The thing that the article doesn't mention is if it's the client-side programs preparing the returns are at fault or not.
All programs have to prepare a *.tax return IIRC, and I'm sure there must be a spec paper released on it. Even the off-the-shelf programs for do-it-yourself people have this functionality. So what happens if one popular program doesn't prepare this *.tax file correctly? It's no excuse for them not checking the data before inserting it in their database, but wouldn't it be interesting to know that Tax Program X is the cause for the grief?
I'd wager a guess that all the ISPs distributing 2-5 IP address for each residential service will only get 1 IP address before IPv6 adoption will happen.
You'll probably have to have proof of need for more than 1 public IP. Now that I think about it, my current ISP surely has more than half a million subscribers only using one of their alloted 2 addresses (or 5 depending on what plan they are on.)
Wouldn't it make more sense to analyze this before jumping on the "let's replace everything" bandwagon?
Keep in mind the free patch utility will only patch the Windows 2000 OS, not MS's other software.
Microsoft, for some stupid reason, decided that Exchange shouldn't follow the OS time and region settings and stores this information internally. If you use something that depends on these internal tables in Exchange (like Outlook Web Access) there are no workarounds. You will have to cough up the $4000 to patch Exchange.
If you are using Outlook (no web access or other reliant software on Exchange's internal tables) patching the OS and running a tool on Exchange should be enough to fix it. Microsoft lists a [long] workaround, and as the parent states, there is a utility that will patch this for you. One interesting thing to note in Microsoft's workaround is that you have to force a reload of the timezone settings - do this by changing to a different timezone, clicking apply, then setting it back. I have no idea if IntelliAdmin's tool does this for you.
a) Microsoft adds more digits
b) Microsoft makes the keys case-sensitive
c) Microsoft sets a key entry delay to 15 minutes to make it unpractical to try to force the issue
d) Some combination of the above.
Currently there are 36^25 combinations (36 unique values and 25 digits.) Imagine if it was case sensitive and 50 digits (62^50.) Ugh.
But I can't exactly put the ceiling fixtures on a surge protector.:P
Actually, yes you can. It connects to your main electrical panel and protects the entire house, which would include appliances and ceiling fixtures.
Considering the amount of protection you get $220 isn't a bad price. I've seen that price just for some fancy ass power bars. I suppose this sort of thing would be handy for lightning strikes, in case you don't have a lightning rod.
Perhaps... however, people carrying wired up circuit boards in public places isn't common. I don't remember ever seeing anyone carrying one. In the light of recent history and movies depicting bombs as wired up circuit boards with LED displays, of course people are going to stare.
I believe that in the US you can be punished legally for bringing photographic devices into theatres or other performance venues against the proprietor's wishes, but that there is no such law in Canada.
In the article I read, there was no hint of it being illegal to bring in a camcorder into a theatre. The article did state that the venue reserved the right to eject you if you are caught with one.
The article went on to state that the films are watermarked so that they can identify the theatre in which the movie was cammed. This is not visible to the naked eye. What surprised me more is that in the troublesome theatre there are ushers with night vision cameras that will continually monitor people for cameras.
I, for one, would not go to a theatre to be stared down by some guy while watching a movie. No thanks.
Damn, I found the article online. This isn't the exact article I read in our provincial newspaper, but it covers the gist of it.
Quoted from the article: Cineplex's Jacob said theatre chains all across Canada already employ security guards who are equipped with night vision goggles and other surveillance equipment to try to catch pirates.
I don't go to theatres anyway. I don't download movies. I don't rent them. They just don't interest me to begin with.
I can only think of one movie that's coming up this year that has my interest: Die Hard 4 (or whatever they call it.) That'll probably be the only movie I'll see this year.
I hope that one isn't a waste of time.
Still, I'm not surprised that this has happened. Canada is pretty lax on this topic. I'd like it to stay that way, but they'll be pressured into copyright "reform" (or "degradation"?) anyway.
This was inevitable. After all the crap that went on the last couple of years, it was bound to happen.
Just recently I read a newspaper article stating that Canada is now on the watch list for movie piracy (up there with Russia and China.) The article stated approximately 50% of movies are cammed here, and that the movie industry will likely delay the releases of new films here.
I've been using Gentoo for a few years now. I had a leave of absence from linux in general, and returned in 2003. I have tried other distros as well, as I have installed other distros on friends computers.
For me, Gentoo is my preferred distro. The main reason is: other distros have packages scattered throughout umpteen different repositories. When I set up ubuntu on a friend's PC, I got quite irritated at all the missing multimedia packages (I know, it's licensing or some such thing.) The popular media players/codecs/etc were all in portage. One command dragged in all the codec dependencies and built mplayer. On ubuntu, most of the packages were available, but unless you messed around with/etc/apt/sources.list you'd never be able to install them. For a new user to ubuntu, finding stuff that I was used to finding in one place was rather difficult.
In another post, someone mentioned the flexibility of Gentoo. The installer CD is very basic and will only get you into a shell environment. For servers, this is great, you don't need to install a desktop or window manager. If you want a desktop, then starts the [long] task of building X and getting your window manager and desktop installed. The other distros I've tried always load a gui. My preference on servers is to not have a gui at all.
Portage isn't perfect. Circular dependencies happen all the time. The most recent one was with the cups package. Installing a package required cups and X. Now, cups required X, and X required cups. Oops.
Also, not updating for a long period of time can cause strange problems. On my friend's PC ubuntu wasn't any different however.
Gentoo does have problems, but I still use it anyway. The documentation on the website is excellent, and the forum community is helpful as well.
I work as the only IT person at a nonprofit society. We purchased Windows 2000 right up until about August 2005. The software that we run doesn't require Windows XP, and ironically, as our custom web application is written, is not compatible with IE7 anyway.
We now have a mix of 2000 and XP computers. All that we need is a working Office suite and a web browser. I found out 2 weeks ago that the new MS Office version won't run on over half of our computers; however, they do have something called downgrade rights, where you purchase a new version of Office and "downgrade" it to work with our existing version that runs on W2K. The other thing is that the volume licensing for the new Office version rose by over $100 in our case per computer. The only thing tying us to it is our use of Exchange server.
I've now gotten quotes of new Outlook licenses by itself, and am looking into StarOffice as a replacement (which will run on all our hardware), which turns out to be about $12,000 cheaper in our case, rather than upgrading to the new MS Office. Way to go Microsoft, you just lost sales on about 100 licenses. If they hadn't jacked the prices and excluded half of our machines, I wouldn't have found out about StarOffice. Of course there's going to be training involved, but that will be cheaper in the long run. StarOffice also apparently will let us save in MS Office formats, so we will still be able to communicate with all of our business partners and clients.
As far as the time change is concerned, if all it is is a registry patch, I'll be putting it on one of our servers and writing a.vbs script to check the OS version and applying the registry patch as needed centrally. I don't know what the person mentioned in the article is thinking, I sure don't want to run around to 100 PCs for that!
...don't forget to turn off the auto update feature, if it has one. I used to use uTorrent before switching over to linux, and I don't remember if it has an auto-updater like some other clients do.
I was surprised to see that the 'security' improvement in the article was a disabled administrator account. Surely when XP came out it was touted to be more secure than Windows 2000. Look what happened when a huge user base was installed... tons of exploits.
Nobody at this point can truly state Vista will be more secure than whatever is out there until they have a massive installed base - then we will know.
Also, it comes to mind that while the address space layout randomization should help against attacks that directly attempt to attack a hardcoded address space, but what about other attacks on other modules? If the other modules have sloppy coding is this really going to help in the long run? Sure, it sounds like a good idea, but I wonder how effective it will actually be. Only time will tell.
As a Canadian, I know we have this tax. But how is it applied? Is it included in the price of the media or is it something that's slapped on afterwards? I remember once I went to a big box store and was charged extra when I bought a pack of CDs and it was stated as a levy, but since then I've used a smaller store and have never seen that tax at all. I paid probably $12CAD for 50 blank CD-Rs. I thought as it is a levy it would have to be charged separately and be shown as such on the receipt/invoice.
Or does this only apply to blank audio CDs? I have seen those in the big box stores.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to mention that too, but I forgot.
The point is: there's so much address space that's wasted/unused. So wouldn't it make more sense to recover it?
The thing that the article doesn't mention is if it's the client-side programs preparing the returns are at fault or not.
All programs have to prepare a *.tax return IIRC, and I'm sure there must be a spec paper released on it. Even the off-the-shelf programs for do-it-yourself people have this functionality. So what happens if one popular program doesn't prepare this *.tax file correctly? It's no excuse for them not checking the data before inserting it in their database, but wouldn't it be interesting to know that Tax Program X is the cause for the grief?
I'd wager a guess that all the ISPs distributing 2-5 IP address for each residential service will only get 1 IP address before IPv6 adoption will happen.
You'll probably have to have proof of need for more than 1 public IP. Now that I think about it, my current ISP surely has more than half a million subscribers only using one of their alloted 2 addresses (or 5 depending on what plan they are on.)
Wouldn't it make more sense to analyze this before jumping on the "let's replace everything" bandwagon?
Keep in mind the free patch utility will only patch the Windows 2000 OS, not MS's other software.
Microsoft, for some stupid reason, decided that Exchange shouldn't follow the OS time and region settings and stores this information internally. If you use something that depends on these internal tables in Exchange (like Outlook Web Access) there are no workarounds. You will have to cough up the $4000 to patch Exchange.
If you are using Outlook (no web access or other reliant software on Exchange's internal tables) patching the OS and running a tool on Exchange should be enough to fix it. Microsoft lists a [long] workaround, and as the parent states, there is a utility that will patch this for you. One interesting thing to note in Microsoft's workaround is that you have to force a reload of the timezone settings - do this by changing to a different timezone, clicking apply, then setting it back. I have no idea if IntelliAdmin's tool does this for you.
To take this one step further, it's possible that
a) Microsoft adds more digits
b) Microsoft makes the keys case-sensitive
c) Microsoft sets a key entry delay to 15 minutes to make it unpractical to try to force the issue
d) Some combination of the above.
Currently there are 36^25 combinations (36 unique values and 25 digits.) Imagine if it was case sensitive and 50 digits (62^50.) Ugh.
Actually, yes you can. It connects to your main electrical panel and protects the entire house, which would include appliances and ceiling fixtures.
Considering the amount of protection you get $220 isn't a bad price. I've seen that price just for some fancy ass power bars. I suppose this sort of thing would be handy for lightning strikes, in case you don't have a lightning rod.
Argh. It's BitTorrent. One word. I don't know why people are thinking a space is supposed to be there.
I really doubt it, but look at it this way: at least the gearshift could be used for more than one type of entertainment!
Perhaps... however, people carrying wired up circuit boards in public places isn't common. I don't remember ever seeing anyone carrying one. In the light of recent history and movies depicting bombs as wired up circuit boards with LED displays, of course people are going to stare.
I believe that in the US you can be punished legally for bringing photographic devices into theatres or other performance venues against the proprietor's wishes, but that there is no such law in Canada.
In the article I read, there was no hint of it being illegal to bring in a camcorder into a theatre. The article did state that the venue reserved the right to eject you if you are caught with one.
The article went on to state that the films are watermarked so that they can identify the theatre in which the movie was cammed. This is not visible to the naked eye. What surprised me more is that in the troublesome theatre there are ushers with night vision cameras that will continually monitor people for cameras.
I, for one, would not go to a theatre to be stared down by some guy while watching a movie. No thanks.
Damn, I found the article online. This isn't the exact article I read in our provincial newspaper, but it covers the gist of it.
Quoted from the article:
Cineplex's Jacob said theatre chains all across Canada already employ security guards who are equipped with night vision goggles and other surveillance equipment to try to catch pirates.
How scary.
Tom: Same here.
I don't go to theatres anyway. I don't download movies. I don't rent them. They just don't interest me to begin with.
I can only think of one movie that's coming up this year that has my interest: Die Hard 4 (or whatever they call it.) That'll probably be the only movie I'll see this year.
I hope that one isn't a waste of time.
Still, I'm not surprised that this has happened. Canada is pretty lax on this topic. I'd like it to stay that way, but they'll be pressured into copyright "reform" (or "degradation"?) anyway.
This was inevitable. After all the crap that went on the last couple of years, it was bound to happen.
Just recently I read a newspaper article stating that Canada is now on the watch list for movie piracy (up there with Russia and China.) The article stated approximately 50% of movies are cammed here, and that the movie industry will likely delay the releases of new films here.
I'm not surprised at all.
IIRC, Word has more exploits lately... We're seeing a shift from Windows -> Office suite hacking. I don't think it's any better this way.
Actually, I used
$ USE="-X -dbus" emerge cups
then emerged everything else. I fixed it immediately, I didn't need to refer to the docs.
Circular dependencies are a bug, IMO.
I've been using Gentoo for a few years now. I had a leave of absence from linux in general, and returned in 2003. I have tried other distros as well, as I have installed other distros on friends computers.
/etc/apt/sources.list you'd never be able to install them. For a new user to ubuntu, finding stuff that I was used to finding in one place was rather difficult.
For me, Gentoo is my preferred distro. The main reason is: other distros have packages scattered throughout umpteen different repositories. When I set up ubuntu on a friend's PC, I got quite irritated at all the missing multimedia packages (I know, it's licensing or some such thing.) The popular media players/codecs/etc were all in portage. One command dragged in all the codec dependencies and built mplayer. On ubuntu, most of the packages were available, but unless you messed around with
In another post, someone mentioned the flexibility of Gentoo. The installer CD is very basic and will only get you into a shell environment. For servers, this is great, you don't need to install a desktop or window manager. If you want a desktop, then starts the [long] task of building X and getting your window manager and desktop installed. The other distros I've tried always load a gui. My preference on servers is to not have a gui at all.
Portage isn't perfect. Circular dependencies happen all the time. The most recent one was with the cups package. Installing a package required cups and X. Now, cups required X, and X required cups. Oops.
Also, not updating for a long period of time can cause strange problems. On my friend's PC ubuntu wasn't any different however.
Gentoo does have problems, but I still use it anyway. The documentation on the website is excellent, and the forum community is helpful as well.
I work as the only IT person at a nonprofit society. We purchased Windows 2000 right up until about August 2005. The software that we run doesn't require Windows XP, and ironically, as our custom web application is written, is not compatible with IE7 anyway.
.vbs script to check the OS version and applying the registry patch as needed centrally. I don't know what the person mentioned in the article is thinking, I sure don't want to run around to 100 PCs for that!
We now have a mix of 2000 and XP computers. All that we need is a working Office suite and a web browser. I found out 2 weeks ago that the new MS Office version won't run on over half of our computers; however, they do have something called downgrade rights, where you purchase a new version of Office and "downgrade" it to work with our existing version that runs on W2K. The other thing is that the volume licensing for the new Office version rose by over $100 in our case per computer. The only thing tying us to it is our use of Exchange server.
I've now gotten quotes of new Outlook licenses by itself, and am looking into StarOffice as a replacement (which will run on all our hardware), which turns out to be about $12,000 cheaper in our case, rather than upgrading to the new MS Office. Way to go Microsoft, you just lost sales on about 100 licenses. If they hadn't jacked the prices and excluded half of our machines, I wouldn't have found out about StarOffice. Of course there's going to be training involved, but that will be cheaper in the long run. StarOffice also apparently will let us save in MS Office formats, so we will still be able to communicate with all of our business partners and clients.
As far as the time change is concerned, if all it is is a registry patch, I'll be putting it on one of our servers and writing a
...don't forget to turn off the auto update feature, if it has one. I used to use uTorrent before switching over to linux, and I don't remember if it has an auto-updater like some other clients do.
I was surprised to see that the 'security' improvement in the article was a disabled administrator account. Surely when XP came out it was touted to be more secure than Windows 2000. Look what happened when a huge user base was installed... tons of exploits. Nobody at this point can truly state Vista will be more secure than whatever is out there until they have a massive installed base - then we will know. Also, it comes to mind that while the address space layout randomization should help against attacks that directly attempt to attack a hardcoded address space, but what about other attacks on other modules? If the other modules have sloppy coding is this really going to help in the long run? Sure, it sounds like a good idea, but I wonder how effective it will actually be. Only time will tell.
As a Canadian, I know we have this tax. But how is it applied? Is it included in the price of the media or is it something that's slapped on afterwards? I remember once I went to a big box store and was charged extra when I bought a pack of CDs and it was stated as a levy, but since then I've used a smaller store and have never seen that tax at all. I paid probably $12CAD for 50 blank CD-Rs. I thought as it is a levy it would have to be charged separately and be shown as such on the receipt/invoice. Or does this only apply to blank audio CDs? I have seen those in the big box stores.