't even get it working. If it isn't 100% reliable (or closer to it, anyway), both Wal Mart and all their suppliers would have to maintain two inventory tracking systems (old one + new rfid). With that much volume, that is no small thing.
Granted, that is normally how the bugs are worked out - you put it in and force the technology providers to keep working on it until it hits the 98%+ accuracy range.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Anyone know of other good projects to do with old laptops? I've got about 4 in various states of disrepair, mostly not working, but the screens on all of them are good.

I may try to do something like this, though.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Wow... apparently so. Bastard!

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

It's been costing me about $35 to fill up my TL, though the past week it gotten back down under $30. The thing only drinks premium. I should've asked before I walked out with it...

You have to remember that they're not designing cars for cheap bastards.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

If you send this email to 10 of your friends, Bill Gates will send you $100. Er send you to Disney world, or refinance your mortgage or something.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

The reality is that people like fast and powerful cars. Most of the afv/hybrib/electric cars to date have been pretty weak. If someone were to include an adequate amount of battery storage and substantial enough electric motors, your electric/hybrid car could leave just about anything else in the dust, in the quarter mile. It's certainly not going to win endurance races, but how often in real driving conditions do you use the full output potential of your car for more than getting up to highway+ speed.

I know I was certainly sold on the TL because of the power, and I could see going with a hybrid so long as the performance were there.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

That case is amazing. I really wish I had the ability to work with aluminum that well.

Everytime I try something like that, it is eligible for the trash bin.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Should this really be a suprise?
Why do you think stores offer "mail-in rebates"? Because NO ONE SENDS THEM IN. Or at least a substantially small number as to still be wildly profitable.
People like to think they're getting a good deal, but when it comes time to send in the paperwork, it doesn't happen.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

This comair story is all I'm seeing getting press. I think its a lot bigger than that.
My sister flew Delta on Dec 23rd from Detriot to Atlanta. Plane was 2 hours late, but no big thing. Waited 5 hours for her luggage, with no dice. By the time we got in line for luggage services, there were at least 600 people in the line already.
Talking to other passengers from 10+ different flights from different cities, no one got their luggage that night. Apparently, it wasn't just Atlanta - the local news in Tampa and Detroit had segments on how the airports had taken over parts of taxiways to sort through seas of bags that didn't make it on to planes.
It's been 2 days, and Delta has no idea where the stuff from that flight is. I'm guessing it isn't just Comair that got hit by some computer problems.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

It seems like most of the rest of the civilized world has already adopted hardware tokens of some sort for online banking security, but here in the good ole USA, we're yet again behind the times.

My fear is that each bank would adopt a different technology to implement this, and I would be keeping track of 7 different tokens right now. OTOH, that is not a bad price to pay for better security of my money and lower fees, etc. on my bank accounts.

The reality is that, depite the big inconvenience, US banking customers who are victimized aren't feeling a lot of pain. Banks here are priding themselves on how quickly they restore your money if someone wipes out your account. As such, there isn't a big demand from customers for a higher level of security, so the inconvenience caused by moving to a token-based system will likely not be very successful, unless something changes.

Jerry http://www.syslog.org/

I admin'd an ace server for a long time, in an org that had multiple groups running them. It is true that you can use an RSA token on many ace domains - buuut the problem is largely organizational. Even within the same company, it was sometimes hard to get the seed files back and forth.

Each customer will need to provide their seed file to each new back. *IF* banks were able to settle on all using the same technology (RSA/ACE), most certainly all of them would have different policies on pins, etc, rendering it a pretty confusing thing for customers. Don't underestimate the problems that would cause.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Couldn't be unusually strong winds in that area at night, could it?

Nah, probably a martian.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Very nice...

Actually, I think all of the networks are crap. I just don't get ABC in HD, which is the one I would want to be in HD if I had the choice.

I'm with you on the Fox dig, though. Cops is the only thing they've got going for them.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Well, I have comcast for a cable provider (yeah, I know), and I get a whopping 14 HD channels. 6 of them are premium, which I don't subscribe to, 2 are sports, which I don't like, 2 are crappy "in-HD" showcase channels, leaving 4 local channels in HD. CBS, NBC, FOX and some other crap.

No discovery, no learning channel, no history channel. So 99.9% of what I watch (other than Cops) is still in NTSC).

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

With all the spam in here its starting to remind me of my inbox.

Anyway, I have a 9600 all-in-wonder, and I really really like the cable tv tuner deal. I desperately need to upgrade, but I am having a hard time parting with the built in tuner. I suppose these would be a good alternative.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Interestingly, SCO came in at #1 on the company queries...

I'm not going to say anything about the Britney Spears bit...

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Being associated with OSS and Linux is sexy right now. We're seeing this done in droves - Sun with Solaris, SAP DB, Nokia replacing IPSO with Linux, etc. It's the in thing to do right now.

I don't see how it is going to pan out in the long term for some of these companies, though.

Jerry http://www.syslog.org/

MS has lots of components that they have started including over the years. From SUS, to MOM, and Media Player to solitare. Those applications, IMO, have the effect of raising the bar for other vendors. Those MS apps are just "adequate". They aren't particularly feature rich, flexible or tied into value-added services.

In the case of Media player v. Real, Real has to work harder to differntiate its product from MS to get people to actually use it. It's been my experience that Real hasn't had a big problem getting their client onto people's computers.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

All-in-all, they didn't blast spamassassin as hard as I thought they were going to. It was sad to see that they didn't think they could get anyone to help them review SA, and it was sadder that they got a lot of the facts wrong about SA, like that it is built around a bayes database.

The mere appearance of SA, though, is impressive because those trade rags rarely include anything open source (partly due to marketing opportunity for commercial, paying companies).

Jerry http://www.syslog.org/

I've been thinking about this for a while. One of the big obsticles is that most companies have a horde of fat clients written specifically for .net/etc., or web-based relying on IE/activex. One of the other posters above mentioned really complex excel spreadsheets, too.

The reality is that those things do exist and are show stoppers. I was thinking the way to tackle that is to have a citrix server/farm for people to connect to for those apps that require Windows. Over time, you can migrate away from those applications.

This is a very thorough article and most likely will convince more than a few companies to take the plunge.

Jerry http://www.syslog.org/

They're going to replace windows update?

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

At first, I thought this was going to spell the end of a lot of anti-spyware companies, but then I realized that MS has bought a lot of companies and done next to nothing with them (what was the name of the A/V company they bought again?)

On the upside, if they are serious about it, I think this is going to be a huge boon for corporate IT. Spyware has become one of the biggest headaches for IT these days. I believe about 50% of our support tickets are related to spyware.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

I realize IE is probably a huge codebase and a big development team, but it is simply amazing that these problems keep popping up. A company with the size and resources of MS should have a much better handle on these things.

Where I work, we have code reviews, automated code scrubbers, and extensize QA, and we're a relatively small shop compared to them.

I know they're trying, otherwise it would be a lot worse, and SP2 did a good bit to improve things, so I can't be that hard on them.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

After all, the article had nano-content.

Hard to say how the diamond dust would be made, but I'm sure there are probably more than a few ways (the like the way c-60 is grown).

It just strikes me as funny to see something saying "we'll take 2 really expensive things and make something really cheap!"

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

I thought I had clicked on the wrong link at first. It is completely devoid of anything useful.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Combining nanotech (expensive) with diamonds (expensive) yields cheap monitors?

It's been a long day, so I know I must be missing something

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

ie. who cares what they can or can't prove after they burn your house down :)

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

There are only 2 industries that call their customers "users". One is IT.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

I think this is another example of government trying to play parent. For a long time, things like this infuriated me. Now that I have kids of my own, and see other people and their kids, I can somewhat sympathize with the intent - we have a lot of really crappy parents running around (me included).

I can say that I could see one of my kids being able to handle violent games, and the other not. How I enforce that, I have no idea.

In general, though, I am well against government taking away parental responsibility.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

I am *not* looking foreward to upgrading the windows in my house every 2 years.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Hypertext in its current incarnation is truely is a client side implementation. Web browsers actually perform the 'linking', though the linked address is supplied by the content. Web servers are nothing more than file servers, and do nothing to enhance or restrict hypertext.

Hypertext content are still just flat text files with bibliographic type references to other documents.

ASP/PHP/Perl/etc muddy the waters a little, but essentially the same is true.

The client is what actually decodes the hypertext links and presents them to the user. Hypertext documents work just fine from FTP servers, windows file servers and your local hard drive, all because of the web browser.

Even if the patent holds any water, there are tens of thousands of ISP's to sue, some of which are very very large, and likely hold a considerable influence to BT's well being. Most software applications now-a-days use hypertext quite extensively. They would also need to be sued. MS would probably have a problem with that and may need to buy BT. There are billions of web pages on the internet, and billions more on intranets. Logistically, there's no way to enforce the patent on content creators or deliverers.

But, there are only so many web browser companies. And many of them are now open source. The best BT could hope for, in my opinion, is a cut of the royalties from web browser sales. With the landscape the way it is, I don't see that being too profitible.

I'm certain there are a few exec's at BT sitting around a table saying 'if we could even get $.01US per link, we would be filthy rich!'

Here's my contribution to the problem :)

http://www.syslog.org

I feel like such a criminal.