People have been waiting for Intel to destroy AMD with a better product ever since AMD came out with their Opterons, then their 'Venice' cores and then finally their 'X2' line of dual-core processors, all of which were much superior to the Intel chips. Intel already destroyed AMD a few years back when they released their Pentium 4 to compete with the original Athlon and everyone has expected the same thing again. That's probably why Dell has sat on the sidelines selling their aging, wimpy Celeron Ds and P4 systems at cheap prices.
Intel is a much bigger company, they have a lot more money, a lot of smart people, the nastiest, sleaziest marketers in the business, many more fabs, and great lawyers to fend off the AMD legal strikes too. The Intel 'Prescott' was supposed to do the job on AMD but it never came close. Now, though, the 'Conroe' looks like it is FINALLY the answer to AMDs stuff. Based on the benchmarks using Intel-supplied hardware and software, it looks like the 'Conroe' line of processors totally destroys the AMD FX-60 which is the fastest AMD processor sold today. Of course, you can't buy the 'Conroe' until September, 2006 but it will be worth the wait, based on the benchmarks anyway.
The only thing AMD has to offer is a little bit faster clock speed (aka FX62) and their upcoming AM2 socket systems which don't seem to do much of anything new other than allow DDR2 memory and a bigger cache. Looks like AMD is headed back to the bargain bin.
Anyway, it's in the millwatt range,
and people aren't putting their
heads or their crotches on the access point and nothing is going to
happen. This guy that banned wifi is a complete idiot.
And you know that how? There is not enough epidemiological
data available yet to KNOW how safe or unsafe exposure to some of the
newer sources of microwave radiation is, such as wifi or cell phone
transmitters. You are just one more of the eager users who refuse
to even acknowledge that there might be a potential problem. One
of the older sources of exposure to microwave radiation are the radar
speed measuring devices used by police officers and there has continued
to be concern about the rates of testicular cancer and other cancers in
the relatively small group of users. Even after 30+ years of
using radar guns, however, the best advice that OSHA
has today is:
"The health concerns of officers who have used
traffic radar in the past cannot immediately be resolved because of a
lack of definitive scientific information on chronic, low-level effects
of microwave radiation. It is possible, however, to make concrete
recommendations about the use of traffic radar devices that will reduce
or prevent future exposure."
Why would you expect that we know what the effects of newer sources of
microwave radiation are if we still don't know what the effects of old
sources are? In the absence of studies that can quantify the
health effects and provide guidance for new exposure standards,
avoiding unnecessary exposure is a good idea. Your posting that people
who are attempting to do that are 'idiots' is not helpful.
Congratulations to that guy for taking a very courageous stand against
exposing more people to more 'wireless' radiation. Everyone's
daily exposure to this just keeps climbing with 'WiFi' access
points, cell phone sites, ubiquitous cell phone use, etc. Yes,
these technologies provide wonderful convenience. Yes, they seem
harmless since they have no visible effects on us after we use them.
But no, they are probably not
harmless, although it will likely be several more decades before
the magnitude of the harm they are causing is apparent to us.
The Canadian university guy will probably be quickly pressured to
recant his ban but it's great that he took the stand he did because it
at least puts some light on the issue that might help to get
independent studies of health effects funded in the future.
No. IBM's former CEO, Lou Gerstner, pulled the plug on new
resources going into OS/2 in April, 1996. You can hear him say
that in his own words in an.mp3 withinin this
zip file.
The John Deutsch's of the world are only leaping in to fill the vacuum created by the absence of religious discussion wrt advances in scientific knowledge. Everyone of us asks 'how did we get here?' and 'where did I come from' but there is very little meaningful public dialog. Ironically, the Big Bang seems far more like the act of a 'creator' than it does the random action of a chaotic universe but apparently Intelligent Designer types like Deutsch think otherwise. Whatever. The most important thing is to bring out ideas and talk about them, to overturn mental rocks and let the sun shine underneath. We live in a computerized internet-rich world with more communication media than ever before in history and yet there is less *serious* discussion about NEW ideas than there was in the 1400s. Everything now is wrapped in dogma, litmus tests of beliefs, and rigid ideological thinking. How did this happen to us? If Copernicus were alive today, his sun-centered theory would be shouted down by islamic fundamentalists, christian fundamentalists, right/left-wing politicians, and global-warming scientists who would all be convinced that it threatened their institutions and the status quo.
The John Deutsch's of the world are only leaping in to fill the vacuum created by the absence of religious discussion wrt advances in scientific knowledge. Everyone of us asks 'how did we get here?' and 'where did I come from' but there is very little meaningful public dialog. Ironically, the Big Bang seems far more like the act of a 'creator' than it does the random action of a chaotic universe but apparently Intelligent Designer types like Deutsch think otherwise. Whatever. The most important thing is to bring out ideas and talk about them, to overturn mental rocks and let the sun shine underneath. We live in a computerized internet-rich world with more communication media than ever before in history and yet there is less *serious* discussion about NEW ideas than there was in the 1400s. Everything now is wrapped in dogma, litmus tests of beliefs, and rigid ideological thinking. How did this happen to us? If Copernicus were alive today, his sun-centered theory would be shouted down by islamic fundamentalists, christian fundamentalists, right/left-wing politicians, and global-warming scientists who would all be convinced that it threatened their institutions and the status quo.
IBM stopped selling their OS/2 operating system last year but has refused to release it as open source or even to allow 'free' licenses for additional users. If IBM cannot find the generosity to release a 'free' version of a defunct operating system which there are cash-paying former customers who could actually benefit, there's reason to be suspicious of a 'free' version of DB2. The DB2 free version is probably some sort of scheme for getting lock-in to the platform and is not just an example of generosity by IBM.
There doesn't seem to be anything very compelling about Itanium. It doesn't clock particularly fast compared with other competitive hardware, it only does 4 FLOPS per cycle like most other current processors, it isn't very compatible with other software, it's difficult to develop for, and it doesn't even have a nice looking case. WHAT is so special about the Itanium that keeps Intel pumping money into it?
The brain tumor survey looks like shaky science. As someone
in the article pointed out, it was based only on a survey of *living*
subjects and most with serious brain tumors die within 18 months and
were therefore omitted from the study. From reading the article,
it looks as though they asked 1,000 people with brain tumors how much
they used a cell phone and then went and asked 1,700 people who didn't
have a brain tumor how much THEY used a cell phone. Then
they used the results of this survey to claim that the amount of cell
phone use between the two group was the same.
Says the article: "The study of 2,782 people across the UK found
no link between the risk of glioma - the most common type of brain
tumour - and length of mobile use."
Presumably, they were looking for a higher proportion of the brain
tumor sufferers to say 'Omigosh, yes, I use the cell phone 8 hours a
day.' while the non-sufferers would say 'Cell phones? What are
those?' Instead, they probably found both that both groups used
cell phones about the same amount of time and from that comes their
'conclusion' that there is no link between cell phones and
cancer. Suppose, though, that cell phones really DO cause cancer
but that they only cause cancer in.0005% of exposed individuals after
3 years of use with the percentage rising to 5% after 20 years of
use? The cancer-sufferers in the study might just be falling into
that.0005% group but that doesn't mean that the non-sufferers get a
free pass but only that their time isn't up, yet. Lots of
people smoke cigarettes but don't get lung cancer until 30 years, or
more, later, and many never get lung cancer. Using similar
methodology, we could survey 1,000 lung cancer sufferers and 1,700
non-lung cancer sufferers in the age range of 25-35 in some country
such as South Korea where most everyone smokes and both groups would
probably report about the same amount of smoking. Then we could
say 'See...there's no link between smoking and lung cancer!'
Also, there are negative cognitive effects that
have been demonstrated in cell phone users. Unless more data
becomes available, the best approach to cell phones is probably the
same as that used for exposure to ionizing radiation which is to
minimize your time and distance and don't give them to kids.
The Firefox 'ping feature' is a good example of why we need a choice of more than one browser to use. The ping tracking is great for website owners but not great for the unwashed masses of users who might not want to wear radio tracking collars and have RFIDs implanted in their left cheek. If there is only one viable choice in web browsers, that browser will be under enormous pressure and temptation to implement features of dubious value to users. With a choice of two or more, users can amble over and give the competition a shot when their primary browser does something user-unfriendly. Even better would be wide support for open standards and a choice of 3, 4, or 5 browsers that all support the standards. Hey, what's wrong with dreaming?
Read more closely. Where does Microsoft actually say that Gibson
is wrong? Gibson claimed that Windows XP would read a.wmf file
and begin executing a portion of the data file contents as executable
code if a metafile record was encountered with a length of one
byte. Since the minimum length of a valid metafile record is 6
bytes, Gibson suggests that the behavior was intentional rather than an
accident. Microsoft doesn't actually SAY in their response that
any of what Gibson claims is wrong:
Gibson: Except
that, when I was pursuing this and finally got it to work, what Windows
did when it encountered this Escape function, followed by the
SETABORTPROC metafile record, was it jumped immediately to the next
byte of code and began to execute it. That is, it was no longer
interpreting my metafile records record by record, which is the way
metafiles are supposed to be processed.
Microsoft:
If you are seeing that you can only trigger it with an incorrect value,
it's probably because your SetAbortProc record is the last record in
the metafile.
Gibson: It turns out that the only way to get Windows to
misbehave in this bizarre fashion is to set the length to one, which is
an impossible value. I tried setting it to zero. It didn't trigger the
exploit. I tried setting it to two, no effect. Three, no effect.
Nothing, not even the correct length. Only one.
Microsoft: The vulnerability can be triggered with correct or
incorrect size values.
Even though the Microsoft guy claims he is going to "get rather
technical here" he never specifies what he considers an 'incorrect' or 'correct'
size value to be. More importantly, he never refutes the
claim that a record with a length of one byte would always cause
Windows to spawn a new thread and begin executing 'data' as
code.
Wrong!! RTFA! It was 'WMF Support' that was introduced in
Windows 3.0. The 'vulnerability' didn't come (according
to Microsoft) until "...all that GDI functionality was allowed to
be called from metafiles." There is nothing inherently insecure
about a.wmf file, it is the *way* that the records in it are processed
in Windows XP that creates the vulnerability.
You can rest easy with your Windows 3.0 as it is is secure against the.wmf security access.
Read the Gibson transcript and then read the Microsoft
page describing the exploit. Notice anything? Either
this backdoor was intentionally placed in Windows by Microsoft or it
was placed by a rogue coder which Microsoft failed to catch. If
it was done by a lone nut, the Microsoft 'Security Bulletin' wouldn't
say stuff like "Although Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and
Windows Millennium
Edition do contain the affected component, the vulnerability is not
critical because an exploitable attack vector has not been
identified..." since the back door code is NOT PRESENT in Windows 98
et. al. No, Microsoft would say stuff like 'this flaw is only
present in Win 2K/XP.' Instead, Microsoft goes on with "For these
versions of Windows, Microsoft will only release security
updates for critical security issues. Non-critical security issues are
not offered during this support period." Looks like the
'non-critical' stuff is just a cover for Microsoft to explain why the
'flaw' is not patched in Windows 98.
The backdoor looks like it was intentionally placed there by Microsoft
and they are not coming clean about it. Microsoft is singing the
same tune as Sony did about their rootkit. Not only that,
they are even using it as an excuse to tout upgrading to Win XP when
they say: "It should be a priority for customers who have these
operating system
versions to migrate to supported versions to prevent potential exposure
to vulnerabilities." This is pure evil.
You'd have to work extremely hard to find a kid in the United States who didn't have access to a computer to mess around with. People are throwing away better computers every day than we were using 5 years ago. Kids don't need their own personal new laptop to have access to a computer for learning purposes and a new laptop is extremely poor for that purpose, anyway, because the kid won't be able to even crack the back cover or dink around with the software load without bringing the wrath of the school officials down on him.
The Figure 1A in the patent looks more like a Chrysler K car than a Prius. Also, the transmission in Figure 2 looks more like the transmission on a McCormick Farmall tractor with the option power take off. Maybe the inventor was influenced by previous art or one of those Iacocca TV commercials from the '80s.
Congress recently passed HR 3402 which was signed into law by President Bush on January 5, 2006. This law makes it federal crime to say anything annonymously that the government considers to be annoying or abusive using any 'telecommunications' device, which now includes the internet. The legal presumption in making annonymous comments illegal is that you forgo your right to privacy when using any telecommunications device. Therefore, the government now has a DUTY to spy on americans using telephones, radio, or the internet to be sure that they are properly identifying themselves in every communication and that their comments are not annoying or abusive.
The future for retail music sales is obviously online and digital...yet the record companies still tell everyone they have to buy CDs. Microsoft and Apple are two heavyweights that have jumped into the retail music business with both feet. How long will it be before they start signing recording artists directly and cut out the middleman? What is it that the record companies do anyway? Oh yeah...
There's two ideas going on here: 1) using computers for education, and 2) using an ebook instead of a regular book. Idea 1 has been going around and around for years and has produced very minimal results, given all of the money that school districts have spent on equipping every school with the latest hardware. The most important thing for teaching is a teacher and computers have not proven to be a good substitute for that. That doesn't stop the local schools from pushing an annual 'technology levy' to raise funds to upgrade every computer every couple of years, though. The school computers do get used for a lot of stuff such as email, student powerpoint, internet research, etc., just not for teaching.
Idea 2 would eliminate the expense of purchasing a pile of books for every student by giving them handy 'ebooks' to read on their laptop instead. The problems with this are that the hardware has a short lifetime, can be finicky to maintain, is not as readable as an actual book, and is less convenient and more time consuming to use than just cracking open a book. If you doubt this, look around at how many people buy 'ebooks' compared with paper books. The world still likes their books, given the current state of the technology alternatives. Maybe idea 2 would be more appropriate in third world countries with limited access to real books in the appropriate language or in poor inner-city schools. The best schools, though, in the first world countries will stay with books for the time being.
Don't know about the NSA cookies but I just went to their wwww.nsa.gov website and the first thing I saw was one of the funniest 'eagles' that I've ever seen. The eagle is draped with feathers like a kid's costume, has the obligatory stern look, a pasted-on shield covering its 'body', and is perched on a key that looks like it came out of a door from about 1910. If it wasn't on the official nsa website, I'd think it came out of one of my kid's video games. We need to cleam up all of the eagle-imagery logos used by our government agencies but the nsa one is the most cartoonish one of the bunch. If I were doing the web pages at NSA, I'd make that eagle about 4 pixels high and put it in the lower left corner instead of making it 500x500 pixels and placing it smack-dab center on the first page.
Java is cross-platform while C# isn't. 'Cross-platform doesn't mean that your java app will run on Windows and Linux, athough it would of course. No...what it means is that your cool new java app will run on the platform you are using right now and also the platform you will be using in 10 years. THAT is cross-platform and it is true with Java and it will NEVER be true with.NET. And that is why Java will still be used long after Bill Gates has retired. So, learning either one would be good but Java is likely be around longer and be more valuable to large companies who lean pretty strongly to Java for that reason so...go with Java.
Life is not the presence of particular molecules. Life is the plan by which the molecules are constructed into a living organism. Molecules without the plan by which they operate are no different than computer hardware without any software installed on it. Finding hydrogen cyanide and acetylene present around another star is more a comment on the improving ability to detect molecules at a distance than it is on the presence of the 'building blocks of life.' It would have been much more remarkable if they had NOT found those substances since they are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen which we would expect to be ubiquitous in the universe, based on our present knowledge. Claiming to have found the 'building blocks of life' around another star is just hype to help pump up the budget for next years work.
Implant an RFID chip in everyone. Stick a camera with sound pickup in every room (make it a requirement for a building permit). Connect all the new sensors together to powerful central computers and build databases for every person on their movements, sayings, potty habits, etc. This will eliminate crime, make the children safe, prevent spousal abuse, wipe out drugs, and identify every osama minion for re-education to our superior way of life.
A significant portion of the heat leaving Earth (which we experience on the surface) originates from radioactive decay deep within. This might shed some light on the origin and, more importantly, the variation of that heat. It would be a shame to be taking measures to reduce global warming by attempting to increase the radiation of heat into space if, at the same time, the heat output from within the Earth is declining on a 10,000 year cycle leading to slightly cooler surface temperatures. Kind of like turning off the central heating right before the blizzard hits.
Just getting rid of the Diebold CEO does not fix the problem because the problem is the *system* rather than just one man. It is the system that allows one company to submit voting systems for use by the public with no oversight of their accuracy and integrity and it is the system that enables corrupt elected officials to allow Diebold to do as it pleased. The next Diebold CEO might be worse than the last one. Even worse, there will likely be other diebold-like companies springing forth to provide similar voting systems. Until the American public are able to throw off their cloak of indifference, timidity and cowardice and stand up to the Diebolds in their local jurisdictions, the system will remain broken.
AMD has significant leads in both manunfacturing technology and cpu design. The specific AMD technology leads over Intel right now are their dual-stress liner technology, SOI, their use of hypertransport, and their implementation of the on-die memory controller. These are the areas that AMD has a 1-2 year lead in. The newest AMD Fab was built for 65 nm and can later move to 45 nm. AMD leads in other areas have allowed them to place less reliance on clock speed increases and process shrinks to achieve performance goals, in contrast to Intel for which clock speed and process shrink seem to be its primary performance tools. Clock speed topped out for Intel so now they have only process shrinks left. There is a lower limit on process shrinks as well due to physical limits so Intel is probably also scrambling desperately to catch up in the areas where AMD has surpassed them. Unfortunately for Intel, there are likely to be no quick paths to implementing the things that AMD has spent years developing.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been waiting for Intel to destroy AMD with a better product ever since AMD came out with their Opterons, then their 'Venice' cores and then finally their 'X2' line of dual-core processors, all of which were much superior to the Intel chips. Intel already destroyed AMD a few years back when they released their Pentium 4 to compete with the original Athlon and everyone has expected the same thing again. That's probably why Dell has sat on the sidelines selling their aging, wimpy Celeron Ds and P4 systems at cheap prices.
Intel is a much bigger company, they have a lot more money, a lot of smart people, the nastiest, sleaziest marketers in the business, many more fabs, and great lawyers to fend off the AMD legal strikes too. The Intel 'Prescott' was supposed to do the job on AMD but it never came close. Now, though, the 'Conroe' looks like it is FINALLY the answer to AMDs stuff. Based on the benchmarks using Intel-supplied hardware and software, it looks like the 'Conroe' line of processors totally destroys the AMD FX-60 which is the fastest AMD processor sold today. Of course, you can't buy the 'Conroe' until September, 2006 but it will be worth the wait, based on the benchmarks anyway.
The only thing AMD has to offer is a little bit faster clock speed (aka FX62) and their upcoming AM2 socket systems which don't seem to do much of anything new other than allow DDR2 memory and a bigger cache. Looks like AMD is headed back to the bargain bin.
Anyway, it's in the millwatt range, and people aren't putting their heads or their crotches on the access point and nothing is going to happen. This guy that banned wifi is a complete idiot.
And you know that how? There is not enough epidemiological data available yet to KNOW how safe or unsafe exposure to some of the newer sources of microwave radiation is, such as wifi or cell phone transmitters. You are just one more of the eager users who refuse to even acknowledge that there might be a potential problem. One of the older sources of exposure to microwave radiation are the radar speed measuring devices used by police officers and there has continued to be concern about the rates of testicular cancer and other cancers in the relatively small group of users. Even after 30+ years of using radar guns, however, the best advice that OSHA has today is:
"The health concerns of officers who have used traffic radar in the past cannot immediately be resolved because of a lack of definitive scientific information on chronic, low-level effects of microwave radiation. It is possible, however, to make concrete recommendations about the use of traffic radar devices that will reduce or prevent future exposure."
Why would you expect that we know what the effects of newer sources of microwave radiation are if we still don't know what the effects of old sources are? In the absence of studies that can quantify the health effects and provide guidance for new exposure standards, avoiding unnecessary exposure is a good idea. Your posting that people who are attempting to do that are 'idiots' is not helpful.
Congratulations to that guy for taking a very courageous stand against exposing more people to more 'wireless' radiation. Everyone's daily exposure to this just keeps climbing with 'WiFi' access points, cell phone sites, ubiquitous cell phone use, etc. Yes, these technologies provide wonderful convenience. Yes, they seem harmless since they have no visible effects on us after we use them. But no, they are probably not harmless, although it will likely be several more decades before the magnitude of the harm they are causing is apparent to us.
The Canadian university guy will probably be quickly pressured to recant his ban but it's great that he took the stand he did because it at least puts some light on the issue that might help to get independent studies of health effects funded in the future.
No. IBM's former CEO, Lou Gerstner, pulled the plug on new resources going into OS/2 in April, 1996. You can hear him say that in his own words in an .mp3 withinin this
zip file.
The John Deutsch's of the world are only leaping in to fill the vacuum created by the absence of religious discussion wrt advances in scientific knowledge. Everyone of us asks 'how did we get here?' and 'where did I come from' but there is very little meaningful public dialog. Ironically, the Big Bang seems far more like the act of a 'creator' than it does the random action of a chaotic universe but apparently Intelligent Designer types like Deutsch think otherwise. Whatever. The most important thing is to bring out ideas and talk about them, to overturn mental rocks and let the sun shine underneath. We live in a computerized internet-rich world with more communication media than ever before in history and yet there is less *serious* discussion about NEW ideas than there was in the 1400s. Everything now is wrapped in dogma, litmus tests of beliefs, and rigid ideological thinking. How did this happen to us? If Copernicus were alive today, his sun-centered theory would be shouted down by islamic fundamentalists, christian fundamentalists, right/left-wing politicians, and global-warming scientists who would all be convinced that it threatened their institutions and the status quo.
The John Deutsch's of the world are only leaping in to fill the vacuum created by the absence of religious discussion wrt advances in scientific knowledge. Everyone of us asks 'how did we get here?' and 'where did I come from' but there is very little meaningful public dialog. Ironically, the Big Bang seems far more like the act of a 'creator' than it does the random action of a chaotic universe but apparently Intelligent Designer types like Deutsch think otherwise. Whatever. The most important thing is to bring out ideas and talk about them, to overturn mental rocks and let the sun shine underneath. We live in a computerized internet-rich world with more communication media than ever before in history and yet there is less *serious* discussion about NEW ideas than there was in the 1400s. Everything now is wrapped in dogma, litmus tests of beliefs, and rigid ideological thinking. How did this happen to us? If Copernicus were alive today, his sun-centered theory would be shouted down by islamic fundamentalists, christian fundamentalists, right/left-wing politicians, and global-warming scientists who would all be convinced that it threatened their institutions and the status quo.
IBM stopped selling their OS/2 operating system last year but has refused to release it as open source or even to allow 'free' licenses for additional users. If IBM cannot find the generosity to release a 'free' version of a defunct operating system which there are cash-paying former customers who could actually benefit, there's reason to be suspicious of a 'free' version of DB2. The DB2 free version is probably some sort of scheme for getting lock-in to the platform and is not just an example of generosity by IBM.
There doesn't seem to be anything very compelling about Itanium. It doesn't clock particularly fast compared with other competitive hardware, it only does 4 FLOPS per cycle like most other current processors, it isn't very compatible with other software, it's difficult to develop for, and it doesn't even have a nice looking case. WHAT is so special about the Itanium that keeps Intel pumping money into it?
The brain tumor survey looks like shaky science. As someone in the article pointed out, it was based only on a survey of *living* subjects and most with serious brain tumors die within 18 months and were therefore omitted from the study. From reading the article, it looks as though they asked 1,000 people with brain tumors how much they used a cell phone and then went and asked 1,700 people who didn't have a brain tumor how much THEY used a cell phone. Then they used the results of this survey to claim that the amount of cell phone use between the two group was the same.
.0005% of exposed individuals after
3 years of use with the percentage rising to 5% after 20 years of
use? The cancer-sufferers in the study might just be falling into
that .0005% group but that doesn't mean that the non-sufferers get a
free pass but only that their time isn't up, yet. Lots of
people smoke cigarettes but don't get lung cancer until 30 years, or
more, later, and many never get lung cancer. Using similar
methodology, we could survey 1,000 lung cancer sufferers and 1,700
non-lung cancer sufferers in the age range of 25-35 in some country
such as South Korea where most everyone smokes and both groups would
probably report about the same amount of smoking. Then we could
say 'See...there's no link between smoking and lung cancer!'
Says the article: "The study of 2,782 people across the UK found no link between the risk of glioma - the most common type of brain tumour - and length of mobile use."
Presumably, they were looking for a higher proportion of the brain tumor sufferers to say 'Omigosh, yes, I use the cell phone 8 hours a day.' while the non-sufferers would say 'Cell phones? What are those?' Instead, they probably found both that both groups used cell phones about the same amount of time and from that comes their 'conclusion' that there is no link between cell phones and cancer. Suppose, though, that cell phones really DO cause cancer but that they only cause cancer in
Also, there are negative cognitive effects that have been demonstrated in cell phone users. Unless more data becomes available, the best approach to cell phones is probably the same as that used for exposure to ionizing radiation which is to minimize your time and distance and don't give them to kids.
The Firefox 'ping feature' is a good example of why we need a choice of more than one browser to use. The ping tracking is great for website owners but not great for the unwashed masses of users who might not want to wear radio tracking collars and have RFIDs implanted in their left cheek. If there is only one viable choice in web browsers, that browser will be under enormous pressure and temptation to implement features of dubious value to users. With a choice of two or more, users can amble over and give the competition a shot when their primary browser does something user-unfriendly. Even better would be wide support for open standards and a choice of 3, 4, or 5 browsers that all support the standards. Hey, what's wrong with dreaming?
Read more closely. Where does Microsoft actually say that Gibson is wrong? Gibson claimed that Windows XP would read a .wmf file
and begin executing a portion of the data file contents as executable
code if a metafile record was encountered with a length of one
byte. Since the minimum length of a valid metafile record is 6
bytes, Gibson suggests that the behavior was intentional rather than an
accident. Microsoft doesn't actually SAY in their response that
any of what Gibson claims is wrong:
Gibson: Except that, when I was pursuing this and finally got it to work, what Windows did when it encountered this Escape function, followed by the SETABORTPROC metafile record, was it jumped immediately to the next byte of code and began to execute it. That is, it was no longer interpreting my metafile records record by record, which is the way metafiles are supposed to be processed.
Microsoft: If you are seeing that you can only trigger it with an incorrect value, it's probably because your SetAbortProc record is the last record in the metafile.
Gibson: It turns out that the only way to get Windows to misbehave in this bizarre fashion is to set the length to one, which is an impossible value. I tried setting it to zero. It didn't trigger the exploit. I tried setting it to two, no effect. Three, no effect. Nothing, not even the correct length. Only one.
Microsoft: The vulnerability can be triggered with correct or incorrect size values.
Even though the Microsoft guy claims he is going to "get rather technical here" he never specifies what he considers an 'incorrect' or 'correct' size value to be. More importantly, he never refutes the claim that a record with a length of one byte would always cause Windows to spawn a new thread and begin executing 'data' as code.
Wrong!! RTFA! It was 'WMF Support' that was introduced in Windows 3.0. The 'vulnerability' didn't come (according to Microsoft) until "...all that GDI functionality was allowed to be called from metafiles." There is nothing inherently insecure about a .wmf file, it is the *way* that the records in it are processed
in Windows XP that creates the vulnerability.
.wmf security access.
You can rest easy with your Windows 3.0 as it is is secure against the
Read the Gibson transcript and then read the Microsoft page describing the exploit. Notice anything? Either this backdoor was intentionally placed in Windows by Microsoft or it was placed by a rogue coder which Microsoft failed to catch. If it was done by a lone nut, the Microsoft 'Security Bulletin' wouldn't say stuff like "Although Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Millennium Edition do contain the affected component, the vulnerability is not critical because an exploitable attack vector has not been identified..." since the back door code is NOT PRESENT in Windows 98 et. al. No, Microsoft would say stuff like 'this flaw is only present in Win 2K/XP.' Instead, Microsoft goes on with "For these versions of Windows, Microsoft will only release security updates for critical security issues. Non-critical security issues are not offered during this support period." Looks like the 'non-critical' stuff is just a cover for Microsoft to explain why the 'flaw' is not patched in Windows 98.
The backdoor looks like it was intentionally placed there by Microsoft and they are not coming clean about it. Microsoft is singing the same tune as Sony did about their rootkit. Not only that, they are even using it as an excuse to tout upgrading to Win XP when they say: "It should be a priority for customers who have these operating system versions to migrate to supported versions to prevent potential exposure to vulnerabilities." This is pure evil.
You'd have to work extremely hard to find a kid in the United States who didn't have access to a computer to mess around with. People are throwing away better computers every day than we were using 5 years ago. Kids don't need their own personal new laptop to have access to a computer for learning purposes and a new laptop is extremely poor for that purpose, anyway, because the kid won't be able to even crack the back cover or dink around with the software load without bringing the wrath of the school officials down on him.
The Figure 1A in the patent looks more like a Chrysler K car than a Prius. Also, the transmission in Figure 2 looks more like the transmission on a McCormick Farmall tractor with the option power take off. Maybe the inventor was influenced by previous art or one of those Iacocca TV commercials from the '80s.
Congress recently passed HR 3402 which was signed into law by President Bush on January 5, 2006. This law makes it federal crime to say anything annonymously that the government considers to be annoying or abusive using any 'telecommunications' device, which now includes the internet. The legal presumption in making annonymous comments illegal is that you forgo your right to privacy when using any telecommunications device. Therefore, the government now has a DUTY to spy on americans using telephones, radio, or the internet to be sure that they are properly identifying themselves in every communication and that their comments are not annoying or abusive.
The future for retail music sales is obviously online and digital...yet the record companies still tell everyone they have to buy CDs. Microsoft and Apple are two heavyweights that have jumped into the retail music business with both feet. How long will it be before they start signing recording artists directly and cut out the middleman? What is it that the record companies do anyway? Oh yeah...
There's two ideas going on here: 1) using computers for education, and 2) using an ebook instead of a regular book. Idea 1 has been going around and around for years and has produced very minimal results, given all of the money that school districts have spent on equipping every school with the latest hardware. The most important thing for teaching is a teacher and computers have not proven to be a good substitute for that. That doesn't stop the local schools from pushing an annual 'technology levy' to raise funds to upgrade every computer every couple of years, though. The school computers do get used for a lot of stuff such as email, student powerpoint, internet research, etc., just not for teaching.
Idea 2 would eliminate the expense of purchasing a pile of books for every student by giving them handy 'ebooks' to read on their laptop instead. The problems with this are that the hardware has a short lifetime, can be finicky to maintain, is not as readable as an actual book, and is less convenient and more time consuming to use than just cracking open a book. If you doubt this, look around at how many people buy 'ebooks' compared with paper books. The world still likes their books, given the current state of the technology alternatives. Maybe idea 2 would be more appropriate in third world countries with limited access to real books in the appropriate language or in poor inner-city schools. The best schools, though, in the first world countries will stay with books for the time being.
Don't know about the NSA cookies but I just went to their wwww.nsa.gov website and the first thing I saw was one of the funniest 'eagles' that I've ever seen. The eagle is draped with feathers like a kid's costume, has the obligatory stern look, a pasted-on shield covering its 'body', and is perched on a key that looks like it came out of a door from about 1910. If it wasn't on the official nsa website, I'd think it came out of one of my kid's video games. We need to cleam up all of the eagle-imagery logos used by our government agencies but the nsa one is the most cartoonish one of the bunch. If I were doing the web pages at NSA, I'd make that eagle about 4 pixels high and put it in the lower left corner instead of making it 500x500 pixels and placing it smack-dab center on the first page.
Java is cross-platform while C# isn't. 'Cross-platform doesn't mean that your java app will run on Windows and Linux, athough it would of course. No...what it means is that your cool new java app will run on the platform you are using right now and also the platform you will be using in 10 years. THAT is cross-platform and it is true with Java and it will NEVER be true with .NET. And that is why Java will still be used long after Bill Gates has retired. So, learning either one would be good but Java is likely be around longer and be more valuable to large companies who lean pretty strongly to Java for that reason so...go with Java.
Life is not the presence of particular molecules. Life is the plan by which the molecules are constructed into a living organism. Molecules without the plan by which they operate are no different than computer hardware without any software installed on it. Finding hydrogen cyanide and acetylene present around another star is more a comment on the improving ability to detect molecules at a distance than it is on the presence of the 'building blocks of life.' It would have been much more remarkable if they had NOT found those substances since they are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen which we would expect to be ubiquitous in the universe, based on our present knowledge. Claiming to have found the 'building blocks of life' around another star is just hype to help pump up the budget for next years work.
Implant an RFID chip in everyone. Stick a camera with sound pickup in every room (make it a requirement for a building permit). Connect all the new sensors together to powerful central computers and build databases for every person on their movements, sayings, potty habits, etc. This will eliminate crime, make the children safe, prevent spousal abuse, wipe out drugs, and identify every osama minion for re-education to our superior way of life.
A significant portion of the heat leaving Earth (which we experience on the surface) originates from radioactive decay deep within. This might shed some light on the origin and, more importantly, the variation of that heat. It would be a shame to be taking measures to reduce global warming by attempting to increase the radiation of heat into space if, at the same time, the heat output from within the Earth is declining on a 10,000 year cycle leading to slightly cooler surface temperatures. Kind of like turning off the central heating right before the blizzard hits.
Just getting rid of the Diebold CEO does not fix the problem because the problem is the *system* rather than just one man. It is the system that allows one company to submit voting systems for use by the public with no oversight of their accuracy and integrity and it is the system that enables corrupt elected officials to allow Diebold to do as it pleased. The next Diebold CEO might be worse than the last one. Even worse, there will likely be other diebold-like companies springing forth to provide similar voting systems. Until the American public are able to throw off their cloak of indifference, timidity and cowardice and stand up to the Diebolds in their local jurisdictions, the system will remain broken.
AMD has significant leads in both manunfacturing technology and cpu design. The specific AMD technology leads over Intel right now are their dual-stress liner technology, SOI, their use of hypertransport, and their implementation of the on-die memory controller. These are the areas that AMD has a 1-2 year lead in. The newest AMD Fab was built for 65 nm and can later move to 45 nm. AMD leads in other areas have allowed them to place less reliance on clock speed increases and process shrinks to achieve performance goals, in contrast to Intel for which clock speed and process shrink seem to be its primary performance tools. Clock speed topped out for Intel so now they have only process shrinks left. There is a lower limit on process shrinks as well due to physical limits so Intel is probably also scrambling desperately to catch up in the areas where AMD has surpassed them. Unfortunately for Intel, there are likely to be no quick paths to implementing the things that AMD has spent years developing.